There are, by my count, at least seven levels of fried chicken. The worst of them is good; the best, which I waited forty-four years to find, led to what can only be called an out-of-body experience. Let’s start at …
Beer Brewing Basics
There are several ways to brew beer at home. Some are expensive and very complicated, but most are simple, enjoyable and produce beers that rival store-bought varieties. Add this to my Recipe Box.
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Getting Started
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Hopefully, you will have a home brew supply store near you that can sell you a starter kit. If you cannot find one, check the American Home Brewers Association website, for a list of stores and online vendors. See the Resources section for a link.
For first-time brewers, working from a kit that includes a syrup made of malted barley extract is the best bet. The easiest of the kits are nothing more than a can of malt syrup and a yeast packet. The preparation--adding water to the syrup and heating--is simple.
A step up from the canned syrups is a kit that requires brewers to add hops, activated yeast, dry malt extracts and sometimes specialty grains. This is a little more challenging, but it produces very good beers.
Supplies
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Brewing beer requires a large pot--a 5 gallon stock pot will do--with a cover to boil the beer ingredients, a large spoon, a large funnel, a thermometer and a 5 gallon fermenter with an airlock.
You will need to cool the boiled unfermented beer, called wort (wert), and add water to it. Many brewers put the hot wort kettle into a sink and surround it with ice to speed the cooling time from hours to minutes. Three 5 lb. bags of ice should be enough.
For a typical 5 gallon batch of beer you'll boil 2 to 3 gallons of water and add a few gallons of cool water at the end of cooking process. If your tap water is chlorinated, you may have to boil and cool a supply of water before brewing day. Some brewers use gallons of bottled spring water rather than risk ruining their beer with tap water that may have chlorine or bacteria.
For bottling, you'll also need a supply of bottles and a way to seal them. Brewing supply stores sell standard 12 oz. beer bottles, metal caps and a device for capping. The capper and caps may be included in a starter kit. A typical 5 gallon batch of beer yields 48 12 oz. bottles. Other sizes and types of bottles are available, including some with re-sealable caps.
You will need a length of siphon hose and a bottle-filling tool. A separate bucket used to hold the beer while bottling is recommended and is a part of most starter kits. The supplies list can seem daunting and expensive, but with the exception of the bottle caps and beer ingredients, everything is reusable. Purchases can be spread out. For example, you do not have to buy bottling equipment until you are ready to bottle.
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Pick a Variety
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There are dozens of styles of beers and picking what to brew first can be daunting. There are two main types of yeast--ale and lager. Both produce good beer, but ale yeasts are easier and quicker. For your first few projects, brew using ale yeast.
Whether you are looking online or in a store you are likely to find some advice on what makes a good first project. Your taste matters too. If you like drinking pale ale, ask for a beginner pale ale kit.
Prep Work
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From a biological standpoint, brewing is the art of preparing an environment where yeast can turn sugars into alcohol. Your number one job in brewing is to make your wort home to only one living thing--yeast.
Anything that will come into contact with your beer needs to be sanitized and rinsed clean--anything that can kill your yeast cannot remain. Most quality beer kits include a yeast packet that needs to be activated hours, sometimes days, before being added to the cooled wort.
The Cooking
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Read kit instructions carefully, recipes vary from the generalized instructions here. To cook wort, start by bringing three gallons of water to a near boil in a large pot. Some recipes include steeping cheesecloth bags of grain as the water heats. Stir in malt extracts and resume heating. Never completely cover the pan while cooking.
Wort will need to boil for one hour with occasional stirring. Beer kits call for the addition of hops from one to four times during the cooking. Follow your kit instructions. Beware that adding hops can cause a sudden surge in boiling, so be prepared to reduce heat or stir down the wort when adding hops.
The Cooling
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As soon as cooling completes, cover the pan. Cooling the wort allows hop and grain particles to settle out and some complex chemical reactions to happen. The wort is cool enough when it is between 60 and 80 degrees F.
Adding Yeast
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Transfer wort to the fermenter using a funnel if needed. Sediment at the bottom of the cooking pot, called trub, should not be transferred. Add room temperature water to bring wort 4 inches or more below the top of the container. Make sure that the wort is between 60 and 75 degrees F--temperatures above 80 F will kill yeast cells and yeast goes dormant when it gets too cold.
Add yeast. Cover the fermenter and place airlock at the top. Move the fermenter to a cool dark place (58 to 78 degrees F) and wait.
The Waiting Game
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Basic ales take from two to four weeks to ferment. Depending on the yeast you use, you can see signs of active fermentation is just a few hours. Bubbles passing out the airlock mean that yeasts are alive and well--those bubbles are carbon dioxide, the gas that makes the bubbles in beer and soda.
There are scientific ways to measure your beer's progress, but when the airlock goes more than two minutes without bubbling it is time to bottle your beer. The bottom of your fermenter contains a layer of particles that settled out of the wort during fermentation. Do everything you can to keep that layer settled.
Energize and Bottle
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If you have a bottling bucket, transfer the finished beer to the bucket using a siphon. Be careful to leave any sediment on the bottom of the fermenter. Your kit likely came with a supply of sugar for bottling. Heat the sugar and a few cups of water to a boil and add to your beer. This will give the yeast enough food to create more carbon dioxide that carbonates the beer.
Connect one end of the hose to the filler device and the other to the beer supply. Fill bottles leaving 3/4-inch room at the top of the bottles. Cap the bottles.
Wait Some More
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Once you have bottled all your beer, put it in a cool dark place, wait two weeks, then open your first bottle to test. If the beer seems flat, wait another week and test again. Once the beer is carbonated it can be refrigerated. The bottles will have some sediment. It is usually best to poor only the first 11 oz. out of the bottle and leave the yeast residue behind.
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