Home Brewing Scottish Beer

Series Summary

Brewing beer at home is surprisingly easy, and that is good news for beer lovers worldwide who have pondered the notion of creating their own ales, lagers and stouts in the comfort of their own homes. Learning how to create wort, choosing the hops and bitters, determine the syrup use and add the yeast are confusing tasks at first, just as is the case with any recipe. Brewing beer at home is no different from the process of perfecting a time-honored recipe: there will be trial and error and many versions, but eventually you can perfect the type of beer you've always wanted to have on hand at all times: your personal favorite beer!

In this free instructional video series, watch as award winning brew master Mark Emiley teaches how to brew Scottish beer at your own home. Learn about the basic home brewing equipment, the style differences of Scottish beer with other beers, the ingredients, how to brew the beer, and the Scottish beer recipe. Whether you are a seasoned beer brewer and drinker or just starting out, this step by step brewing lesson is sure to be just what you need to enjoy your own home brewed beer.

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about how to brew Scottish Ales. Today we'll be talking about everything you need to home brew this style, which includes the ingredients, the equipment and the different processes you're going to need to take all your basic ingredients and convert them in to tasty beer. I've been a home brewer for about nine years. I've got about 140 different batches under my belt . The President of the Boeing Employees Wine and Beer Making Club and even had some of my beers scaled up and produced commercially. There are many different ways to brew beers. Today we're going to be focusing on extract with specialty grains. Our focus will be on doing this as simply as possible with the least amount of equipment investment to start out. We'll recommend the basic equipment you need, and also some equipment that if you want to get a little more into it, you'll appreciate later. To start off, I'm going to give you an overview of what you'll be expecting during the whole brewing process. To begin you're going to start on the brewing day. On this day you're going to steep some specialty grains if you have them, and you're going to add some malt extract and boil off that. You're going to add in your hops, and then at the end of that, when you're done boiling, you're going to cool it down and add your yeast. This usually takes between two to three hours. After the yeast have been added, your wort is now a beer. The yeast will start fermenting away for about three to seven days. This is called your primary fermentation. Once the yeast start slowing down, you're going to siphon off your primary vessel into a secondary vessel. This operation is called "racking" and takes roughly thirty minutes. Once you're in your secondary vessel, you're going to let it sit and finish its remaining fermentation that it has left. This will take usually seven to fourteen days. At this point, most of your yeast will have fallen out of solution, and your beer will be getting very, very clear. Finally you're going to go into the bottling phase, where you're going to siphon one more time into your bottling bucket. Add some priming sugar, and then fill up your bottles, and cap them off. You're going to put them in to a nice, dark area and let them sit for two or so weeks. At this point the beer will start carbonating itself, get up to a nice level, and then you'll be able to chill and drink your beer. While this video will be enough to get you start home brewing, I'd like to recommend a couple other resources that you can use to develop your brewing skills. First, the American Home Brewers Association puts out a Beginners Guide to Home Brewing that you can pick up at your local store or request at their website, at www.beertown.org. Next we have a classic book called "The Joy of Home Brewing", which is going to be everything you really need to get started. For people who want to get a little more advanced, you can pick up "How to Brew" by John Paul, which takes you through a little more of the science. For some other good recipes out there, for some beers that you may have already tried and want to reproduce, there's "Clone Brews" and "Beer Captured"."