INGREDIENTS
- -1lb American Crystal 40 Barley (NOT milled)
- 8oz Bavarian Wheat Dry Malt Extract
- 1lb Pilsen Dry Malt Extract
- 3/4 oz Cascade Whole leaf hops (1 1/2 Cups)
- Cellar Science Berlin Lager Yeast
- 1oz Corn Sugar (for Priming)
- 6qt Water
BREW TIMELINE
- Steep 1lb American Crystal 40 Barley (20 minutes)
- 150-165 Degrees
- Rinse the steeped grains with two quarts of water, then add the malt extracts.
- Boil for 60 minutes
- add 1/4oz Cascade hops with 60 minutes remaining
- add 1/2 oz Cascade hops with 15 minutes remaining
- Chill the wort in an ice bath (20-30 minutes)
- Add wort to fermenter, strain the hops out, squish them for extra wort.
Fermentation Timeline
- Primary: 15 days
- Secondary/carbonation: 15 days
- Enjoy after 30 days
HOW TO MAKE A CHEAP AMBER BEER
If you’re here because you want to experiment with making beer and are too proud to buy a kit, then you are in the right spot. One day I decided that I was too proud to buy a kit and the result was actually not too bad! So don’t be worried about screwing up your first beer, just order some grain and let the chaos commence! For this project you will need a one gallon fermenter, a large pot (6-8qt capacity), a meat thermometer, an auto siphon, a kitchen scale, and a muslin bag to hold the grain. If you want to bottle the beer then you’ll need five 22oz beer bottles, one 12oz beer bottle, 6 bottle caps, and a bottle cap crimper. As far as the yeast for this project I used a lager yeast which works best in colder temperatures. Somewhere the 50 to 60 degree range. Now that you know that please promptly stuff it in the back of your head for some other time. You will find, just as I have, that lager yeast work just fine at room temperature. More than fine actually.
I started by grabbing a somewhat small pot and bringing about two quarts of water up to a temperature of 150-160 degrees. I used that temperature to help get the sugars in the grain to come out. I then added my one pound of American Crystal 40 to the muslin bag and steeped it for twenty minutes. For this project I had pretty poor temperature control during my brew, so the pot got up to about 168 degrees during the steeping. To be honest I don’t think it made much of a difference, but I did come up with the idea to use the smaller burner on my stove instead of the larger one. In a future brew that technique proved to be a much more effective way to control the temperature in the brew kettle. After twenty minutes had passed I took my bag of grain out of the pot and held it over my larger brewing pot to drain. As it was draining I filled up a mason jar with tap water and poured two quarts of water over the grain to get any additional sugar out. If this is your first beer attempt, and you don’t know any better, it’s not a good idea to squeeze the grain bag to get all the water out. Squeezing the grain can release some of the tannins in the grain and that can cause your brew to have off flavors. Instead, rinse (or lauter) the grains with some water, like I did. #themoreyouknow
Now that I had some beautiful barley tea in one pot, and some barley flavored water in my brew kettle, it was time to combine them in the big pot. I set my burner on high and added my dry malt extracts, stirring until dissolved. This was the beginning of the boil. One note about the boil is that you will experience a significant loss of water. I expected this and added an extra quart of water into the pot, bringing the volume of liquid up to five quarts. As the water was coming up to a boil I recall that it did not smell like I had anticipated, and the wort was starting to look like coffee that had maybe a little too much cream in it. I did not anticipate that either, but nevertheless I continued. The timer was set for sixty minutes, it was time to add my first round of hops. I measured out and added one half cup of Cascade hops at the very beginning of the boil. The next round of hops I added was one cup with 15 minutes left in the boil.
Around the same time as I added the last hop addition I started getting my sink ready to help cool down the wort. I had been preparing to do this for a couple days by saving up some Ice cubes in a zip lock bag. I then poured them into my sink after filling it with cold water. Once the sixty minutes of boiling was done I took the pot and placed it in my sink, covering it with a lid to reduce the risk of bugs and bacteria getting into it. It only took me twenty minutes to cool down the wort to 75 degrees. It worked much better than I expected. I grabbed a funnel and a strainer and started pouring my wort into the fermenter. I’d like to take a minute to call back to the boil phase where I said that I had anticipated losing some wort due to boil off. Originally, I had thought that I would only lose a quart. That was incorrect. Even after squeezing the hops for every last drop of precious wort that I could get, I was only able to fill the fermenter to about 60%. I had to add almost two quarts to fill the fermenter which caused the gravity to drop significantly. 1.035 was my starting gravity, a potential ABV of 5% which I figured would probably not ferment out all the way. Before I added the yeast I shook the fermenter for about a minute to get some oxygen into the wort. Finally I added half-ish of my lager yeast directly from the package into the fermenter, slapped an air lock on it and stuck it outside in my storage closet. See ya in fifteen days beer!
Wrong, I checked on the beer the next morning and discovered that some sugar ants were attempting to get into the air lock. I guess that is why we use air locks! I brought the beer inside and set it on the counter to finish. Not too much later the air lock was filled with foam and beer. It was like a beer fountain, which would be cool if it was coming from a keg and not my fermenter. I had read online about something called a blowoff tube that was a pretty typical solution to my beer fountain. I did a little bit of research on it and got to work engineering one. Essentially all I did I was cut about 9 inches of PVC tubing off my auto siphon and ran it from my empty air lock into a mason jar filled with water. Luckily my 1/4 inch PVC tubing fit perfectly on the little nub in my airlock and this worked like a charm. I needed it for about three days and then the fermentation calmed down. I was then able to set it back up normally. My wife was happy to have some of the counter space back too. For the rest of the fermentation, which was fifteen days in total, I had the beer covered with a paper bag so that the yeast were not exposed to light. In order to get some B roll footage for the video however, I did remove it several times and I honestly don’t think it made any difference at all.
On the fifteenth day I was super stoked because it was time to bottle and prime the beer for carbonation. I gathered up five 22oz beer bottles, one 12oz beer bottle, some bottle caps, and my bottle cap crimper. For this particular project I went with in bottle carbonation, which is when you give the yeast a little boost of sugar and seal them in the beer bottle. They’ll eat the extra sugar and produce some more Co2, which will be trapped inside your bottle and then be absorbed into the liquid as the pressure increases in the bottle. To get started with that I measured out .8oz of corn sugar. If you don’t have a kitchen scale then you can use approximately 3 to 4 tablespoons of corn sugar. I added the sugar to half a cup of boiling water, stirred it till it was dissolved and then added it to a pot. The pot was going to serve as my bottling pot so I racked the beer out of the primary fermenter and into the pot where it mixed with the priming sugar. I took a quick gravity reading of the pot and came up with 1.019. That would make it about 2-3% ABV, but one thing to note is that when I took the gravity reading I had already mixed the priming sugar into it. The priming sugar is only going to add about .003 points to the gravity but it does fudge the actual gravity number a little bit.
I successfully bottled five 22oz bottles and part of a 12 oz bottle, only spilling a little bit on the floor. The sad part is that even though the beer is in the bottle it still has to sit for at least two weeks to become fully carbonated. I tucked the beer away in my ant infested storage closet and let it do its thing for 15 days. Not a single day beyond fifteen days I opened up my closet door to find that not only were the ants gone, but my beer was happy to see me as well. What a wonderful day to be alive it was. No bottle’s were broken, no ants crawling on them. The only thing left to do was to taste it.
To my surprise it was actually pretty good! My video was good too. I had the perfect sunset, the lighting was spectacular, and I didn’t stumble over my words too much either! I came back in bragging about it to my wife and then immediately sat down at the computer to finish the video. Upon opening the files on my SD card I found that they were all completely corrupted, sweet. It must have been those damn ants! I was pretty upset about it because my reaction was genuinely happy and now I had to fake it for the camera. Sorry to ruin the illusion for those of you who watched the video. I was hoping for another good sunset the next day and I got a pretty decent one with good lighting thankfully. Now that I am done complaining, let me tell you about the beer.
It had a nice amber color and a nice grainy smell, almost like a stout. Stout notes were confirmed when I tasted it. It was just a tiny bit more “stouty” than I would have liked, but it was still pretty darn good for just one type of grain and some randomly picked malt extracts. If this project proved anything to me, it’s that it is much harder to screw up a beer than I had originally anticipated. The only hard part really is when you’re finished with the last bottle.
Cheap Brew 