Colorado Kitchen Brew

The older I've gotten, the more I've wanted to make my brew days easier. While I appreciate the exercise I get from lifting heavy wet grain bags, and moving large pots of water or wort back and forth around the kitchen, that doesn't mean I want to work that way forever.  My back, for one, doesn't dig all the weight lifting like it used to. My spine was badly injured quite a few years back, and can only take a certain amount of strain, no matter how much I focus on lifting with my legs. Gravity is our friend, and it would be nice to take advantage of that fact more than I have. Simply having my wife give me a brew pot with a ball valve for Christmas two years ago seemed like a gift from above, since I was no longer tipping a heavy pot to transfer wort to a fermenter.  Brew day has also meant taking over the kitchen for several hours. Or many hours, on the days I decided to perform a multistep mash. That's not exactly fair to the rest of the family, which lead me to p...

Back in 2012, I did a post on making your own Candi Sugar for Belgian beers. Nine years later, it's time to make Brewer's Invert Syrup for British beers. While these syrups are available commercially, they're tough to find in the US, as there are only a handful of homebrew shops that carry them. They're also not exactly cheap, so why not make your own? The sugar I prefer to use for making Invert Syrup is Turbinado. Complexity is what I want from these syrups, and I feel that Turbinado, as well as other raw sugars, create more complex flavors than plain white table sugar does. However, table sugar works just fine.  Here's the basic procedure for making one pound of Invert Syrup: Mix one pound of sugar with approximately 1 cup of water to make a thick syrup. Over Medium heat, gently stir the liquid until the sugar is dissolved.  Add 1/4tsp of Cream of Tartar. You can optionally add roughly 2Tbsp of Lyle's Golden Syrup at this step to help avoid crystalizing your s...

As promised in Part 1, now that we know how to Cold Mash, it's time to brew some beer! The recipes below are all beers that I've had good luck with. Styles include Oatmeal Stout, Witbier, Dunkelweizen, Mexican Lager and Schwartzbier. I intend to add styles in the IPA realm as I continue experimenting. Hopefully I've provided enough variety to get people started.  Oatmeal Stout Grains: 3lbs Simpsons Golden Promise 12oz Fawcett CaraMalt 12oz Flaked Oats 12oz Simpsons Chocolate Malt 4oz Crisp Roasted Barley Hops: 0.75oz Challenger (6.3% a.a.): 60 min Total Boil Time: 60 min Yeast: White Labs WLP002 - English Ale or Imperial A09 - Pub Mash Schedule: Cold Mash for 12 Hours at 37F  Original Gravity: 1.015 Final Gravity: 1.005 ABV: 1.31% IBU: 30 SRM Color: 28 Fermentation Schedule: 1 Week Primary at 67F 2 Weeks Secondary Witbier Grains: 2.5lbs Castle Pilsen 1.25lbs Weyermann Pale Wheat 1.25lbs Briess Flaked Wheat 8oz Flaked Oats Hops: 0.5oz Styrian Golding (3.5% a.a.): 60 min 1oz ...

Cold Mashing is a technique I stumbled upon while researching ways to make very low ABV beers. My goal was to see if I could get below 2% ABV without using either microscopic grain bills, or boiling off alcohol post fermentation.  Why would I want to do this? For one, my wife loves the taste of beer, but not the aftereffects of having a couple. That left her drinking the limited array of NA beers that you can get in my neck of the woods. Plus, she's a fan of darker beer styles that aren't exactly well represented in the NA beer landscape.  In addition, low ABV also means you can have a few without getting loopy. If I'm working outside in the garden, I want to plow the fields, not get plowed in the fields.    I've tried both the small grain bill and the boil off techniques. Neither of them produced what I would call good beer. Small grain bills produced thin, beer flavored water. Boiling left behind an aftertaste that's most generously described as different, but mo...

While I've done my best to devote this blog to brewing inexpensively, I'm occasionally given a piece of gear that is a brewing luxury rather than a necessity. In this instance, my wife found an awesome deal on the BrewJacket Immersion Pro. Lo and behold, Christmas came, and one was waiting for me under the tree.   Before the Immersion entered my brewery (a.k.a. the kitchen and a basement storeroom), I had no way to control temps. Mercifully, the temperature in my storeroom stays between 65F(18C) and 70F(21C) all year. This has allowed me to brew ales for a long time without worrying about whether or not my beer was getting too hot or cold. What it also meant was that brewing lagers was out of the question, because there's nowhere in the room I can put a dedicated brewing fridge. That's no longer the case. Now I can brew cold enough to make lagers, and can also be more true to style with my Belgians by upping their fermentation temps. The full setup I was pleasantly surp...

It's high time a wrote some more brewing advice, so here's the start of a new series of blogs. This series is inspired by Brad Smith's "Multiplying Your Beer" blog on BeerSmith . In his blog, Brad talks about various ways to get multiple beers out of one brewing session. His work is long on details, but short on examples, so it seems fitting that I try his ideas out and see what happens. These articles are also an extension of a couple of previous experiments. One base beer resulted in three Abbey Beers back in the Spring. My Session Saison and Dark Saison sprang from the same base as well. The difference here, is that with Split-Batch brewing, you get different beers from a single brew day. The simplest form of batch splitting is to take finished wort, put it into multiple fermentors and then pitch different yeasts, or perhaps add differing additional ingredients into the fermentor of each beer. In this instance, I'm working with oak ag...

Welcome to Part 6 of my Kitchen Brewing series. Today we'll be making our very own Non-Alcoholic (N/A) homebrew. Why on earth would I want to make a Non-Alcoholic beer? Good Question! There are lots of reasons behind why people eschew alcohol. I won't get into any of them here. The point is that there are many people who avoid alcohol, but still want the taste of beer from time to time. For these people, the mass-market commercial options are extremely limited. They can have N/A Pale Lager, N/A Amber Lager, N/A Hefewiezen (if they're lucky) and that's pretty much it. What happens if that person wants something else? They're out of luck, unless they happen to live near a Craft Brewery that brews additional styles of N/A beer. For everyone else, the answer is to brew your own. The first thing to understand about N/A beer (commercial, or otherwise) is that it isn't truly free of alcohol. It actually contains around 0.5% of the stuff. That news is import...

After my general disappointment with the Weizenbock I brewed, I decided to see what would happen if I tried doing a Decoction Mash on the stove. While the Multi-Step Mash I had used improved efficiency, the beer lacked a certain something. How hard can it be? My goal here is to do a mash that doesn't require rocket-science (or an all-day brewing session) to pull off, but will give a little extra something to my German beers. But before I go any further, I must give credit where it's due. Mary Samuels' excellent 1995 article Solve the Mystery of Decoction Mashing served as the inspiration for my stove-top technique, so hop on over there if you want all the in-depth decoction mashing details. Also, if you want charts and even more details, head over here . However, if your goal is to cut out the lengthy prose and cut to the chase of brewing beer, please read on. Single-decoction is the easiest decoction to perform. Since I work with canning pots , I don't have...

Up until now, I've employed a simple single-infusion mash for my stove-top brews. It's the technique I demonstrated in Part 2 of this series. I heat the water to a set temp, add the grains, stir things up and let the mash perform a Saccharification Rest for 60-90 minutes. Outside of the occasional stir and temperature check, that's pretty much it. For many beers, this works really well, especially with English and American Ales. However, I was getting poor extraction rates from wheat malts. My efficiency on wheat beers was dropping around 10% versus my all barley brews. What to do? Take a shot at a multi-step mash and see what happens. The only real difference between my multi-step mash and a single-infusion one is the introduction of a Protein Rest at the beginning of the mash. For the Protein Rest, I heat my water to around 130F. I then mash in the grains, which drops the temperature to around 124F. After mashing in, I pull the pot from the stove, cover it and wrap...

Beet sugar waiting to invert. I love Belgian Candi Sugar. So much so, that since I started this blog, it's shown up in my Belgian Strong Pale Ale , Tripel-Dubbel , Enkel and Tripel recipes. Unfortunately, the stuff is rather expensive. Upwards of $5.00 a pound expensive. This led me to wonder if I could make it myself. How hard can it be? Checking the temp at 15 min. After a bit of research, it turns out to be a pretty simple and inexpensive process. In addition to a pot and spoon, all it takes is sugar, water, cream of tartar, a candy thermometer, a cookie sheet, aluminum foil or parchment paper, plus a little time. More importantly, the finished product will cost less than a $1.00 a pound. The syrup is darkening at 30 min. If you want to be true to the Belgian original, you'll want to use beet sugar. Here in Colorado, we have a local producer of it, but it can be hard to find in some other markets. No worries though, as cane sugar works just as well. ...

The tools you will need. I realize it's been a couple of months since I posted actual brewing advice. Today that all changes with another installment on yeast culturing. Back in June, I wrote a blog on a Simple Yeast Culturing technique that allows you to reuse yeast from previous batches of beer. The simple method I presented required that you re-pitch the yeast within a month or so of cultivating it. But what happens if you wait longer to reuse? Well, you have to do a little extra work to bring the yeast out of hibernation. Rousing older yeast isn't terribly complicated. Before pitching your hibernating yeast into a new batch of beer, you have to get it going the day before with a starter made from fresh, sterile wort. Here's a rundown of the procedure: Yeast joins the fresh Wort. Mix 1/4-1/3 cup of DME (Dry Malt Extract) with 2 cups of water. Boil the mixture for 10-15 minutes to sterilize. Cool the fresh wort to 70F. Pour the wort into a sterilized c...

I dry-hopped my English IPA last week, so I'm writing this short blog about my dry-hopping technique. Dry Hopping is underway. The amount of hops you use is a matter of taste, but I usually use 1-2 ounces in a 5 gallon batch. I'm a big fan of using leaf rather than pellet hops for dry-hopping, but they can be messy. I like avoiding the mess and have found that the best technique for me is to use a hop bag and marbles. The hop bag keeps stray hop particles from getting into the beer, while the marbles stop the hops from floating on top of it. By not floating, more hops are in contact with the beer for better hop utilization. Boiling the marbles keeps them clean. Before using them, the marbles need to be sterilized. This is especially true if they have been in the hands of kids, like mine have. Boil the marbles for 15 minutes, put them in the bag with the hops, pull the bag shut and drop it in the fermentor. I usually leave the hops in the secondary fermentor for th...

A few members of the family I just finished racking my English IPA to a secondary fermentor. As part of the process, I saved some of the yeast in the primary for future use. Here then, is the start of a series of articles on yeast culturing. Back in the "good old days," homebrewers didn't have a ton of yeast choices. In some cases, brewers would even use bread yeast from the baking section of the grocery store. In practice, you hydrated the packet of dry yeast you got at the homebrew or grocery store and pitched it. The packets were cheap and worked, but there wasn't much variety to be had. Nowadays, there are several dozen strains available. While a few strains are still dry , most are liquids that come in pitchable tubes , or smack-packs . The liquid yeasts give consistent results and provide tremendous variety to finished beers, but are pricey. If you only use each pack, or tube once, you will quickly discover that yeast makes up 15%, or more of the cost ...

The mash emerges from the oven. Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for. The grains have gained a little weight. There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going i...

Always start your session with a beer. Now that the equipment is together from Part 1 , it's time to start brewing. I'll be brewing an English India Pale Ale for my demo batch. The beer's details will be out in a future blog. Ingredients ready to go. I'm lucky to have a homebrew shop with a grain mill, so I've crushed my grains at the store. The hops have also been measured out ahead of time to keep things simple. You don't have to do this, but I recommend it. My setup. My stove-top setup is pretty simple. Two kettles, a grain bag and a metal spatula are pretty much it. I also like using a hop bag (available for around $5.00), but it's completely optional. If you're doing all-grain brewing, canning pots work best for batches of 2.5 gallons or less. Anything larger and you'll be battling spill-overs. They also work well for partial-mash batches of up to 5 gallons, where you can top off your wort after the boil. We hav...

The whole premise of this blog is economical brewing. I figured it was about time I wrote a blog about it. My process is largely influenced by an article I found at Homebrew Talk , but I made a few changes along the way. My kitchen brewhouse for all-grain beers is very simple and uses a lot of items most of us already have. First off, you need a basic brewing starter kit. Most homebrew stores carry them for $70-$90. The kit should include a fermentation bucket, bottling bucket, siphon hose, hydrometer, fermentation lock and bottle caper. Some kits also contain bottle caps, a bottle brush, a racking tube and other goodies. You can buy bottles too, but you might as well save them from the beer you buy at the store. One word of caution: you can't use screw-top bottles for your beer. The standard kitchen items are a large metal slotted spoon (your low budget Mash Paddle), mesh colander, kitchen timer, food scale and a digital or floating thermometer. If you don't have any of...