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13 Things 2009

13 Things 2008


Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

Search Brown

 

 

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]

"Breathe deep of the aromatic essence, touch the foam with the tip of your tongue. Is it smooth? Does it tingle to the touch? Then there is health. For if properly brewed, beer will possess all these qualities, and the wise ones of many ages have declared it strengthening. Exhilarating always, no doctor needs to tell us that."--Eloise Davison, Beer in the American Home

'The thing to remember is to relax and not worry... do what must be done. It is easy. It is no big deal." -- Charlie Papazian, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, on brewing for beginners

What better way to understand how beer is made than by making some beer? I borrowed/bought a whole bunch of Beer-making Apparatus, did a little homebrewing, and made sure to photodocument everything so I can walk YOU through the process!




Part 1: Brewing

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Step 1 is to take a whole bunch of water (2 gallons) and boil it. In my hands is a $17 bucket I was pressured into buying by the lady at the homebrew-supply store--it was supposed to be a fermentation vessel, but my fermentation lock does not fit into the hole in its lid, so it didn't actually see use beyond being a giant measuring cup until bottling started. I used it here to measure out 2 gallons of water. Boiling 2 gallons of water took, of course, a very long time.



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Having done that, I took my can of liquid malt-extract syrup, which had been softening in a bowl of hot water, and poured it in. From this point until the end of the brewing process, the mixture, which I called breadwater, smelled like some kind of rich stew. One would almost think I was cooking.



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Yeah, it's pretty viscous. Look at it trickle out. Appetizing.



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I brought my breadwater back up to a boil and then made it a little breadier with the powdered malt extract. As soon as I'd finished this part, the mixture had become mash--mash is like unfermented beer that also has no hops, sort of like tea made with malt. I still called it breadwater, though.



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Something I learned during this process is that when exposed to trace amounts of hot water--say, for example, the steam that rises off of boiling water when powdered malt extract is added to it--powdered malt extract tends to solidify into a tough, sticky paste that is difficult to get off of hands and stirring implements. What a pleasant surprise.



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The malt extract had been in a concentrated form--in order to fully reconstitute it, I had to not only add the requisite amount of water but keep it at a boil for a while. Periodically, the mixture would foam--whenever this happened, I had to settle it by turning off the heat until the foam disappeared, then turning it back on. I got a picture of some foam here.



Once the mash was reconstituted, I added my hop pellets and boiled the entire thing for about half an hour--the first round of boiling was all about the malt, but this round is all about the hops. It's necessary to keep boiling it for so long in order to facilitate the chemical reactions that bring the bittering resins out of the hops. At this point, with all ingredients present except yeast, the mash had become wort--beer that has not undergone fermentation.



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-Of course, I also had some dried hop leaves. I had to put them in this loose cloth bag, to keep them all in one place and under control, and add it to the wort for the last couple of minutes of boiling, for aroma and for a little extra kick I couldn't get out of the pellets.



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At this point, the wort was finished. I took the whole (boiling) pot and poured it into the fermentation vessel, which already contained a few gallons of cold water.



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I gotta say, it's actually a pretty good thing the fermenting/aging process takes so long, because brewing is really unappetizing for many many reasons. This right here did not particularly put me in the mood for a brewski.



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I've filled my fermentation lock with vodka, which carries out not only the usual locking functions but is also pretty good at killing unwanted microbes, germs, and other things I don't want in my beer.



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A view of the fermentation vessel, filled with wort which has cooled enough to be a good environment for yeast. My first experience with homebrewing was over this summer. It failed--you're supposed to keep the wort below 90 degrees or so. Guess how hot it was in my un-air-conditioned house? Yeah. That yeast went crazy and died. I made sure to wait long enough this time that that wouldn't be a factor; the brisk Rhode Island autumn certainly helped there.



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On that note, I threw in the yeast. It started fermenting. Yes, yes, my pretties, eat up. Gorge yourselves. If only you knew what I had in store! Mwa ha ha ha!



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After a few minutes, I stirred the yeast in with a little swish, corked in my fermentation lock, and let the whole thing sit next to that door for a week. Here begins the fermentation process, detailed on another page, during which the yeast will eat sugar and excrete precious, precious ethanol. Within 24 hours, the fermentation gases had begun to bubble through the lock, which was the mark that the process was working!





Part 2: Bottling




"First of all relax... don't worry... and have a homebrew (if you haven't had any yet, store-bought beer may do)... and get a friend or two to help you. That shouldn't be too difficult." -- Charlie Papazian, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, on bottling



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The first step of this process was to take all of these bottles and sanitize them. I didn't document that since it wasn't part of the actual bottling process, but it took a really long time, so when it was over with I felt like I'd accomplished enough to warrant a picture. Observe all the many rows of clean bottles.



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The next step was to dissolve the priming sugar in some water. I'm doing that here.



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The sugar wasn't really that dissolved when I took this picture--later, as the water was heated and brought to a boil, the mixture would become entirely transparent. It made the room smell like candy. This was the most pleasant the room would smell all night.



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On the left there you can see what the fermentation vessel looks like after fermenting for a week. It's still very brown, due to the wide diameter of the vessel (in individual bottles, the beer appears more yellow) and very opaque, which is a hint that the yeast is still alive. On the right, you can see my old friend the bucket again. It's going to see a lot more use tonight, since I have to separate the beer from the other objects in the fermentation vessel that are not beer, and the best way to do that is by simply moving the beer into the bucket. First, I put the priming sugar mixture in the bucket, though. I need that around to kill yeast.



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In order to properly move the beer from fermentation vessel to bucket without taking any of the bad stuff with it, I set up the auto-siphon and the plastic tubing, a-like so. Using it at all will necessarily bypass the gook on the top of the vessel, and if we're careful about where we put the bottom of it, we can avoid getting the sediment that has shifted down there, as well.



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This is me demonstrating the use of the auto-siphon. It's actually pretty tiring, like you're pumping a keg, only you have to pump the entire keg all at once, and the pump goes up about twice as far as usual. It's preferable to the alternative, though--if I didn't have it, I'd have to get the beer moving through the tubing the old-fashioned way, by creating suction on the other end of it with my mouth. I'll take the pump any day.



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As you can see, it worked--here, the beer is flowing through the tubing into the bucket. It's only trickling out in the picture--which was probably taken between auto-siphon pumps--but when a burst of it comes out, it comes out quickly enough that the beer mixed with the priming sugar mixture fairly well without having to add a stirring step to the process. This is why the sugar was added to water in the first place.



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Here you can get a better look at some of the fermentation by-product we're avoiding getting in the beer by using the siphoning method rather than just pouring it. And I bet you can see why we're going to the trouble.



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My housemates who helped me with this project, Anson Nickel and Chuck Cajilig, take over for me while I man the camera. Pumping is pretty tiring work.



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At this point, all of the beer has been successfully moved into the bucket and we can move on to the next step--actually putting it into the bottles.



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We took the auto-siphon/tubing mechanism we'd rigged up earlier and added a bottle-filler to the other end, to help us control when beer would exit the whole contraption. Here's a shot of the bottle-filler inside a bottle, to give a better idea of how it works. The bottle is clean, don't worry--that's just paper residue on the outside.



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Here's a shot of bottling as it happens. Anson is manning the auto-siphon while I man the bottle-filler. Anson's duties include keeping the tubing full of beer and getting squirted by some of it that escaped our contraption somewhere around the auto-siphon/tubing interface. My duties include filling the bottles, stopping the beer before the bottles overflow, and wiping up all the ubiquitous foam with a paper towel. Beer got all over the place during this process. Our kitchen began to smell like the aftermath of a huge frat party. It wasn't pleasant.



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Here we've successfully filled a bottle of beer. I'm very proud of myself, but at this point I'm unaware of just how long this process would take (hint: very, very long).



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I'll just skip ahead to the point where we capped our first bottle. One person holds the bottle in place and presses down hard on the bottle-capper (except that part isn't in this picture because we hadn't figured it out yet), and the other person pushes down on the bottle-capper's handles. It's harder than it seems like it'd be--I'm pretty sure the one we were putting on in this picture didn't go on at the first or second try.



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Note: the cap is waterproof! Once again I'm way too proud of myself. Notice that the beer is still opaque. It won't be ready to drink for 1-3 weeks.



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Okay, that whole process I just walked through? We had to repeat that, like, 50 times. It took SO LONG. Here is one case of our finished product, or what will be our finished product after we let it sit for a couple weeks, anyway. Now begins the aging process, over which time the yeast will eat of the priming sugar, causing carbonation, and then die, causing the beer to clear. As of when I'm writing this, I plan on waiting a couple of days before trying one--it may or may not be properly aged by then. TO BE CONTINUED.

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