So I have been reading my How To Brew book and I came to John Palmer’s suggestion about primary fermentation duration.

He states that primary fermentation should always last 2 weeks. When I first started brewing, I never left a beer fermenting longer than a week.

Every recipe I followed always gave a week for fermentation and instructed you to bottle after that.

Anyone else in my boat? Leave a comment and let’s talk up how long primary fermentation should take.

Check out our post on secondary fermentation  as well.

Here is an extract version of a recipe I made a few years back. It was a great beer, a little too tart on the cranberries after it aged a bit. So either cut the berries by one third or be sure to drink it up while it’s fresh. (The latter being preferable to the former).

Here is the recipe reproduced here with a few modifications I had to make for local ingredients. The original version of this appeared in the October 2005 edition of BYO magazine!!! We love that mag.

1.5lbs Muntons wheat dried malt extract
3.3 lbs Coopers Wheat liquid malt extract
2.0 lbs of golden clover honey
3.0 lbs of whole cranberries
2 medium navel oranges (seedless)
2 medium apples (Granny Smith)
1/4 tsp. of yeast nutrients
1/2 tsp. of pectic enzyme (dissolved in a little beer before racking)
5 AAU Williamete hops (30 mins) (1.0 oz pellets/23g of 5% alpha acids)
Safale US-05 dried ale yeast (2 packages, formerly US-56)
1.25 cups corn sugar for priming

Brew this up adding the liquid extract late (20 miutes left in boil). Add yeast nutrients right at the end of boil before your kill the flame. Ferment in primary for 7 days. Blend all the fruit in a food processor to make a rough relish; rinds, peels, seeds and all!!!. Put that in the bottom of a secondary fermentor. Rack the beer on top of it. Save a little 80z of beer and dissolve the pectic enzyme in it.  After it is dissolved, dump it in the fermentor. I let mine sit in the primary for ten days, seven may be better to avoid over tarting from those berries.

It’s important to take good notes, kids!

Here is my log sheet that I use to keep important information straight. It’s still a work in progress, but it works for me so far! Feel free to print it out and use it. I usually print a formulated recipe from the beer recipator along with one of these logs. Then both the recipe sheet and the log sheet go into a binder with plastic sheet protectors.

Protectors keep me from getting “Sheet” on my sheet in the brew-house!

Brewing logsheet

I hate when “Past John” leaves work for “Future John”. It’s strange…we’re the same guy, just separated by time.

“Past John” is lazy…or at least inconsiderate…when it comes to cleaning.

To bottle up our beer that we made at IncrediBREW back on October 6th, I needed to gather up all the 22 ounce bottles I have kicking around in the basement.

I can say the first case looked clean but the other two cases had a lot of funkiness. Ugly white and green clumps of mold were stuck to the bottom of a large number of bottles.

Last night, I got out my PBW (Powdered Brewery Wash) and followed the directions on the package to make a nice soaking solution in my bottling bucket.

I used the spigot on the bucket to fill each bottle with the solution and I just let them soak overnight.

This morning, I gave some of the more funky bottles a shake. The PBW had broken up the mold and now big, wildly shaped particles were floating in the bottle.

This stuff works great! No scrubbing needed.

So this time, “Future John” was ok with the work that was left him…but that’s not always the case.

The lesson I need to learn and follow is to clean homebrewing equipment and materials as soon as I am done with them. Don’t leave it for later.

To rid my life of bottle cleaning, I could throw money at the problem and buy kegs and kegging equipment.

I wanted to put up a post about starting down the path of all-grain brewing.  All-grain brewing gives you ultimate control over the wort.  You can control the exact proportion of base malt to specialty malts and you can control the body of the beer through mash temp.  These two factors are things that are out of your control as an extract brewer.  You can certainly “shop around” and make 3-4 pale ale recipes using base extract from different suppliers.  Maybe you’ll find one that’s just right.  What happens though if you don’t fine one that’s just right?  Well, that’s where all-grain comes in.

Before I continue…
Extract brewing is great in its own right.  You can make awesome beer with extract.  You can win awards with extract.  There are microbreweries out there based upon extract brewing!!!  There is absolutely nothing wrong with using extracts.  However, eventually you may want to see if you can “brew like the pros” or you may hit a wall in recipe tweaking that forces you to investigate the all-grain process.

In this first part of “Going All-Grain” I want to introduced the most important piece of the puzzle for getting there; the mash tun.  Now there are several ways to mash and lauter (rinse) your grains.  The method I employ is referred to as batch-sparging.  I’ll discuss the how and why in a subsequent post.  I want to focus this post on how I built my mash tun to start to give you some ideas.

First off I used a 50qt “cube” cooler that I got on sale one winter at Target.  It had a spot for a valve, but it wasn’t drilled out.  So I was free to do what I wanted.  I chose to keep it real simple and I purchased a second valve that you normally see on your bottling bucket.  I also purchase a rubber stopper that would fit into the port of the valve once inside the cooler.  I jammed a stainless steel T-fitting into the stopper.  To serve as a sieve to strain the wort from the grain I used the ever popular stainless steel hose braid.

Working with the braid can be tricky.  I simply hacked the end fitting off with a saw.  Then I cut it to my approximate length.  Wearing gloves, I carefully worked the rubber hose out of the interior of the braid so I was just left with the braid.

This picture is a close up of the valve on the cooler.

This picture is a close up of the braid clamped to the T-fitting and jammed into the stopper.

Here is what the whole thing looks like assembled inside the cooler.

Now you’ll notice that I doubled over the braid into two loops.  This isn’t really necessary.  In fact most other people you’ll just see one straight 5 inch piece of braid.  I went with the doubled over loop to increase my overall lautering profile with respect to the dimensions of the cooler.  This was to decrease the probability of channeling if I had decided that batch sparging wasn’t for me, or that I wanted to give fly sparging a try. (I will describe the differences in a future post).

Here is a picture of beautiful wort running out of the tun.  This was wort for the Belgian Tripel!

So that’s the basics of what my mash tun look like.  I’ll discuss how I set up my mash in part 2!!

In the mean time here… have a beer on me.

I know some people have asked me about extract versions of my all-grain recipes.  In the future, I will do my best to remember to post an extract version of the recipes I post.  In the meantime, I wanted to put up a post about converting recipes and how I convert any all-grain recipe to extract.  That way readers can double check my math if they wish (and call me out on it!) or you can use my method to convert any recipe you see on the web yourself.

First off some personal philosphy:
While not an original thought, I agree with many others on this simple premise: Formulate all your extract recipes using only Light Malt Extract.  Once you have brewed enough extract beers from kits and you start to formulate your own recipes, using only light extracts makes good beer sense.  Primarily, it will standardize the base malt flavor profiles in your beers, which will lead to predictable results each time you brew.  Secondly, it gives you a lot more control over the flavors you get because you are controlling all the specialty malts and grains yourself.  Lastly, it will make it a hell of a lot easier to convert that recipe to all-grain should you go that direction some day.  It’s a lot easier to convert 10lbs of DME to ~16lbs of pale malt grain than it is to convert 10lbs of dark DME to who knows how many pounds of pale malt, crystal malt, chocolate and black patent; for example.  Dark dry malt extract (DME) is made with a combination of the malts I mentioned above, but it’s according to some maltser’s recipe.

OK…on to the calculations. ( I have two methods for doing this the first is more “accurate”, the second is “good enough” for the first pass.)

METHOD #1
First off, keep all the specialty malts the same in any recipe you wish to convert to extract.  For the most part that will be a good starting point. 

Next, you need two pieces of critical information the total pounds of base malt (usually Pale malt, Marris Otter, Munich Malt, Pilsner Malt, etc. etc.) and the extract efficiency.  Most of the time I assume 70-75% efficiency when formulating recipes.  This number should be given by most completed recipes but it may not be available for a recipe that hasn’t been brewed yet.  Multiply the pounds of base malt by 37PPG (point per pound per gallon, this is the typical PPG for base grain).  That equals the total points of extract assume 100% conversion and recovery.  You need to convert that total points to actual points but multiplying that last number by the percent efficiency (as a decimal).
Example:  10lbs base malt * 37PPG is 370 total points.  The actual points is going to be 259 (370*0.70=259). 

In 5 gallons, that would yield an expected OG of 1052 (259/5gallons= 51.8)

So what you need is 259 points of extract from DME or LME (Liquid Malt Extract).  For my calcs, I use an assumed 44PPG for DME and 37PPG for LME.  Just divide the total points needed by the points per pound of DME or LME.
259 points is ~5.8lbs of DME (259/44PPG)
or 259 points is 7lbs of LME (259/37PPG)

Use that much calculated extract, and steep the same amounts of specialty grains as you would with a normal extract kit.

METHOD#2
Look for the anticipate OG of the recipe you wish to convert (don’t even look at how much base malt there is).  Multiply the OG points by the batch size to get the total points of extract. For example, 5 gallons of 1050 beer would contain/need 250 points worth of extract (5 gallons*50 [from 1050 OG]=250)

Simply divide that number by the PPG of DME or LME as I did at the end of method #1.

250/44=5.6lbs DME
250/37=6.7lbs LME

Again, use that amount of extract and steep the specialty grains as you would a normal extract kit.

This method is less accurate but easier to deal with.  I often use this method if I want to just get a quick idea how much extract to buy or I want to quickly convert a recipe for someone.  It is the best way to easily get a total amount of extract (DME or LME) without worrying about efficiency in the all grain brewers mash.  The only draw back to this method is that you will end up with a slightly higher OG because this method ignores the contribution of gravity points to the OG.  But that is relatively small contribution, and if you plan to rebrew a recipe to tweak it (I recommend that approach) then you can change the extract values then.

I hope that helps with converting recipes.  If there are questions or challenges to my method of converting, post them as comments and I will address them or attempt to clarify the methods as needed. (Hopefully this post won’t turn into an excuse to forget to post the extract version of each recipe I put together in the future)

This is the last post of the beginner kit item review. The last items, highlighted in the picture below, are used to keep your other equipment clean.

The white packet is sanitizer. Any piece of equipment that will come into contact with your brew should be sanitized* before brewing. The sanitizer in the packet is most likely in a powder form. To prepare and use the sanitizer, follow the directions on the packet.

*Sanitized is different than clean…we’ll discuss the difference in a future post.

The bottle brush is used, you guessed it, to clean the inside of your bottles. You will want to clean your bottles well to avoid contaminating your beer. I ruined a perfectly good better because I was lazy and I didn’t do a good enough job cleaning my bottles.
As I alluded to earlier, cleaning bottles and sanitizing bottles are two different things. We’ll go through each process…in an upcoming post.

Thanks for reading these posts describing the items in a beginner brewing kit. If you missed anything, be sure to check out the following sections:

• Beginner Brewing Kit
• Beginner Brew Pot
• Fermentation Bucket
• Racking Cane
• Bottling Bucket
• Hydrometer
• Bottle Capper