Beer Craft: A Simple Guide to Making Great Beer - Softcover

Bostwick, William; Rymill, Jessi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605291331 ISBN 13: 9781605291338

Verlag: Rodale Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Six easy steps to making world-class beer in your kitchen! Beer Craft by William Bostwick and Jessi Rymill is your guide to drinking the best beer you've ever tasted—by making it yourself. This kitchen manual has everything you need to turn your stove into a small-batch, artisanal brewery. Hone your craft by perfecting the basic beer styles, or go wild with specialty techniques like barrel-aging and brewing with fruit. Beer Craft is the ultimate modern homebrewing resource, simple and clear but packed with enough information to satisfy anyone making their first, or four-hundredth, beer.

• Master simple stovetop recipes for all your favorite styles, from pale ales and barleywines to fruit and sour beers
• Flavor your beer with spices, special grains, and a pantry full of deliciously unexpected extras like coffee, chocolate, and homegrown hops
• Create labels and bottle caps for your home brewery, and get inspired by retro designs of beers gone by
• Get pro tips on advanced techniques like barrel-aging and wild bacteria from interviews with brewers at Rogue, Sierra Nevada, Stone, and more of today's best craft breweries
• Learn facts from beer history, like recipes for ancient bog-myrtle and heather beers, the story of the great London beer flood of 1814, and even brewing advice from Thomas Jefferson

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WILLIAM BOSTWICK is a writer and beer critic. He likes brewing old-school styles like heather beers (but understands why some of them have gone extinct).

JESSI RYMILL is a designer and editor. She collects labels and bottle caps and wonders why the beers with the weirdest designs usually taste the best. Together, they live, work, and brew in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

LEARN

BREWING STEPS AND INGREDIENTS

WHAT'S IN YOUR GLASS

Beer has only four ingredients--which means it's easy to make, and easy to make it your own. Just by changing the types of those ingredients, and their ratio, you can brew pretty much every beer style there's a name for-- and even some there isn't. Beyond these basic components, everything about beer is up for grabs, so have fun!

Water and grain, mixed with some sort of spice, and fermented by yeast: That's all beer is. Of course, the choice of grains, spices (hops, mostly), yeast, and, yes, even water, make all the difference--but we'll get to that later. First, let's go over the basic beer-making process.

Yeast turns sugars into alcohol, and in beer, those sugars come from barley. Brewers steep barley in hot water to make a sort of sweet, grainy tea called wort (pronounced "wert"). Different kinds of barley make the wort darker or lighter, sweeter or toastier. Brewers will then boil the wort and balance some of its sweetness by adding bitter, aromatic spices-- almost always hops, though in the past, brewers used dozens more, and you can too. Hops need to be boiled to release their flavors.

Once the hopped wort cools down and brewers add yeast to it, their job is basically done. The yeast takes over, eating the sugars from the malted barley and producing alcohol and carbon dioxide in a process called fermentation. This can take a while, but when the yeast stops working, wort has turned into beer, ready to bottle, cap, and enjoy. In this chapter, we'll go over those steps in more detail, then talk about the different kinds of ingredients you can use, and how to combine them to make great- tasting homebrew.

YOUR OVERVIEW OF SIX BASIC BREW STEPS

BREWING BASICS

Clear off the kitchen stove and follow these six basic steps to your first batch of homemade beer. The following pages will go over each step in more detail, and there's a full equipment list on page 160. Consider this an overview, and a handy reference to flip back to when things get a little more complicated. Get to know this simple process, and you'll be bottling our recipes--or inventing your own--in no time.

1 MASH

Beer starts as a sugary, grain-flavored tea called wort. Make your wort by filling a mesh bag with malted grains and steeping it in hot water for an hour. You're converting starches in the grains into fermentable sugars that yeast will be able to digest into alcohol. This is called mashing.

2 SPARGE

Sparging, or rinsing your grains with hot water, extracts every last drop of sugary wort. Lift your grain bag out of the stock-pot, let it drain, and dunk it in a second pot of hot water to rinse it. Then mix this water in with your wort.

3 BOIL

Hops balance wort's malty sweetness. The longer they're boiled in wort, the more bitter they'll make the beer. Typically, you'll add hops three times during an hour-long boil, for bitterness, flavor, and aroma.

4 CHILL

Chill your wort down to room temperature to make it a safe new home for yeast. Most beer yeasts will quit working--or even die-above 80°F and will hibernate below 60°F. Make sure everything that touches your beer from this point forward is sanitized!

5 FERMENT

It's time to put your yeast to work. Strain the chilled wort into your fermenter. Add your yeast and plug the fermenter with the stopper and tube, submerging the other end of the tube in a bowl of sanitizer. This will catch foam that will spew out when the yeast starts working. After a day, replace the tube with an airlock and wait.

6 BOTTLE

Yeast creates carbon dioxide as well as alcohol, and will naturally pressurize your bottles. Siphon your beer into a stockpot, leaving any sediment behind, and mix in a corn sugar solution. Siphon the sugared beer into bottles, cap them, and let them sit for 1 week. Then label, refrigerate, and enjoy!

LEARN: BREWING STEPS

FIRST THING

CLEAN AND SANITIZE FIRST TIMING

INGREDIENTS

Water Sanitizer

EQUIPMENT

Large bucket or tub Spray bottle

This is the most important part of making great beer. You can fudge the other steps, but whatever you do, don't skip this one. Seriously! No matter how vigorously you scrub those counter-tops, your kitchen is crawling with food-loving bacteria. Your kitchen is also your brewery, and unluckily for you, there are few things those bacteria crave more than jumping into a warm bath of sugary wort. When brewing, you want your yeast to work alone.

After your beer has been boiled, keep it safe by SANITIZING EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES. Sanitizing before then is overkill--even to us--since boiling will kill anything that managed to survive up to that point. This means that your strainer, funnel, fermenter, airlock, tubing, and--when it's time-- bottles and caps, should be clean and sanitary.

By SANITARY, we don't mean sterile--you're a brewer, not a chemist--so you can get what you need to treat your equipment at any homebrew shop or drugstore. Mix up a bucketful of solution (see chart at right) and soak everything in it. It helps to have a spray bottle of solution on hand, just in case anything needs a last-minute spritz.

Star-San, an acid blend, is probably the easiest sanitizer to use, since you don't need to rinse it off. Professional brewers use iodine because it's cheap to buy in bulk, but plain old bleach works, too, as long as you rinse well.

WHAT TO SANITIZE

CHILL STEP

Stockpot lid, thermometer, strainer, metal spoon, funnel, fermenter

FERMENT STEP

Blow-off tube, rubber stopper, airlock, turkey baster, hydrometer and tube

BOTTLE STEP

Bottling pot, tubing, racking cane, bottles, caps

|TYPE |BRAND NAMES |AMT. PER GAL. WATER |CONTACT |RINSE | |Acid |Star-San, |1 tsp |30 sec |NO | | |Sani-Clean | | | | |Iodine |Iodophor, IO-Star |1/2 tsp |1 min |NO | |Chlorine|Clorox bleach |1 tbsp |20 min |YES |

A HOMEBREWER'S BEST FRIEND

The two most annoying things about homebrewing are peeling labels off of old bottles to reuse as your own, and cleaning out dead yeast gunk from your fermenter. Not so with Oxy-Clean. Fill a big bucket, your sink, or even a bathtub, with hot water and add a scoop. Soak your bottles for 15 minutes and their labels will slide right off. Dunk a fermenter in the bucket, and use a stiff nylon brush, or a bent toothbrush, to clean the hard-to-reach curve just below its neck.

1 MASH

INGREDIENTS

Grains Water

EQUIPMENT

Stockpot, at least 3-gallon Stockpot, at least 2-gallon, with lid Fine-mesh grain bag Kitchen scale* Measuring cup Wooden spoon Thermometer Timer

SEE ALSO

Water, page 48 Malt, page 50 Equipment, page 160

*If you don't own a kitchen scale, you can measure your grains by volume. See Grains by Volume, inside front cover.

MASHING grains in hot water turns their inedible starches into a sugary banquet for beer yeast. How much grain and water you'll use, and how hot you'll steep, are determined by what beer you're making and by the behavior of enzymes in the malt. But in essence, mashing is as simple as making tea.

Start with the water. Pour 2 quarts water per £d of grain into the smaller of your two stockpots. Heat the water in your mash pot to 163°F (or the temperature specified by your recipe), then turn off the burner. This is called STRIKE WATER.

Weigh out your grains, pour them into a mesh GRAIN BAG, and sink it in the strike water. (The mesh bag will make it easy to strain out the grains later.) Fit the mouth of the bag around the lip of the pot, so it stays open...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rodale Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1605291331
• ISBN 13: 9781605291338
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 175
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar