Brew Day!

All riiiiight. Happy day-after-Christmas, everyone. I assume everyone asked for, and received, all the items I described in my rundowns of the ingredients and equipment needed to brew beer at home. So let's get started! Today we'll be making a Bavarian Hefeweizen. This is a surprisingly simple beer to make, for how delicious the finished product tends to be.

The recipe:
1 pkg Wyeast 3638 Bavarian Wheat yeast
5 lb Briess Bavarian Wheat dry alt extract (DME)
2 oz Hallertau (3.3% AA) hop pellets
1/2 tsp yeast nutrient

(Click on photos to enlarge)

Anyway, first things first. I'm using liquid yeast, which needs to be refrigerated before use, but brought to room temperature at the time of its use. This means about an hour or two before I start brewing, the yeast needs to come out of the fridge to start warming up, and the "smack pack" inside needs to be broken to begin the yeast's feeding/reproduction. Do this and set it aside.


Now, what makes this beer so easy to make is that you skip one of the usual first steps, the grain steep. For this beer, start with 2 1/2 gallons of hot water, and mix in your malt extract. Give it a good stir and then start the heat, being careful that no clumps of extract have settled and stuck to the bottom of the brewpot. This mixture of water and malt extract is now referred to as wort.


Once you've reached a rolling boil, add your hops and note the time. This recipe requires no further hop additions beyond this one; many other styles of beer, especially hoppy beers like IPAs, will have the brewer adding hope at numerous later points in the brew. Alas, not today.
Be careful when you do this, however; it's around this time in the process that the wort has a tendency to boil over and cause a huge mess all over the stovetop. Have your hand on the dial to kill the heat for a moment in case this reaction makes an appearance.

Stir, stir, stir. You want to boil the hops for a full hour, taking care not to let anything settle and scorch at the bottom of the pot. As occasional stir every five or ten minutes is usually ample.




After about 45 minutes, I like to add a half teaspoon of yeast nutrient, which helps the yeast to reproduce and eat more sugar, thereby providing me with a stronger beer. Ahh, science.




Right around here is when I want to make my ice bath. Y'see, the beer is boiling hot, and we have to cool it down before we can add the yeast to it. You want to make this happen as quickly as possible, and the best way is to fill your sink with ice and water, and dunk your pot in to cool.



...Like so. The pot absolutely has to have a lid on during this stage, because the beer is especially vulnerable to atmospheric influences while it's cooling, which then cause off-flavors in the finished product.




While the beer is cooling, I'm over here working hard, mixing my sanitizer solution with warm water. I'm using this solution to thoroughly clean out and disinfect any and all items which the beer will be touching after it has cooled down, most notably my fermenter and its lid.



Once it's cool, around 65° F, you're gonna pull it out of the bath. Nearby, you've got your fermenter, to which you've added two gallons or so of water. Tap water is fine, if you don't mind the taste of your tap water (duh). You're gonna pour the wort through your sanitized strainer (did I not mention that you want to use a strainer? It's not 100% necessary but I'd recommend it) and into the fermenter. Check the liquid volume of the beer, adding extra water if necessaryto bring the mix to five gallons.

The leftover sludge in the strainer is composed mostly of hop material, but don't toss it until you've muddled it around, pressed it down with your (now sanitized) stirring spoon and squeezed all the liquid out of it and into the beer. Lots of good hop flavor comes from this stage and that's not usually something I care to miss out on.



Right now, just before you add the yeast, you want the beer to encounter lots and lots of oxygen - a reversal from the desired situation after you've added the yeast. I like to pour the beer back and forth between my fermenter and my brewpot a few times, making lots of bubbles and being careful not to spill all over the kitchen floor.



While you're doing this, catch a sample of your beer in the long plastic tube that came with your hydrometer. Bring this to 60° F (a minute in the freezer will do it) and drop in the hydrometer. Note the scale on the side that reads "specific gravity" - log this reading. It's your "original gravity" reading, and we'll use it to find out how strong our beer is later. This time, mine came in at 1.048.


As you can see, by now your yeast has had three to five hours to begin "waking up". The package should hopefully be considerably fatter than it was when you took it out of the fridge. It might get so big you think it's going to pop - it's never happened to me, so don't open your yeast package until you're ready to use it. The beer should be around 65° or so, but a few degrees off in one direction or the other doesn't seem to make a huge difference.



Sanitize the exterior of the yeast package before you open it. If you use a knife to cut it open, sanitize the knife. It's just better to spend a few extra seconds to avoid harming the beer down the road. I like to pour half the beer into my brewpot first; then, I add the liquid yeast to the remaining beer in the fermenter, being sure not to let the nutrient package (smack pack) inside fall into the beer; and finally, I gently pour the remaining half of the beer back into the fermenter, allowing the yeast to mix thoroughly with the beer.

Pop the sanitized lid on the fermenter, and affix your airlock (not pictured) in the hole in the lid. Then lug this tub of goodness to a dark area where the temperature is stable, somewhere between 65° and 75° F. For hefeweizens, you'll actually want it to be on the higher end of the two; at higher temperatures, yeast tends to produce esters, which give beer a fruity flavor that tastes great in hefeweizens but not so great in other beers.

And you're done! You were scared, I know. You probably expect your beer to taste like garbage. Well, it won't. Check in on it in a few hours, and then a few hours more... soon you'll be seeing living proof that your efforts paid off. Otherwise, relax and let the yeast do the worrying.