Mess making

I found a recipe for George Washingtons small beer. Since it included lots of grocery-store goodies I thought I'd try it. The only deviation I made was to replace the hops with rosemary (the herb) and add a fistful of oats. And I scaled the recipe down to make a half-gallon batch.

I've never brewed anything and have no expectation of having a drinkable brew. I wanted to step through the process of brewing without investing a lot of money into a failure. I bought 1 stopper, 1 bubbler-ma-jig, and a hydrometer. I spent $10.43 on these items.

I had a half-gallon glass jug.
I bought a 12 oz bottle of robust molasses.
Spices on hand: ground ginger, ground clove, and dried rosemary.

I started with a half-gallong of boiling water and added a tablespoon of dried rosemary. After a few minutes I added 7 ounces of molasses and boiled for about an hour. At 45 minutes I added a pinch of ground clove and ground giner and a small handfull of oats.

I let it cool to 140 F and put 1/4 cup into a jar and place that into the fridge. I put the rest in the half-gallon jug, adding about two cups of water. This went into the sink and I filled the sink with cool water. I took SG at 105 F and found 1.057 corrected.

At 78 F I pitched in a package of fast acting bread yeast. I put the bubbler-ma-bob on and sat it on the coffee table. Within 30 minutes I got my first bubble. Its been bubbling for about 30 hours and is showing signs of slowing down. There is nothing floating on it. It smells the same as it did when it was brewing.

It smells like cookies, by the way.

I suspect this will be disgusting but the experience has been fun, and I'm ready to invest into more gear and a better recipe.

Thoughts?

Certainteed said:

...I suspect this will be disgusting but the experience has been fun, and I'm ready to invest into more gear and a better recipe.

Thoughts?

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I, too, suspect it will be disgusting, but pats on the back for courage and expression. Welcome to HBT.

Peruse the forums, the recipe area, and get some proper equipment / ingredients. If you found this exercise exciting, just wait until you make real beer!

Thanks for the welcome

I'm considering 5-6 1 gal jugs instead of 1 5-6 gal jug. I think I'd rather have several different recipes going at once and it'll save me the hassle of upgrading to a larger pot etc etc.

Any advice? Am I likely to get fed up with small batches?

just wanted to post a few observations...

bread yeast likes warm temperatures. below 70 and the bubbles get few and far between.

small batches have no thermal stability. i can force the yeast to work by putting both hands on the bottle. within minutes the bubble rate will increase noticeably.

it still smells like a batch of cookies. not quite as strongly, but the smell is certainly sweet and appealing.

its cloudy. looks like a jug of mud. i'm thinking about pulling it off the yeast and adding gelatin. then maybe cool it down in the fridge for a few days to see if it clears. i dont think i'm going to try carbonating this mess. i'd like to but i have nothing to put it in.

small batches suck because taking a sg reading nearly empties the bottle. 1 gallon would be ideal but i don't like jugs. buckets are better because of the opening while they suck because they are opaque. i saw a 2 gallon cookie jar at walmart that seems ideal except its too short to leave the hydrometer floating in it. and there is the question of sealing the lid... or not. mom says her mother made beer in a crock with a wooden lid and people loved her beer.

well i'm having fun and i haven't spent 20 bux yet. movies don't offer this kind of entertainment value.

I hear you about small batches. Not only does it take the same amount of time to make a small batch as it does a large batch, but you cringe every time you have to remove some for sampling. I just did my first five gallon batch and even after a few samples I still bottled 49.5 bottles when all was said and done.

sour sour sour sour sour.

a year ago i was at the thirsty monk in asheville nc sampling things i couldn't pronounce. i got a taste of some really sour stuff and loved it. but i don't recall what it was.

this stuff comes close. if it weren't for the herbs and the terrible color i'd drink it. in the recipe above i forgot to mention the juice of one lemon and some zest. maybe i'll just use the juice next time. i think the yeast had a tough go in that much acid.

i pulled it off the yeast. added the quarter cup of original wart and a packet of gelatin. i dont have a lot of hope for it clearing but i do have some great ideas about what to do next batch...

less lemon.
no oats!
more molasses
way less herb. like maybe hold the clove next to the boiling pot for 23 seconds and then separate the two.

i saved some yeast and am going to use it in the next batch. i figure the yeast will eventually become a better strain.

More for the chronicle..

So evidently that old recipe is missing some punctuation and the person who perpetuates the current recipe does not mention using BRAN.

Soooo.... I grabbed some from the supermarket. I've yet to buy any hops. Maybe payday. For now, I'm trying to wrap my head around the process.

So I toasted a cup of oats on the stove and a cup of bran in the oven. It seems to me that the molasses are exceptionally strong so the bran/oat combo need a lot of flavor.

These went into boiling water and boiled away for an hour. Then I added 4 ounces of molasses and boiled for 30 more minutes. The mixture is tasty.

I understand now that I should not be boiling the grains. Ok live and learn.

My thermometer died on me so I didn't bother reading the SG. This step appears to be a waste of time for a zero-budget brew. As long as there are sugars, the yeast will throw a party.

So I cooled it and put half a packet of bread yeast in. Put on the bubbler-ma-bob and tossed it into the closet.

For the two cups of oats/bran, I added two cups of flour and the other half-packet of yeast. It rose a little so I tossed it into the oven. 35 minutes later I had a very non-offensive-yet-boring loaf of bread. The flavor livens up with a bit of salted butter but overall it needs help. Next weekend I'll try another batch and with the dough I'll add raisins, an egg, and use the yeast from this weeks beer.

This sounds like a terribly fun experiment. From my perspective, I was taught to brew, so wouldn't try a lot of the stuff you are. Be sure to post anything that works please!

Sour beers you tried were probably lambics?

One note regarding the oats - unless you are mashing them, you will not gain any fermentable sugars. Boiling them will gelatinize and dissolve some starches, but this will only serve as a food source for whatever wild yeast or bacteria end up in the fermenter. Saccharomyces Cerviseae will not be able to process it. In order to break down the starches from the oats into fermentable sugars, they have to be mashed with malt, which possesses the amylase enzymes necessary to break them down into simple sugars.

Certainteed said:

Thanks for the welcome

I'm considering 5-6 1 gal jugs instead of 1 5-6 gal jug. I think I'd rather have several different recipes going at once and it'll save me the hassle of upgrading to a larger pot etc etc.

Any advice? Am I likely to get fed up with small batches?

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The issue isn't in getting fed up, it is when you hit one that is GREAT....you only have one gallon of it. I had that with two wines I made and it SUCKS!

kevmoron said:

One note regarding the oats - unless you are mashing them, you will not gain any fermentable sugars. Boiling them will gelatinize and dissolve some starches, but this will only serve as a food source for whatever wild yeast or bacteria end up in the fermenter. Saccharomyces Cerviseae will not be able to process it. In order to break down the starches from the oats into fermentable sugars, they have to be mashed with malt, which possesses the amylase enzymes necessary to break them down into simple sugars.

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I can work with this. Thanks. Next weeks session should be interesting.

just a little update on batch number two...

its drinkable. not good. drinkable.

i've spent the past few days reading up on amylase and now understand why george washingtons beer (along with a lot of other old recipes) include ginger: because its a source of amylase. if only it weren't so flavorful.

for some reason i was convinced that i needed to save this batch by getting the enzyme in there to break up the starches from the oatmeal. and since fermentation had stopped i figured i couldn't make things any worse.

the temp in my basement is holding at 65F. too cold for bread yeast. this is probably the problem.

i put a pinch of ground ginger into my brew in hopes that any starches will be converted. it just sat there on top... ground ginger floats and so does its amylase. my girlfriend (masters in chemistry) told me to spit in the brew and give it a month. i figure ginger would work a little faster and taste a little better. and now i have powdered ginger sitting on top of my brown liquid. i almost spit in it just to see if i could sink the ginger. i didn't want to stir the bottle because of all the yeast.

for reasons unknown i squeezed a bit of dark corn syrup into the bottle which sunk the ginger.

moments later i've got fizz. serious fizz. i put the bubbler-ma-bob back onto the bottle and it went nuts. then i set the bobble in front of a space heater and its really rocking now.

sooooooooo

the lesson learned here is patience is the key to making beer. amylase doesn't go away (normally) so a tiny bit will continue to work on starches for a very long time. a small amount will work through the beer over time. also, yeasts will produce amylase but this only happens when necessary and it requires time.

its all about time.

and in the case of bread yeat, its partly about temperature.

i'm learning slowly but i'm learning none the less.

You spit... In your beer?

PhelanKA7 said:

You spit... In your beer?

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I believe the reasoning behind the girlfriend's recommendation here is that she knows saliva contains amylase enzymes. In several parts of South America, Chicha has long been produced using this principle, where villagers will chew starchy things like wheat or corn and spit them out into a fermenter (more or less), allowing amylase from their saliva to create sugars for fermentation.

I would think, however, that it would take a lot of spit to have the desired effect on your beer, and that you would end up with so many other microorganisms in the ferment that it would come out pretty funky.

Certainteed, Have you read John Palmer's "How to Brew"? It is free online and a wonderful rescource for people new to the obsession. I just found this thread and am impressed by your pioneering attitude. You'll fit in great here!

no i haven't read that but i will. thanks for the link and the encouragement.

this batch gets put into a bottle saturday. i'm going to use the same basic recipe, while tuning the process so that i can take better advantage of the starches locked-up in the cereals. i really appreciate the input from everyone here.