Extract brewing is easy, quick, and convenient; sometimes I miss the good old three hour brew-day.  But I don’t miss the increase in freshness that all-grain has over extract.

A recent discussion I had with a couple other brewers yielded these ideas which help extract brewers bring more freshness to their brews:

1. Dry malt extract is generally more shelf stable and gives a fresher flavor than canned liquid extract.  I tended to use DME exclusively over LME before I switched completely to all-grain.  A possible exception to this would be if your local shop carried bulk LME in a drum, that is routinely purged with nitrogen instead of air, and has a high turnover rate.  I have a local shop that used to have the drums but their turnover wasn’t so good because more and more folks started doing all grain batches, so then “canned” the barrels (no pun intended).  Not to mention that the barrelled LME can get pretty messy with all those people trying to fill a 1 gallon container with 1.2 gallons of extract for that little extra value!
2. While it is a common practice for some, I think the use of steeping specialty grains is under-valued for its freshness contribution.  For the most part all your caramel/crystal grains, your toasted and roasted grains, and some of your other wacky grains (acid malt and melanoidin malt) do not need to be mashed.  Using them for your color and flavor will bring a much fresher taste and value to your wort than using amber extract alone.  Not mentioned in part 1 but praised quite a bit by us here at Brew-Dudes, we always recommend the lightest extract you can get.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask your local shop folks how long any product has been on the shelf.  Don’t just go to the store and grab a 6oz bag of any old thing.  It’s tough to tell from sight how fresh a little bag of black patent is, so you have to ask.  It’s like purchasing beef at the market with a blindfold on, only to get it home and see that it’s all gray and nasty.  With brewing ingredients, you may not realize freshness issues until the beer is brewed.  You can taste a few kernels on any malt and they should have a clear crunch in your teeth.  If not, they are likely a little stale and you should find another source.

Ingredients are expensive and so is your time.  If you want to make beer that you can drink and pass out on, then I encourage you to go get the discounted extract cans at your LHBS.  However, if you are interested in making a beer that rivals your favorite commercial beer for flavor and freshness follow those practices above!

BREW ON!

Cooler temps are great for fermentation at home, but it can pose a problem when you bottle.

At my house we delay turning the heat on for as long as possible, so during the day the house may only be 60-65F.  This can lead to slow carbonation times in the bottle.  Here are some quick ideas for finding warmer places in your house to get bottles to “carb” up in the time you are used to.

1. Get bottles off the floor.  You’d be surprised to realize that the floor may be 10 degrees cooler than chest height in some places in the house.  Also, a cold floor acts as a heat sink and can suck warmth out of the cases if they sit on the floor.  Either get them up on a shelf or use a few old towels or blankets to get the bottles off the colder floor.
2. Where is your furnace?  Maybe set up some shelving nearby to take advantage of the heat given off from your furnace.  If you have forced hot air in your home, set the boxes near a vent in a spare room and drape a towel or blanket over the vent and cases to trap some hot air with the cases.  Rotate the cases daily to prevent uneven warming and carbing.  If you have radiators you can just place the cases in front of one rotating daily.  Just don’t lay them up agains tthe radiator as they can get too warm.  A 1ft distance should be fine.  Of course, none of these things work if you aren’t regularly heating your house yet.
3. Ever notice how much heat is coming out from behind your kitchen fridge?  Placing cases on top of the fridge with a blanket to make a “hood” will trap warm air rising up from behind the fridge and increase the ambient temp of the beer cases.  If space allows pull the fridge out enough to put the cases behind the fridge.  Set them up on a small bench to get them off the floor.  Push the fridge back against the cases for a week or so.  (Of course, clear this one with your spouse or roommates first.)
4. Use a heating pad as a heat source.  Sandwich a heating pad between two cases of bottles, set to low, with a blanket of the top is a great way to increase ambient temps.  Rotate the cases 90 degrees each day to ensure even warming.  You could even put two cases of bottled beer in the oven with a heating pad in there too…. just don’t forget to remove them before preheating the oven to make pizza.
5. Sit on the cases like an ostrich on an egg.  Of course this may require some time off from work and someone to fetch you food and water (or beer).

What should you do when your bottled beer doesn’t carbonate?

My first rule of thumb is to WAIT. Sometimes we rush into wanting to try our beer and it hasn’t had enough time to carb up. I have had beer that carbonates in a week, but that doesn’t usually happen. (When it does it still tastes sort of green, requiring longer conditioning anyway.)

If you have given the beer three weeks to carb up at least and it’s still flat, the next factor to examine is temperature.  It’s OK to move the beer to a temperature that is higher than your normal fermentation temp.  There is so little fermentation that goes on it generally won’t hurt it much.  For me, 70-72F is a good temp to carbonate at naturally (even though I like to ferment at 65-68F).  Sometimes this step is as simple as bring the cases of beer up from the basement and into the corner of a spare room for a week or two.

If it’s still not carbonated, now what????

Well, you have to really think back now and try to remember if you added the priming sugar.  If you think you forgot to add priming sugar, then find a way to remind yourself next time to be sure you add it.  Maybe if you drape the bag of sugar over your capper so you can’t miss it….or tape the bag of sugar to your chest.

If you think you forgot the sugar you can to add a little sugar to each bottle, but weighing out suck a small amount is tough for each bottle.  Another option would be to make a concentrated solution of sugar in water and use an eye dropper to put in the required drops to be the same sugar per bottle as intended.  (Of course, this all requires a little math on your part).  Probably an easier solution would be to try CarbTabs. These are little sugar tablets that go in each bottle.

The last resort that I don’t really recommend is pouring the flat beer into the bottling bucket again and adding sugar on the whole.  Personally, I would rather dump out the beer or drink it flat.  The process of carefully collecting all the beer again will certainly oxidize the beer making it taste really bad even if it does carb up.  I’d rather chalk it all up to a learning experience than drink oxidized beer.

So if you beer is flat and doesn’t seem to want to carb up, try my suggestions.  You can always keep it and mix it with a new batch of beer that you intentionally over carb with an extra ounce of priming sugar.  Then blend the two in the glass.  I think that is the best way to rescue a batch if you can’t bring yourself to dump out a whole batch.

Good luck.  Let us know if you have more interesting methods for rescuing flat beer.

Welcome To Fermentation Friday - July 2008

July’s Theme: What one tip would you give a beginner homebrewer before they brew their first batch and why?

Thanks to all bloggers that submitted posts to us for Fermentation Friday and thanks to Adam at Beer Bits 2 for starting the event and allowing us to host. And now without any further adieu, here are the submissions in no particular order:

EvilchurchdOc types: One tip that I alway give beginning homebrewers who are using extract is to move up to a full boil as soon as possible. This will help reduce the flavors from the extra carmelization of the wort and the darkness caused by the concentrated boil. Also I add that you need to turn off the flame and stir during the extract addition to reduce or eliminate scorching and further carmelization of the wort.

patrick Mor from Facebook commented: sanitize because no mater how good your ingredients your brew will taste like ass…

Aaron commented: I dunno, I still think after all these years, Relax is the best advice out there. There’s lots you can do wrong when making beer, but 95% of it will still result in decent beer, just not ideal beer.

Bryon sent along this post with the suggestion of avoiding distractions.

Adam @ Beer Bits 2 supports the mantra of Brew It Your Way.

Andy reassures beginning brewers that the process is simple and provides a nice graphic to help illustrate his point (literally).

Bunz breaks it down to three things: Sanitize! Sanitize! Sanitize!

Steve/hbbeerguy posted on Aleuminati: Spend decent $ on good liquid yeast for the style you are brewing (or culture it from a good bottle of beer). Yeast is THE most important ingredient of any brew… It defines the style and is usually the difference between a good drinkable beer and one you pour down the drain! It is well worth the extra 5 or 6 bucks to get good liquid yeast rather than use the fifty-cent dry yeast. You get what you pay for!

Da OD seconds Steve’s sentiment with an AMEN BROTHER!!

Use high quality yeast, High quality ingredients (especially the water), and Sanitize everything.

Virgil G suggests: Let it fully ferment, then give it a couple of more days. Otherwise you might get to clean up some exploded bottles.

DJ (Deege) thinks you should become an apprentice and watch someone else brew first.

Eric (Chemgeek) sent this tip (along with two pictures):

Easy volume measurement.

Spend some time calibrating your brew kettle and carboys. Use a ruler (plastic one) to correlate depth to volume for each kettle you may use. That way when you need a specific volume, you can directly add it to your kettle until the correct depth is reached. To simplify the measurement of 5 gallons in your carboy. Add 5 gallons of water to the carboy and place a temperature strip on the carboy so that the top of the strip is at the 5 gallon mark.

Matt C. tells beginners to not stress out since beer isn’t as fragile as you may think. You know, relax.

Ray and Melissa write about staying organized with a checklist. Write things down!

Travis has great advice: Dive right in!

Rob and Des provide these two tips (one each!): Drink more beer more and keep an eye on the ol’ brewpot.

Jon wishes he could do it over again and read any competent brewing manual/instructions before brewing his first batch.

Marcus has a late addition on his Final Gravity blog.

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What a cool event! Incredible suggestions from the homebrewing blogging community! Thanks for reaching out and sending us your thoughts. If you would like to contribute, please post your thoughts in the comment field below or you can email them to us.

Here is the Brew Dudes tip (Thanks Mike!):

Recipes are recipes. And unless you have a difficult time following a recipe, the contribution that a good recipe has on your final brew in a fixed variable towards making better beer. Let’s face it: yeast do most of the hard work for us brewers. When you are still “green” to brewing, managing your fermentation is the best way to start moving from good beer to better beer. And who doesn’t want better beer!?Fermentation is everything in the brewing process. Managing yeast cell counts (pitching rate), yeast health, and temperature control are crucial factors for getting the perfect fermentation. Any good experienced brewer will tell you to make a yeast starter. However, for the “greener” brewer that only has 2-3 batches under their belt jumping right into starters, while certainly good for yeast management, is not exactly the easiest step towards making better beer. By not overly complicating your brew day you can focus more on mastering the basics of wort boiling, chilling, and sanitation.A simple and affordable alternative is to use some of the high quality dry yeasts available on the market from companies like Danstar and Fermentis. The nicest thing about dry yeast is that one package generally contains more than enough cells to ferment any average gravity wort (O.G. < 1.050). The choice to use dry yeast usually makes for a simpler brewing process and a slightly cheaper (which can be a relief with the cost of hops and malt still on the rise); albeit at the sacrifice of the variety you can get with liquid cultures from Wyeast and Whitelabs.

The critical factor for using dry yeast is the re-hydration step. Many beginner recipes will simply have you sprinkle the dry yeast over the chilled wort. This is not the best practice. Some sources cite that this practice results in up to a 50% decrease in viability of the yeast cell count…meaning many of those cells you pitched just don’t survive the re-hydration. The best way to ensure the greatest effectiveness of your dries yeast is to rehydrate in clean, sterile water. The best technique is to boil up a pint of water to sterilize it at the start of your brew session in a small sauce pan. The cover the pan with the lid and set it aside during your brew session. Just as the boil ends and before you start the chilling process is when you should start to rehydrate the yeast. Open up the sauce pan and sprinkle the dry yeast over the top of the water and recover. After you go through your wort chilling process the yeast should be almost entirely rehydrate at that point. Anticipate at least 15-minutes to rehydrate.

You will know the yeast is full hydrated when the water now looks a little creamy and cloudy. There should be very little if any “grains” of yeast still floating around. It’s OK to gently swirl the sauce pan a bit if you think there is too much stuck to the sides or not all the yeast seems to have taken the plunge into the water (sometimes they can seem a bit hydrophobic and are stuck on top of the water). Now that the yeast is ready you can pour it right into your wort. If you are using a bucket fermentor as most of us did just starting out pouring is a snap. If you use a narrow necked carboy be sure to include a funnel in your sanitation procedure while cleaning and prepping the fermentor. You did sanitize your fermentor right????

Properly rehydrated dry yeast can help you make a cheap and easy leap forward in the quality of your brewing. Master this part of your brew process and you’ll be even more ready to move on to yeast starters and controlled fermentation temp before you know.

Brew On!

I see this question alot in the homebrew forums on-line: “How long should I leave my beer in secondary?”

This depends on a lot of things.  The reason most people do a secondary fermentation step is to get more stuff to settle out of the beer.  If you use a glass carboy for this (preferred) then you can visually check the beer on a week to week basis.  Once the level of junk at the bottom doesn’t change much, you are good to go.  I think in most applications 2-weeks should be plenty to help clarify a beer.

The second reason is to “bulk” age or maturate a beer.  Again this is very recipe dependent.  If the beer is not a high alcohol beer then it will mature faster than a big monster beer.

Lastly, you really will just need to experiment with maturation times.  You get a sense from the bottled product too if longer maturation is needed.  Then next time you brew maybe you can add some of that time to the secondary instead of waiting it out in the bottle.

The last thing to concern yourself with extended secondaries is yeast for bottling. If you plan to bottle condition (prime with sugar before bottling for natural carbonation) generally there will always be enough yeast to carbonate.  The longer the secondary, the longer it may take to carb.  With that said though, if I was to leave something in secondary for 6 months or more… that yeast may be worn out and too weak to really carbonate well, and adding an eighth to a quarter packet of rehydrated dry yeast to the bottling bucket may be necessary.

I hope that helps clear up some of that issue.
Check out these other threads of ours regarding secondary (and primary) fermentation:

Primary Fermentation

Skip the Secondary

Better Bottle Carboy 

Spices in Secondary 

This past weekend I bottled up my Kolsch and IPA. I had brewed the Kolsch in a “Better Bottle” carboy. You may have seen or heard of these carboys at your local brew shop, or in your favorite brewing magazine (like Brew Your Own).

I only have one of these, but I love it. Primarily because it’s much lighter and significantly less fragile than the traditional glass carboys that many of us have. I strongly endorse these carboys for primary fermentation, even as a seconday container. I would still use glass if I was brewing an imperial stout for aging or something with a bacteria addition or “wild” yeast addition. But for most applications I think the Better Bottle is the best substitute out there for doing ferments in.

I have been using my buckets to do most of my fermentation in mainly because of their ease of cleaning. However, my buckets are getting tired and I think I may start to replace them with a couple Better Bottles. There is however, on small issue with the Better Bottle that I was painfully reminded of this weekend when bottling.

Because these things are plastic, they are mildly malleable. I tend to put my carboys (glass or otherwise) in a milk crate to help carry them around. This is a great way to support the carboy and pick it up when it’s full as they are difficult to grab onto. As I lifted the carboy out of the milk crate to put it on the kitchen counter, the bottom of the carboy flexed down a little bit with the weight of the beer inside it. This change in shape creates just enough of a plunger effect that a vacuum was created and it sucked a bit of air from the airlock into the beer as I lifted it!

As I put it on the counter, I said “DAMN” to myself. Brewing up a Kolsch is a bit more work than a tradition ale and I may have contaminated it right at that moment with the airlock water. The lesson learned here is that Better Bottles are great, but just don’t take them out of the milk crate when they are filled with beer because of that flexible plastic issue. The saddest part of the story is that this has happened to me before, but I just don’t use my Better Bottle often enough to have remembered that.

So I’ll just be sure to drink up the Kolsch fast enough that if there is a mild contaminant in there it won’t have a chance to spoil the beer too quickly.

Lesson learned,
Brew ON!

Check out our earlier post on Better Bottles!

“Should I use a secondary fermentor?”

I see that question asked a lot in various on line forums. The general consensus among many “expert” brewers is that it is a waste of time. I also find that those same “experts” (myself included) tend to be keggers.

Getting clear beer takes a couple things that happens long before the choice to secondary or not becomes an issue. First, I use Irish Moss or Whifloc in the kettle. This goes along way to helping clear up the beer. Secondly, I employ a 75-90 minute boil. This ensures a really great and complete hot break to denature many haze forming proteins. Thirdly, I use a wort chiller. Getting a great chill on the beer helps to coagulate those proteins in what we call cold break. The combination of these techniques gets you pretty far in the quest for clearer beer.

But what about secondary and does it really help?

I normally ferment my beer for at least 2-3 weeks in primary. So by then… its done! And I think we can all agree that there is really no more fermentation going on in secondary. I hate to break it to you, but when you see a bubbling airlock in your secondary its just dissolved CO2 escaping from the beer…if you actually let the beer finish in the primary.
That said, when I am done with primary, I tend to transfer to a keg. Then I chill that keg down and start my carbonation process, with pressurized CO2. In a week or two I am drinking clear beer.

Now many “experts” do the same thing and say: “Hey, I don’t do secondary.” However, as I see it, my process (shared by many) is the same thing as a secondary but it’s done at colder temps and in the serving vessel! To me I would have to say, that I am employing a secondary in a way, but I prefer to look at it as a conditioning step rather than call it a secondary.

If you can’t chill your finished beer down with a fridge, or if you don’t have a kegging system, then I think a secondary “ferment” can help you out in most applications (whether you are brewing a 1038 OG Bitter or a 1065 IPA). Especially, as an extract brewer doing partial boils that extra step is quite useful for clarity. I think the last key to good clear beer is a cold conditioning step; whether it be in a glass carboy, a keg or in the bottle.

So I say skip the secondary fermentor, but do a cold conditioning step as the final part of trying to achieve a clear beer Nirvana.

Check out our post on primary fermentation as well.

10/1/08 Edit:

The Dudes have hemmed and hawed about the clarity of this thread.  We want to restate that the main point is many ”experienced” brewers say they don’t do a secondary anymore and think its unnecessary.  They go right to keg.  However, I am saying that doing a cold conditioning step IS a secondary.  A vastly improved one at that because of the effect cold temps have on beer clarity.  So a secondary CAN help you if you do not have the capacity to do a cold conditioning step like most keggers.  Lastly, be wary of experienced brewers (myself included) that tell you they don’t do secondaries.  Because they are doing it as a cold conditioning step.