A Walk Through A Brew

Site Map Home Introduction How To Use This Site Equipment You Will Need DIY Corner Materials You Will Need Water Treatment A Walk Through A Brew:   The Mash Wort Collecting and Sparging Boiling and Topping Up Cooling and Pitching Initial and Secondary Fermentation Bottling Kegging A Few Recipes Creating Your Own Recipes Danger - Quicksand! Frequently Asked Questions Links and Further Reading What Is Sensible Mole? Contact The Head Brewer

I guess the best way of showing you how to brew all-grain in your kitchen and backyard is to walk you through the whole process, step by step. So welcome to my kitchen! I’m assuming you’ve treated your water and it’s sitting in two sterilised fermentation bins. You’ve told your wife/girlfriend/mates/Probation Officer that you’ll be tied up all day, you have all your equipment and ingredients to hand, your recipe is printed out and sitting on the kitchen table, and we’re ready to rumble. We’ll just have a simple walk through of what we’re actually doing, and we’ll discuss why we’ve done what we’ve done later, in the Frequently Asked Questions page. Let’s get cracking... The recipe we’re going to brew today is for 25 litres of bitter. In fact every recipe on this site, unless stated otherwise, is for 25 litres. The beer we're going to brew now will turn out to be, as near as makes no difference to me, about 5.5% ABV. If you wish to use a hydrometer to attempt to get the exact ABV, go ahead, following the instructions that came with it... but me, I'm not going to bother. After all, 5.1% or 5.5%, it all ends up 'down the hatch'. But I digress... Using a staggering amount of imagination, let’s call it Brew A. It’s a fairly typical recipe for a bitter as brewed in Britain, and here it is:

Brew A Malt: 5000 gms pale malt - Pearl in this instance, but it doesn’t really matter. 500 gms Crystal Malt 275 gms Torrified Wheat   Yeast: 2 sachets of Safale yeast   Hop Schedule: Start of boil: 15 gms Cascade @ 4.8 AA = 9.38 IBU 30 gms East Kent Goldings @ 4.8% AA = 18.77 IBU 30 gms Willamette @ 4% AA = 15.64 IBU   TOTAL IBU: 43.79   15 mins from end of boil: 10 gms Cascade 10 gms Willamette and Protofloc   5 mins from end of boil: 10 gms Cascade 10 gms Willamette

As you'll see on the links on the left hand side of the page, over the next seven pages we'll take a detailed look at every aspect of the brew, beginning with the mash and ending with bottling or kegging your beer. So without further ado let's start the mash...

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