Science Friday did a segment on home beer brewing and how to avoid some of the pitfalls. I know we have a few home brewers and am wondering what they think of the show and the advice for a potential novice.
I would say that segment did
not do a very good job at setting out brewing for a novice. So I will take care of that right here an now
Step one is to find your local homebrewing club and go to a meeting or two, which they did mention, but didn't stress. I'd stress that because before you buy anything, you probably want to chat about and see various equipment choices. It doesn't have to be expensive. And you'll want to show up at someone's house on Saturday morning and sit there and wash stuff for them while they brew, hehe. Actually, you'll want to go to several "brew sessions" to see various equipment options. You'll only get a look at the "hot side" equipment on brew day, but if you ask, during some of the quiet points in the brew day, they might show you their bottling or kegging arrangement (how they "rack" or transfer the beer after fermentation).
The segment didn't talk about equipment at all, so, yeah, that's what a novice is up against. You want to brew 5 gallons at a time. Although you can do a "partial boil" by boiling, say, 2.5 gallons, then diluting it with 2.5 gallons, but I don't recommend that route. Just go with a large boil kettle (pot). You can buy a turkey frier (propane burner and an 8 or 9 gallon aluminum pot at WalMart in October/November for $50), a "weldless ball valve" (bargain fittings dot com), a copper coil immersion chiller (home brew store), a 6.5 gallon glass carboy (home brew store), a hydrometer (hbs), bottling bucket, bottles and caps (hbs). You'll need Oxyclean Free (grocery store) to clean and you'll need StarSan or Iodaphor sanitize (hbs). You might find an equipment starter kit at your home brew store that has a lot of that "cold side" (bottling) stuff in one package.
The segment started by saying how making beer starts with a process like making oatmeal. But most novice brewers start out with "dried malt extract", which bypasses that process. And you can make reall good beer with an extract kit. A little more expensive on ingredients, but less equipment required and much less time on your brew day. They talked about the brew in bag technique, which allows you to use the same equipment you use for extract brewing, but start out with grain instead of extract.
At least they said that it is easy to make beer! By the way "contamination" is a more acturate word than the word they used: "infection" (living things get infected and a batch of beer, although has living things floating around in it - yeast - itself is not a living thing). They talked about bacteria vs yeast, which is important. For a novice that wants to make a beer, yeast=good, bacteria=bad. They talked about sanitization, which is key, but just a few rules need to be followed. But they neglected to say that the sanitization only needs to be a big concern on "the cold side" (after the boil). The entire processs involves mashing, boiling, chilling (sanitation becomes important at this point), transferring to a fermentation vessel, "pitching" yeast, allowing fermentation to happen (yeast makes beer, you don't), transferring to bottling bucket, adding bottling sugar, transferring to bottles, waiting for the bottles to "carb up", drinking!
Just a word of warning about bottling in individual bottles. It's a pain and you'll probably end-up kegging if you stay into beer making. That means buying lots more equipment (kegs, CO2 tank, regulator, keggerator).
They talked about a kettle lacto beer, which is just a weird style that you probably don't need to even consider and shouldn't worry about. They didn't talk about something very basic and important: exposing the beer to air (oxygen) during fermentation and bottling is bad. In fact that's one of the biggest "food failures" that a novice brewer might make. Easy to prevent oxydation with the right equipment and technique, though.
They didn't go into the logistics of fermentation of a lager (requires a cooling chamber) versus fermenting an ale (at just a low room temperature). If you want to ferment at warmer room temperatures, you can brew the saison style beer (using a saison yeast). Temperature control in fermentation is critical, so if you have a place that has a nice stable temperature, just find a yeast that likes that temperature, and that will determine what your first beer style will be!
They talked about bottle conditioning and exploding bottles as a failure, and that can happen if you don't know how much bottling sugar to use, but there are calculators you can use. Oh, buy a cheap little scale. Harbor Freight has 'em for like $12. That way, you can measure your bottling sugar to the gram and get it perfect. Not that it's really that critical, though. As they explained (not well, but explained), if you bottle too early there will be unconsumed sugars that will generate 'unexpected' CO2. Your bottling sugar calculation presumes that all the yeast-edible sugars are gone, but if you give the yeast the added bottling sugar plus the residual sugars, you can have more CO2 than the bottle can hold. But in the segment, they didn't connect the dots on the other (and I think more frequent) reason for bottle bombs: contamination. Say the beer is fully fermented at bottling time and you add the right amount of bottling sugar. But let's say you contaminate the batch in a crusty bottling bucket (bacteria gets in there, usually brettanomyces). Well, those guys go to work on sugars that yeast are unable to digest, and the pressure builds. So yeah, bottling too early and contamination are the bottle bomb "food failure" causes.
I know it was sort of a "random walk" through home brewing, but I think I did better than the radio segment to get reasonable coverage of the basics for someone considering the hobby.
