All grain brewing questions - please critique the steps involved.

Trying to see if I have a basic understanding of all grain brewing....please correct me if I am wrong...

You begin with a grain - such as barley, wheat, or even rice. From this you want to create a malt. A malt is formed when you take your grain, and start the process of creating an acrospire (young plant) by pouring water over the grain.

Pouring water over the grains causes the enzymes to become active, and begins breaking down the starches into simple sugars (the primary one being dextrose) which will be used by the yeast in fermentation. After a short while, you halt the process by bringing the grain up to temperature in a process called mashing.

To mash your grains...you'll soak your grains in water that is around 160-180 degrees for around an hour. From there, you'll add your 'sparge' water, to try and collect as much sugar from the grains as possible. At which point you are left with wort.

Now that you have the wort, you go through your boil, at which time you'll add your hops. Once the boil is complete, you want to aerate the wort by dissipating oxygen into the mixture. Next, add your yeast, and you're on your way to enjoying your beer.

Please let me know if I'm missing anything or misused any of the terms! Thanks!

You're malting your own grain? I'm no expert on that, but it doesn't seem like enough steps for the malting process. You have to kiln or finish the malt before you mash with it.

Your mashing temps would be 150, +/- 5 degrees, not 160-180. The enzymes that convert the starches into fermentabe sugars would be denatured above about 168.

Malting and mashing are not a continuous process. They are done completely separate of one another. For malting, the barley dampened and allowed to start to germinate. Then the process is stopped by quickly drying the malted grain. After this, malts may be kilned to darken or wetted again and then kilned (crystal malt). After the malting process, the"malt" is purchased by a brewer, milled, and then mashed.

The mash is conducted around 150F, 160 to 180 is too high and will stop the enzymes from working. During the mash, the enzymes convert the starches in the grain to both fermnetable and non-fermentable sugars. Then the sugars are washed out of the grains during the lautering process, wort is collected and then boiled as usual with hops added at various stages during the boil. The the wort is then cooled and the yeast is pitched.

All of the grain that you purchase at homebrew shops is pre-malted so malting is not something you need to worry about unless you really want to get into it.

Brewing with the B.O.B. GREAT video! Thanks!

Bobby_M said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZI5i_zNWwo

Click to expand...

Speaking of which... when are you gonna do more of these?