How well is your beer carbonating?

Some of my friends have asked how the Hefeweizen is doing. I told them its going well and I hope to have a taste in about 2 weeks.

One of the things many home brewers want to know is how to figure out if the beer is carbonating? I follow a simple process before capping the bottle: Usually there is a small gap between the opening of the bottle and the level of the beer in the bottle. I squeeze the PET bottle till the level of the liquid rises to the top of the bottle and then I cap. What I'm doing here is pushing all the air out of the bottle so that this space will be replaced by carbon dioxide produced during carbonation. Every few days or so, I squeeze the bottle and the harder it gets to squeeze the bottle, the better it is carbonating.

This can be done for PET bottles but not glass bottles. So what do you do when carbonating in glass bottles?

Here's something I plan to do: Whenever I use a glass bottle, I will fill a PET bottle with say half a litre of beer and see if the PET bottle is carbonating (by squeezing it every few days). If it is carbonating in the PET bottle, you can rest assured it is carbonating in the glass bottle too.

Moving Forward

Now that I have bottled the Hefe, I have an empty fermenter. And having an empty fermenter means I can brew another beer.

Between the Hefe brew day and the bottling, I have been reading up quite a bit with regards to what my next beer should be and a lot of other things. One thing that caught my attention was dry hopping, which is to add hops to the fermenter after fermentation was complete to extract delicate hop oils that would add a whole lot of flavour and aroma to the beer.  I decided that this should be something I should try.

I have been trying to work out a way to make a light coloured beer somewhere in the range of 4-6 SRM. I spoke to fellow brewers and I was informed that adding rice might help, but if I were to go down that path, I should use only about 20% of rice in my grain bill. And if I were to use rice, I was informed to use cooked Sona Masoori rice and that it should be cooked in a lot of water. This water would contain quite a bit of starch from the rice and this could be added to the mash. The grains in the mash would have enough and more alpha-amylase and beta-amylase enzymes to convert the rice starches into fermentable sugars.

I am currently tweaking a recipe for this Pale Ale and hopefully will brew it in a week or two.

Priming and Bottling the Hefeweizen

It was another exciting weekday as I primed and bottled the Hefeweizen from the fermenter. I noticed no fermentation whatsoever and no bubbles in the fermenter and decided to prime and bottle.

Priming is where the brewer adds that wee bit of fermentable sugar to the beer at bottling to carbonate the beer. The two important questions a lot of first time brewers ask is what kind of sugar and how much sugar?

What kind of sugar to use is a difficult question to answer. There’s table sugar, corn sugar, honey, jiggery and so on. Some even make a solution with the dry malt extract and use that to prime. What you want to use is your call. I went with table sugar, which is pretty much regular sugar that I add to tea or coffee.

How much sugar is an even more difficult question to answer. From the research I did on the internet, I decided to go with somewhere between 6 to 7 grams of sugar per litre. Which means that for 4 litres of beer, I should use between 24 to 28 grams of sugar. I went with 24 grams.

Now that those two questions are answered, I can prime and bottle. To bottle, I used the half litre PET bottles from soft drinks and sodas.

I brought a full cup of water to a rolling boil and kept it there for 5 minutes during which I added the sugar. After 5 minutes, I switched off the flame, and cooled the sugar solution. The sugar was then added to the bottles in equal amounts. I have to admit that this is a cumbersome process and I will have to find a better way to prime.

I slowly opened the water dispenser tap and allowed the beer to flow into the bottles slowly without disturbing the yeast cake at the bottom of the dispenser. Once I got almost all of the beer out, I capped them and left them in a dark cabinet.

How long do I keep the beer bottled before opening? Many brewers suggest between 2 to 4 weeks. Here’s how I plan to do it: I will open a bottle at 2 weeks and check and that should tell me if the rest of them are ready too.

Note: Although I initially stated 4 litres of beer, I lost some to the trub at the bottom of the fermenter. This was something I had not accounted for and I now have about 3.6 litres of the Hefeweizen.

Brew Day: Hefeweizen

I brewed a Hefeweizen over the weekend. It was a tense process, but I went through it without issues. Right now, the Hefe is in the fermenter for 2 weeks before I bottle it. 

Here’s how brew day went:

I went over the recipe carefully. A bit here or a bit there and things may have looked different.

Extract Hefeweizen (Tasting notes here):

1 pound Wheat DME
4 grams Perle at 45 minutes
4 grams of Danstar Munich

I measured 5 litres of water and set it to boil. I needed 4 litres of wort so I calculated that I would lose about 1 litre to evaporation. I added the wheat DME and mixed it in the water. I took my time to do this as I didn’t want any clumps in the wort.

Once I saw small bubbles through the foam on the wort, I hovered around: things could go well or there could be a boil over. I waited with bated breath and lo and behold, the bigger bubbles came through and the foam parted to give way to the rolling boil, much like the parting of the Red Sea.

The recipe had 4 grams of Perle added at 45 minutes. While it was boiling, I worked on my cooling setup.

A few days prior to brew day, I started made blocks of ice and left them in the freezer. At the end of the 45 minute boil, I moved the boil vessel to a tub filled with water and ice blocks. It took a full 25 minutes to cool.

While the wort was cooling, I hydrated the yeast. Once the boil was over, I added the required amount of yeast to a cup, added some water and wort and stirred it. After 15 minutes, the hydrated yeast was ready to go into the fermenter. The wort looked darker than what I expected and I believe it was because it was an extract recipe. An all-grain would have looked much lighter.

I put the yeast into my fermenter and added the wort and shook it for aeration. I closed the fermenter and left it in a dark area.

I cleaned everything I used on brew day. The entire process took about 2 hours. Not bad for a first brew!!

Notes:
- I cleaned and sanitized all utensils including the fermenter with bleach but made sure I rinsed out the bleach completely.
- I apologize for not taking any snaps as I was really excited and forgot the camera altogether.
- I will explain the priming and bottling process after the priming and bottling day.

Orders Placed

I am currently in the process of procuring the malts, hops and yeast for the Hefeweizen and it should reach me shortly. Unfortunately, this will take time as I am importing it.

I haven’t found any suppliers for malts (liquid or dry) in small quantities. Most of the malt companies supply malt in 20-25 kg packs. There’s information on the web where it states that the malts from Indian manufacturers are mainly for bread and not for brewing. I cannot comment on the accuracy of that last statement, although I will have something concrete when I get my hands on some Indian malts.

For now, I wait.

Working things out

Some things work in my favor, some things don’t. While searching for a Hefeweizen recipe, I came upon the 1 gallon Northern Brewer Bavarian Hefeweizen kit and its recipe. The recipe calls for Dry Wheat Malt, Perle hops and Danstar Munich yeast. The mention of Perle in the recipe has greatly reduced the confusion about which hops to use in the Hefeweizen.

So that’s it: Wheat DME, Perle and Danstar Munich.

Shopping Around

When I decided to brew at home, I looked around at my options to procure the ingredients (malts, hops, yeast, etc) for the brew. Without a shred of doubt, it was incredibly difficult to get my hands on the ingredients for the beer recipe in India.

I wrote to different breweries and asked where they shop from. A quick Google search and landed me hundreds of results from which I contacted the maltsers. Some of them provided me with pricing for the malts that I asked for but they all sell in 25 kg packs and upwards. So unless you're brewing regularly and big time, it doesn't make sense to have that much malt lying around the house.

Further research led me to these two websites: BrewOf and DiyBrew. BrewOf is based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and DiyBrew is in Bangalore, Karnataka.

Both of them offer a good variety of ingredients and their prices are fair enough.

To brew all-grain batches of beer, one would need a good amount of base malts to extract fermentable sugars from and both BrewOf and DiyBrew have a good range of base malts. Their specialty malts are equally good and worth it if brewers want to brew different beers.

I haven't decided where to procure my ingredients from and that is something that will need some time and thinking.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

After going through a ton of reading material on making beer, I decided to take the plunge and will soon be making an extract Hefeweizen. More so because it is the first craft beer I had and almost immediately fell in love with it. I mean, what is not to like about a light, effervescent, yeasty beer that has notes of banana and cloves?

However, with regards to hops, I’m still in limbo. I have narrowed down to Danstar Munich for my yeast. The hops is the missing key and I have options to choose between Perle and Hallateur.

All said and done, the most important thing is this: I will be brewing a small batch, a one gallon batch. I arrived at this decision after going through the (limited) equipment I have in my kitchen and based on the tips on this link: Brewing 1 gallon batches

I’ll put up notes and comments when I’m good to start.

First Thoughts

The first thought for many home brewers is ‘I want to make beer’. That’s it. It cannot be anymore simpler than that.

And then you google for information and that’s when you realize isn’t so simple. There’s water, malt, hops, yeast, fermenters and bottling. And from there, it gets more complicated: there’s sparge, lauter, mash, mash tun, grain bill, specialty grains, malt extract, wort, wort chiller, pitching, priming, conditioning, etc. It can get more and more complex, but the question here is: how complex do you want it to be?

Some great beers have really simple recipes: A few ingredients is all it takes to make a great beer. And some beers have really, really complex recipes.

Mostly, first time brewers start with beer kits with a fixed set of ingredients and a fail-safe recipe. The results are good. Over time, brewers move on to extract recipes and then onto all-grain or jump straight to all-grain. Either way, a brewer will end up with good results.

What you get may differ from what you want, but a good recipe followed thoroughly will yield good results. Brew day takes a couple of hours depending on what is involved, bottling your brew may take a few hours too; but if you’re careful enough to keep an eye out, then there’s a good beer waiting for you.

In this page, I will document my recipes, my experiments with ingredients, my beers and their tasting notes.

Kicking Off...

Across India, the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of beer is Kingfisher, obviously because it’s the most popular option. Decades ago and even now, that is what most people opt for. However, many people also know that making beer is not rocket science and it can be made at home. And because many people know it, there’s been a rise in the number of microbreweries in India.

What these microbreweries offer is a choice that probably no mass produced beer can offer. They make their own beers with their own recipes. This means that they’re a bit pricier than mass produced beer, but way tastier, aromatic and flavourful.

This blog chronicles my attempt at brewing my own beer. I will have failures and I will have successes but it’s a learning process that is part of the package.