Mixing Ingredients For Home Brewing Amber Beer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mark on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment, we're going to talk about mixing our wort and taking our specific gravity readings. Now that we've got our wort cooled, we are going to mix it in with our hot water. So, we're going to take our lid off, put it off to the side, take our lid off our cold wort, and start pouring it in. If you decided to go with glass as your primary fermenter, you need to remember one thing: never, ever, ever pour hot wort directly into an empty glass. It will shatter your glass immediately and you'll have a big and painful mess on your hands. If you're going to do this, make sure that you've at least filled it up with halfway with cold water to help absorb the thermal shock. Now we're going to look at our water level and see if we need to add some more water. I need to add a little more, so I'm going to start pouring in a little more water. Now, we're going to secure the top onto the bucket. The beauty of these buckets is that they seal very, very well. If you have a glass carboy and you're doing this, this next step is going to be pretty easy too. You're just going to want to install that rubber stopper. Now, as we get down here, we want to kind of aerate the wort. So make sure that you have your stopper filled at this point and we're just going to gently rock it back and forth until you can hear the splashing inside. That's going to help aerate it. This is the only step that you want to aerate your wort on. This is also going to help mix it up so all the extract mixes with the water. Now that it's nice and mixed up, we're going to take a hydrometer reading. So we are going to use our little thief, which is also our bottle filler. Just stick it in here, take some of the sample and put it in our hydrometer which has also been sterilized. We're going to do this until it is about full up to here. Now that we have our hydrometer filled, we can take a look to see how much sugar there is in here. You're going to look at the specific gravity which is the one that starts off at one point zero, zero, zero and then it has ten, twenty, thirty after that. And you are going to take your reading from there. You are going to look for the very bottom of the meniscus to make your reading. Whatever your specific gravity measurement is, write it down in your book and keep it for later, so we can help figure out what the alcohol content is. For our American Amber, we are going to be aiming for a specific gravity of 1.045 to 1.060. Don't worry if you didn't hit that range. You may have added a little too much or a little too little water. The beer will still come out fine. Alright, we're going to take off our wonderful saran wrap, take off our lid, and make some beer. So we'll get that in there, put this off to the side, securely fasten our lid back on, and agitate it one last time. And now, we have got a nice beer. "