Measuring Hops for Home Brewed Pilsner Beer

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment we're going to talk about how we measure hops and how we move through some of our early boil operations. Now in terms of measuring out your hops, you can either use an eyeball technique which if I fold it right here it will end up about, that will give me half. Or you can actually use a scale which will give you a much more accurate result. This isn't rocket science it doesn't have to be perfect. Using your eye will be good enough. Now we are going to add some of our hops to our hop sack in preparation for their boil. Once again not measuring exactly, that's roughly half of what I was looking for so I'm going to tie that off, or you can fill up your nylon grain bags, which can also double as hop sacks. Now that we've got a good rolling boil we are going to go ahead and add our first hops. Get those nice and saturated under and then we are going to start our timer. Once again, we are going to boil for a full sixty minutes so this is going to be important. As you continue your boil you're just going to want to make sure you keep a nice rolling boil, stirring occasionally. Get your hops mixed up and also make sure there is no scalding on the bottom. Now we are going to add our next charge of hops in which is going to add some bittering, but mainly some nice flavor. With about 20 minutes left in the boil I'm going to start adding in the rest of the malt extract. Now I could actually take it off the heat and put it out to the side but I'd like to keep this nice rolling boil going so I'm just going to add it very, very slowly and keep stirring the whole time while I'm adding it. Another tip that you might not see other places to get the most out of your extract container is to take a little dip into your pot with a nice clean jar. Pour it into your container, very gently trying to minimize the aeration, gently swirl it around to help dissolve the rest of the sugars that are in there and then pour it back into your mix. With about twenty minutes left in your boil too, you are going to want to start adding your rice syrup solids. This is really going to increase the body of the beer, adding a lot of alcohol to it without actually making it much thicker. So I add...as we add the rice solids, we are just going to want to add them nice and slow and make sure they dissolve in."