Pete Drinks

If I’m honest, I found the prospect of my first ‘proper’ homebrew rather daunting. I was convinced I’d screw it up somehow, so I decided to buy an all grain kit from Barley Bottom. This is a great idea for the nervous first timer – they have already worked out the recipe, measured out the grain and the hops and everything else you need and just send it to you in neatly labelled bags. It’s a slightly more expensive way of buying grain, but it removes one big scary area of potential error.

The kit I happened to pick was their Bitter and Twisted clone. It arrived as one big bag filled with all the grain, two different vacuum sealed packets of hops, a sachet of yeast (S-04), a Protafloc tablet and a reassuringly friendly and thorough set of instructions. It even included the guy’s telephone number in case I got stuck. For reference, their helpfully pre-measured recipe is below – I notice that they’ve slightly tweaked the hops in the version currently on their website, but only by a few grams.

• 4kg pale malt
• 200g crystal malt
• 200g flaked barley
• 200g torrefied wheat
• 60g Fuggles hops (full boil)
• 30g Bobek hops (last 15 minutes)

I set aside an entire Saturday, and by 11am had the boiler filled up with water and heating. By 11:30 it was up to temperature and it was time to add 20 litres or so of hot water to my mash tun, add the bag of grain, set an alarm and leave it to stew.

The alarm called me back for 1pm and I started the most tedious part of the whole process – sparging. Essentially this is just rinsing the grain but I haven’t yet worked out a way of automating it so for now it involves patiently pouring jugs of hot water over the grain bed in the mash tun while slowly opening the tap at the other end.

Still, by 2:30pm I was all sparged out, the wort was back into the boiler along with the Fuggles hops and was boiling furiously.

An hour later I realised that a big tea urn boiling vigorously resulted in turning my kitchen into a wallpaper-peeling sauna. I opened what windows I could, added the Bobek hops and Protafloc tablet and waited another 15 minutes before turning on my fancy home made immersion cooler.

By 5pm, the wort was in the fermenting bucket and cool enough to add the yeast and by the next morning, it looked like I had at least done something right.

Unfortunately, this was the high point of the experience. After a week, things had died down  but the gravity was an annoyingly high 1027 which, as far as I could tell, was much too high to be any good. Various homebrew forums suggested all sorts of things to try, from giving it a good stir to adding another sachet of yeast. But nothing seemed to work, so after a couple of weeks I gave up and shoved it into some bottles.

At the time I bottled it, I tasted it. At that stage it was probably better than anything I’d made before but it still tasted a bit odd and homebrew-y. So I shoved the bottles in the corner and ignored them – by which, of course, I mean I allowed them to mature.

They’ve now been in the bottle for 3 months or so; there’s still a whiff of homebrew about them when you first open the bottle, which I put down to the mistake of bottling them straight from the fermenter instead of giving them some time in a barrel. But once it stands for a few minutes, it smells and tastes of … beer!

Given that it’s nominally a clone of Bitter and Twisted, I thought it would be interesting to do a proper side by side comparison.

My effort is on the left. It’s flatter than the real thing, which is only to be expected as I didn’t add any priming sugar when I bottled it. There was a reason for that – I was half convinced it hadn’t finished fermenting and had visions of exploding bottles if I added any more sugar to the equation.

More surprisingly it’s a little darker. I say surprisingly, because I would have thought that most of the colour was determined by the recipe, so how I managed to do that I’m not sure. It’s possible that the rather vigorous boil resulted in a smaller final volume than the recipe intended, which may affect the colour.

Moving on; the original smells a little sweet and fresh, green grass and citrus lime. My clone has a slightly richer smell but lacks that fresh greenness – the hops are much less obvious and more orange citrus than lime.

In the mouth, the original is light bodied with a deep hoppy bitter kick to it, some very subtle spicey notes and a lingering dry finish. The carbonation is a little overdone for my taste. My clone has a slightly heavier body, and more sweetness to it. There’s still a good hoppy bitterness but it’s not as significant and the finish, while still a little dry, is more subtle.

Overall, in a blind test there’s no way I’d have said they were the same beers although there are definitely some similarities. The differences, I suspect, are far more to do with my deficiencies as a brewer and not the fault of the recipe.

The really cool bit, however, is that in that blind test I’d have said that although different, they were both real beers. I may not be a particularly good brewer yet, but I’m definitely a brewer!

Edit 08/04/2012: As mentioned here, I recently discovered an error in the way I was testing and the beer was in fact fully fermented.

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In a very limited sense, I have dabbled  in homebrew for a long time; my first experience was at university. I bought one of those homebrew bags from Boots, which was basically a 20 litre sack prefilled with – well, I don’t know what, some sort of kit goo I suppose. You just added boiling water, shook it up, emptied the yeast sachet and waited.

I don’t recall how it tasted, but I do remember it not lasting very long and a distinct increase in visitors to my room while it was there.

Since then, I’ve worked through a few extract kits – tins of dehydrated wort where you just add boiling water, add your yeast and wait. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I’ve never been entirely convinced it was worth the effort – the results always tasted like homebrew and it frankly felt like I was cheating. It felt like using a shop bought cake mix, where you “just add eggs”.

So last year, I turned 40 and had the traditional series of people asking what I wanted for my birthday. Having established that “a night with Kylie” wasn’t on the table, option two was buying some proper brewing kit in the form of a tea urn (which is much easier to use as a boiler than the old stock pot I was using up to that point, not least because it has a tap) and an icebox.

The icebox, of course, isn’t just an icebox – it has a tap and a grain filter built into it, and works as a very good mash tun. It will hold a batch of grain and hot water for 90 minutes and barely lose a degree of temperature, and then you just turn the tap and the wort flows out. Suddenly doing “proper” brewing, starting from the grain and doing everything a grown up brewery does, became possible.

The rest of my kit is a slightly more traditional mix of leftovers and homebuilt. Several years ago Boots were selling off all their old beer kits and I got three full kits – each including a big fermenting bucket – for a pound each. My Patented Mash Tun Support Structure is, err, two boxes of Sun Lik Beer stacked on top of each other.

The pinnacle of my equipment is, of course, my immersion cooler which is several yards of copper tubing which I wrapped around a demijohn and turned into a coil just the right size to sit in my tea urn. With cold water running through it, it can drop a boil down to a yeast-friendly temperature in half an hour or so.

So I was all set to do some real brewing. And despite my trepidation, it turns out that brewing really isn’t that scary. If you can make tea, you can probably brew – after all, that’s pretty much what you’re doing in the mash tun. I’m not suggesting that you’ll be producing perfect beer from day one, but despite all my mistakes (and there are plenty of those!) my very first all grain beer is still the best beer I’ve ever made – and more importantly, tastes more like beer than homebrew.

For now, I’ll leave you with some of the more important things I’ve discovered so far.

All Grain Brewing Is Easy

No, really. If you’ve ever done any sort of extract brewing and made a cup of tea, you’ve already mastered every stage. Yes, you need to either buy or MacGyver up some sort of mash tun but it really is way, way easier than I expected.

Brewing Is Geek Heaven

On one hand, brewing is a wonderfully simple sport. You soak grains in some hot water, then add yeast and wait. But, much like photography, there are a million and one cool little gadgets you can waste your money on to satisfy your geek lust. My current favourite is my awesome refractometer which I got from Ebay for 15 quid – way better than a crappy old hydrometer.

Don’t Worry About Water

I live in London. My water is horribly hard. I have now bought a kit to test the hardness and pH and it’s almost off the scale. And yet despite doing absolutely nothing to my water for the first brews, I made drinkable beer.

As I’m getting more into it, I’ve bought a testing kit and some brewers acid but that’s because I’m a geek.

Don’t Panic

As you will see in my next homebrew post, my first brew went properly wrong, appeared to stick half way through fermenting and sat in a bucket with me swearing at it for a month. It still tastes like beer. I know it’s all technically wrong, but it’s still nicer than plenty of beers I’ve had to pay for in pubs.

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