My first brew

[FriendlyFoe]

So i love beer, love creating things and this just seems like a natural evolution for me. I'm reading how to brew by john palmer, almost done the malt extract brewing section and then I'm going to read it all over again, theres lots of things i dont quite understand.

While i'm going to follow the instructions more or less exactly what id really like to do is just basically post up the process i plan on following in as concise a manner as i can, in hopes of someone glancing over it and making suggestions if i've got anything wrong.

Dont have that all typed out just yet, im going to do that tomorrow so for now i'm mostly just saying hi

Have a few cleaning questions. I'd like to use a glass car boy for fermenting and im going to have a food grade bucket as well for priming/bottling. My plan is to clean everything in the bucket with PBW, empty the bucket and then sanitize everything post wart with star san sanitizer.

Does my sanitizing water need to be boiled first?

I guess i'll just pour some of the diluted sanitizing liquid in the carboy, clean with a carboy brush but then what? I know it doesn't need to be rinsed, but i guess just leave it upside down until it dries entirely?

Everything thats sanitized can just sit on a cloth on the counter right?

 

[Hopper450]

Sanitize everything with Starsan before you use it, you don't need to boil the water for the sanitizer to work. You should drain everything after sanitizing it but it doesn't have to be dried. Enjoy the hobby, it's a good one. You will make mistakes but just keep learning from them.

 

[helibrewer]

StarSan does not need to dry and will not effect your beer. Fermenting in the carboy is not a problem but you will need a blow off tube for the first few days of fermentation (vice an airlock).

 

[FriendlyFoe]

StarSan does not need to dry and will not effect your beer. Fermenting in the carboy is not a problem but you will need a blow off tube for the first few days of fermentation (vice an airlock).

I thought i only needed a blow off tube if there wasn't enough room in the carboy, so 6.5 gallon carboy with 5 gallons of fermenting wort.

 

[jonmohno]

I like letting my carboy (a 2 gallon glass wide mouth jar) sit upside down in my iodine solution to kind of drip dry,without being exposed,i have a new method for draining my bottles by letting those dripp dry on the counter upside down.It seemed better than turning them upside down in my disrack being more exposed to the air.Id rather do that than bother rinsing. If you trust your tap water just rinse with that or preboiled water,but then you got to let that cool some also.

 

[eeverwine]

I thought i only needed a blow off tube if there wasn't enough room in the carboy, so 6.5 gallon carboy with 5 gallons of fermenting wort.

Well this would work in theory but if you have a particularly active fermentation you're going to fill your airlock with krausen and other such sediment and wort. Definitely go with a blow off into a growler or bucket of water.. (i filled the guinness glass i used for my 5th or 6th batch with wort and krausen and it overflowed and made a huge mess in my basement)

 

[NordeastBrewer77]

Well this would work in theory but if you have a particularly active fermentation you're going to fill your airlock with krausen and other such sediment and wort. Definitely go with a blow off into a growler or bucket of water.. (i filled the guinness glass i used for my 5th or 6th batch with wort and krausen and it overflowed and made a huge mess in my basement)

i ferment all my 5 gal batches (5.25 gal in the fermenter) in 6.5 gal carboys. i always rig up a blow off just in case, but have only had a few krausens reach up and into the tube, and of those, only one really 'blew off'. that one blew off a half gal into the jug of starsan.
long story a little shorter, 6.5 gal carboys, w/a blow off, are fine for 5 or so gal batches.

 

[FriendlyFoe]

good info.

More questions!

How much "sludge" for lack of a better term can i expect there to be at the bottom of the brew pot. I'm thinking of buying this 10 gallon brew pot
Blichmann Engineering - BoilerMaker 10 Gallon Brew Pot
And not only would it allow me to do double batches of beer (two 5 gallon carboy's at a time.

Now both in context to pouring it out the spout and using a carboy, i know when i dump the wart into the fermentor with the yeast i need to aerate it. Whats the best way to do this when i cant agressively dump my wart into the carboy. Pick it up and shake it??


In the next day or two im going to try and formulate something resembling an ingredients list. It's going to be a simple ale, but online none of the DME seems to list how many points or what sort of gravity you can expect from it, muntons is the brand most accessable to me. How is one to figure out how much of an extract to use if you cant figure out what sort of gravity it's going to result in?

Also what can i expect from working with hop pellets as opposed to actual hops. Is it going to make much of a difference because i think pellets are going to be the easiest for me to obtain.

 

[FriendlyFoe]

For some reason it didnt like my last post so i'm having to retype it.

Couple questions.

I'm looking at getting a proper brew kettle to get started with this, something like such http://www.torontobrewing.ca/servlet/the-147/Blichmann-Engineering---dsh-/Detail . This one has a spout thats 3/4" above the bottom, how much sediment can i expect to be in the bottom of my brew pot from the wort and do i want to intentionally exclude it from my fermentor? As opposed to just dumping the whole brew kettle in if you didnt have a spout.

What i want to know is also tied to using a carboy for fermenting, was going to use john palmers method where you have 3 gallons boiled water in the fermenter, add yeast to it, then "agressively" dump a concentrated wart into your bucket to get air into it so the yeast can start fermenting. How do i do that with a carboy? Pick it up and shake it?


I'm also starting to think about recipes, want to do a pretty simple brew and have muntons DME easily available to me. I want to use a combination of 4 parts amber DME to 2 parts light DME but i cant find anywhere that says what the malts yield is and as a result how much to use for a 5 gallon batch.

I know some of these questions possibly have obvious answers, and theres lots more where that came from

 

[jonmohno]

I couldnt follow this all but the part about after the boil you want to make shure its added forcefully then shaken or aerated, as in get a mixer to add to your drill to mix it up, otherwise plug it and shake the hell out of it,once it cools you need to get som oxygen for the yeast to thrive well,either by shaking it or mixing it. I use a paint mixer,but i have a wide mouth carboy so i use a paint mixer attachment.
8 # of dme is probalby a good range but you can figure out what og that will yeild with a good brew calc.

 

[RM-MN]

What i want to know is also tied to using a carboy for fermenting, was going to use john palmers method where you have 3 gallons boiled water in the fermenter, add yeast to it, then "agressively" dump a concentrated wart into your bucket to get air into it so the yeast can start fermenting. How do i do that with a carboy? Pick it up and shake it?

How do you plan to get the water and wort into the carboy? If you use a funnel, you will be adding oxygen as it splashes to the bottom. If you siphon, just clip or hold the end at the top of the carboy and it will splash in too. Don't pick up your carboy to shake it. If it's glass and it slips to the floor, it will break and you will bleed. If it's plastic it isn't meant to be stressed this way and may break and dump your wort.

If you are using dry yeast aeration isn't as important as with liquid yeast. The wort still needs oxygen but the dry yeast contains more cells and doesn't need to propagate as much. Do the best you reasonably can and then quit worrying.

 

[FriendlyFoe]

Random questions.

Why do many recipes call for a dry and liquid malt extracts? I thought they were essentially the same?

At the end of fermentation how much sediment is left in the fermentor? Does the racking cane remove any sediment while bottling?

When talking about commercial beers being "filtered" vs microbrew and home brewing not being so, in what way and what point are commercial beers filtered?

What happens if you pitch too much yeast to the fermentor?

 

[RM-MN]

Liquid malt usually comes in certain size container and once opened you should use all of it. If the recipe were to call for 4.2 pounds of liquid extract, what would you do with the rest of it in the opened container? The solution is to use some liquid and some dry as the dry will store better once opened.

The amount left at the bottom of the fermenter varies as it contain any break material, the hops, and any yeast that has clumped up and flocculated out. When I rack my beer to the bottling bucket, I used to try to stay above the sediment. Now I quit worrying about it and sometime I do suck up some of the yeast. It settles pretty quickly in the bottling bucket and I only notice it when I'm trying to get that last 2 ounces at the bottom of the bucket so I get another full bottle. It settles out in the bottle just fine.

Commercial beers are filtered between the fermenter or secondary if they use one and the bottling. By force carbonating the bottles (actually the beer before bottling) they can produce bottles with no sediment as all the yeast is filtered out.

In most cases not too much unless you get way too much yeast. Using liquid yeasts you will be encouraged to make a starter to get more yeast cells before adding to the beer and unless you do this you probably pitch way to little yeast. Too little is more detrimental than too much.

 

[FriendlyFoe]

thanks for your time RM, thats good info.

So that being the case do LME's have the the potential to make a better beer then DME? Thats what you make it sound like.

The amount left at the bottom of the fermenter varies as it contain any break material, the hops, and any yeast that has clumped up and flocculated out.

Wait i thought you strain the wort when going from the brew kettle to the fermentor. I thought you only had hops in the fermentor if you're dry hopping.