Hello everyone,
After browsing through the forum for a long time (a year) I finally decided to join in and learn some more.
As the title suggests, I am from India, and my name is Ashok.
As a beer enthusiast, I wanted to brew my own beer for a long time, but had been busy traveling all the time and at that, it is a herculean task in India to find the right equipments to ferment a drinkable beer.
However, from my last visit to Chicago, I came back with a few 11.5 gram pouches of Safale US 05, and brewed my first beer ever (all grain, not easy to find malt extract here) - still in the fermentation process.
I hope you will allow me to take this opportunity to seek some help from you generous folks (Cannot help notice the members here being so prompt in dispensing out the right and precise information to help out the first timers!).
Well, here it goes:
I bought 4 kilograms (about 9 pounds) of barley, a packet full of hop pellets (got it from a store in Wisconsin), and a packet of Safale US 05 (11.5 grams).
Soaked the barley (had made sure I got the ones meant for seeding so they would germinate for sure) for two nights and the acrospire was up to almost 80% the length of the grain.
However, I had to suddenly move to another apartment, and since it is illegal (I suppose) to brew in India, I put it all in a plastic bucket and got on with the moving process. That delayed the drying part for two more days, and about 10% of the grains had the sprouts coming out.
I quickly moved them to the roof and spread em all for sun drying (no conventional oven here) and it took me over 3 days to have them even appear like they were drying - it's December
By that time I had gotten so much of workload, I decided to dry them further in the microwave on very low power while I kept checking every other minute whether they were getting too hot to touch, and did not let them get like that.
The microwave of course dried them real quick but the roots were still hard to get rid of and took the most work in the entire process.
Right after getting rid of the roots, since I do not have anything to crush them in big pieces (somewhere I read the ideal size is about 3 pieces per grain) , I put them in a juicer/grinder and turned it on.
To my disappointment, half of them turned to flour, while half remained intact. So I kept stopping the juicer every few seconds to remove the crushed/pierced/powdered part, and grinding the rest, until I got a good amount of flour + full grains. Full grains contained about 5% of the entire malt.
After having a good amount of flour at my hands (weighed about 8 pounds by then), I decided to go ahead with it and not use a cloth bag for mashing/sparging with the thought that I could strain it later on.
I heated the water (18 liters) in a stainless steel container, just enough so I could put my hands inside (with a bit difficulty as it still felt very hot, not boiling though) to squeeze the grains some more, and continued to do it for about 45 minutes. The water became milky white.
That was followed by straining the extract/wort with a double folded (clean) cloth, and indeed took a long time as the flour had made it took thick and sticky.
Having strained it all, I decided to boil it thoroughly, since I had used my bare hands (washed) to squeeze the sugar out, and put it on a vigorous boil for about 1.5 hours (90 minutes), with half the hop pellets added at the beginning of the boil. It got reduced to about 13 liters.
Added the rest of hops at 5 minutes left of the boil.
After the boil, it looked like some grey colored thick drain water that deserved to go down the sewer. However, it was thoroughly boiled so I knew it was still clean of any bacteria (or perhaps any life form except whatever virus might have been there), and I put it in the fridge as I did not have anything better to cool it down faster.
The fridge was a bit slow for it, because when I took it out after an hour, it was still at about 120 F. But the wort was reduced a lot, so I poured down 2 liters of cooled RO water in to fill it up to 15 liters, and it felt it was around 90-100 F (I am comparing it with my body temperature -> warm means around 40 C and hot means 50+ C).
The lack of the right equipments was very disheartening, but somewhere I had read that there are as many ways to brew as there are brewers, and it kept me going.
So now I had 15 liters of wort, might have been high gravity as it looked pretty thick, and I needed to pitch in the yeast asap and seal it away. And that's exactly what I did.
Poured the wort into the plastic water bottle (20 liter container), pitched in half the packet (dry) yeast of Safale 05, and sealed the bottle with a balloon.
I let it sit in my room for primary fermentation and to my relief it already looked pale orange color, not grey anymore. However, I panicked when I noticed no activity, no foaming even after 12 hours and fearing that I pitched the yeast in when the wort was too hot (it still felt warm) I poured in 2 more liters of cold water into the wort and threw in the rest of the yeast (although just before I threw in the rest half of the yeast, I noticed very thin layers of foam had begun to form).
So since then the activity has been normal, as I see in the pictures in here and read about them, with half an inch of krausen residing on top of the beer, I feel more at peace, and have decided to keep it like that for 2 weeks, before I bottle them away in PET bottles for a week more of fermentation, and then may consume it.
Oh well, I wonder if anyone read all that boring stuff up here, but would sure love to have some help on deciding whether I should try to throw in some crushed/sliced ginger roots at this time - 3 days after fermentation began, to give it a hint of ginger. If it is involves the risk of bacterial infection, then certainly I will not try it at all. But would sure love to have some ginger flavor in my beer.
Will be grateful for any help on this.
After browsing through the forum for a long time (a year) I finally decided to join in and learn some more.
As the title suggests, I am from India, and my name is Ashok.
As a beer enthusiast, I wanted to brew my own beer for a long time, but had been busy traveling all the time and at that, it is a herculean task in India to find the right equipments to ferment a drinkable beer.
However, from my last visit to Chicago, I came back with a few 11.5 gram pouches of Safale US 05, and brewed my first beer ever (all grain, not easy to find malt extract here) - still in the fermentation process.
I hope you will allow me to take this opportunity to seek some help from you generous folks (Cannot help notice the members here being so prompt in dispensing out the right and precise information to help out the first timers!).
Well, here it goes:
I bought 4 kilograms (about 9 pounds) of barley, a packet full of hop pellets (got it from a store in Wisconsin), and a packet of Safale US 05 (11.5 grams).
Soaked the barley (had made sure I got the ones meant for seeding so they would germinate for sure) for two nights and the acrospire was up to almost 80% the length of the grain.
However, I had to suddenly move to another apartment, and since it is illegal (I suppose) to brew in India, I put it all in a plastic bucket and got on with the moving process. That delayed the drying part for two more days, and about 10% of the grains had the sprouts coming out.
I quickly moved them to the roof and spread em all for sun drying (no conventional oven here) and it took me over 3 days to have them even appear like they were drying - it's December
By that time I had gotten so much of workload, I decided to dry them further in the microwave on very low power while I kept checking every other minute whether they were getting too hot to touch, and did not let them get like that.
The microwave of course dried them real quick but the roots were still hard to get rid of and took the most work in the entire process.
Right after getting rid of the roots, since I do not have anything to crush them in big pieces (somewhere I read the ideal size is about 3 pieces per grain) , I put them in a juicer/grinder and turned it on.
To my disappointment, half of them turned to flour, while half remained intact. So I kept stopping the juicer every few seconds to remove the crushed/pierced/powdered part, and grinding the rest, until I got a good amount of flour + full grains. Full grains contained about 5% of the entire malt.
After having a good amount of flour at my hands (weighed about 8 pounds by then), I decided to go ahead with it and not use a cloth bag for mashing/sparging with the thought that I could strain it later on.
I heated the water (18 liters) in a stainless steel container, just enough so I could put my hands inside (with a bit difficulty as it still felt very hot, not boiling though) to squeeze the grains some more, and continued to do it for about 45 minutes. The water became milky white.
That was followed by straining the extract/wort with a double folded (clean) cloth, and indeed took a long time as the flour had made it took thick and sticky.
Having strained it all, I decided to boil it thoroughly, since I had used my bare hands (washed) to squeeze the sugar out, and put it on a vigorous boil for about 1.5 hours (90 minutes), with half the hop pellets added at the beginning of the boil. It got reduced to about 13 liters.
Added the rest of hops at 5 minutes left of the boil.
After the boil, it looked like some grey colored thick drain water that deserved to go down the sewer. However, it was thoroughly boiled so I knew it was still clean of any bacteria (or perhaps any life form except whatever virus might have been there), and I put it in the fridge as I did not have anything better to cool it down faster.
The fridge was a bit slow for it, because when I took it out after an hour, it was still at about 120 F. But the wort was reduced a lot, so I poured down 2 liters of cooled RO water in to fill it up to 15 liters, and it felt it was around 90-100 F (I am comparing it with my body temperature -> warm means around 40 C and hot means 50+ C).
The lack of the right equipments was very disheartening, but somewhere I had read that there are as many ways to brew as there are brewers, and it kept me going.
So now I had 15 liters of wort, might have been high gravity as it looked pretty thick, and I needed to pitch in the yeast asap and seal it away. And that's exactly what I did.
Poured the wort into the plastic water bottle (20 liter container), pitched in half the packet (dry) yeast of Safale 05, and sealed the bottle with a balloon.
I let it sit in my room for primary fermentation and to my relief it already looked pale orange color, not grey anymore. However, I panicked when I noticed no activity, no foaming even after 12 hours and fearing that I pitched the yeast in when the wort was too hot (it still felt warm) I poured in 2 more liters of cold water into the wort and threw in the rest of the yeast (although just before I threw in the rest half of the yeast, I noticed very thin layers of foam had begun to form).
So since then the activity has been normal, as I see in the pictures in here and read about them, with half an inch of krausen residing on top of the beer, I feel more at peace, and have decided to keep it like that for 2 weeks, before I bottle them away in PET bottles for a week more of fermentation, and then may consume it.
Oh well, I wonder if anyone read all that boring stuff up here, but would sure love to have some help on deciding whether I should try to throw in some crushed/sliced ginger roots at this time - 3 days after fermentation began, to give it a hint of ginger. If it is involves the risk of bacterial infection, then certainly I will not try it at all. But would sure love to have some ginger flavor in my beer.
Will be grateful for any help on this.
