How to succeed at Home Brewing.
The truth is that you can do a much better than most commercial brewers do. The reason is that you can afford to lay out more money on good quality ingredients than commercial brewers. Their expertise will always be greater than yours but home brewing does not have to bow to the economics of the marketplace: your home brew can be the best if not commercially viable.
How to get there: mashing at home.
Nothing to do with potatoes, the mashing process turns pale and lager malts into a sugary solution called the “wort”. To my mind mashing is essential to a good home brew. What you do is steep pale or lager malt in hot water for about 45 minutes. The temperature of the water must be maintained at around 150 degreees Fahrenheit, which given a large enough volume of material is not too difficult to do. Indeed there are mashing tuns with thermostatic control which are foolproof. Having steeped the malt long enough you teem the sugary solution into the vessel where you will boil the wort and hops together and rinse the last remnants of sugar from the malts grains. You will not achieve the extraction rate of a commercial brewer but you will avoid the slightly “cooked” taste which you get when using malt extract. Some commercial brews suffer from this flavour, as well as most home brews that are produced from kits.
How to get there: added grains.
You can improve the flavour and “heaviness” of home brews by using added grains when you mash the malt, but you can also achieve a similar result by using the enzymatic properties of malt extract. Indeed some malt extracts are known as “DMS” (=diastatic malt syrup) which signifies the presence of diastase – the malt enzyme which converts starch to sugar. As a rule of thumb flaked maize will lighten a brew, and wheat flour make a heavier more rounded taste. There is ample room to experiment with your home brew. Some of the published recipes will make the whole process clearer than the author can do in a short article about home brewing, so read up on the subject.
How to get there: the hops.
The quickest way of adding value to a home brew is to choose the hops carefully. It goes without saying that lagers need their own hops and bitters something completely different. But on top of that the balance of aroma and bitterness needs to be carefully considered. To my taste (and maybe its because I live in France and can’t buy decent beer) many small breweries in the UK are now overhopping their beers. Hops like Northern Brewer – a very bitter hop – can easily be overdone. Be warned. What’s important to you is that the choice of hops is where you can really score. Remember that many of the large commercial brewers simply use hop extract these days. A great shame since the first process of producing hop extract succeeds in separating the bitter principle from the ancillary aromas, and although the aromas can be added back later its not the same as the natural processes that you will use.
How to get there: the conditioning.
Many people are tempted to produce draught beers which will be served out of plastic kegs, under pressure.. For the home brewer this is how it has to be, wooden casks are much too difficult to manage for most of us. In my opinion an amateur home brewer should be able to excel only at bottled beer, naturally conditioned in the bottle like champagne. Since the disappearance of proper Guinness and Worthington White Label I can’t name any traditional bottle conditioned beers. In this field you can shine !
There’s more pertinent ramblings like this at theBrewersGuide.com. Good health !
Tagged with: home beer equipment • home beers • Home brewing
Filed under: Other Hobbies
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