Secondary Fermentation

There are many tricks of the trade in the world of beer. Secondary fermentation is one. This is the process of siphoning off your beer after the initial rush of fermentation that happens. This leaves behind much of the yeasty sediment which comes out of your beer and sinks to the bottom of the fermentation vessel. By leaving behind the sediment, one insures that this dead yeast doesn’t steep itself into the taste of your beer. This sediment contains dead yeast, and gluten from the barley, malt and other grains used in the making of the beer. Utilizing the process of secondary fermentation has many benefits.
 

     The most prominent benefit of using secondary fermentation is that your beer will have a much purer taste.  Your beer will also have a much clearer look to it if you use this process. Amber will have a beautiful red clarity, showing off the fine colors roasted into the grains, while a pale ale will shine glowingly in the evening sun. With secondary fermentation, the natural clarity of your beer will really come out. Even for the dark beers this is important, because the cloudiness that can ensue from sediment mixing will actually make the beer look less dark.
 

      To help us understand why brewers use secondary fermentors lets look into the different phases of fermentation. When your beer first begins to ferment, it will go through a few phases very quickly. The first phase is an aerobic phase where the yeast cells adapt to their environment and multiply very quickly but do not produce much alcohol. It is during this phase that the yeast actually need oxygen in the beer in order to do their work. This phase only lasts for a few hours in most cases, and you cannot see anything happening with the naked eye.

The yeast then begin to metabolize the sugars into CO2 and Ethanol during their anaerobic phase. This is the part you can see as a foamy head or “Krausen” on the top of the fermenting beer. The CO2 is evident in the airlock as the bubbles begin to pop faster and faster(see video). This phase of fermentation is very active and usually lasts a couple days to a week.

After the krausen begins to subside, most of the yeast cells fall to the bottom of the fermentation vessel (this is called flocculation), and go dormant or die. A few of the hardy yeast cells stay suspended in the beer and continue to slowly ferment for several weeks. This phase is called "conditioning".

The following chart shows the cycles of the yeast as it ferments your beer:

Most Ales will spend the majority of their "conditioning" phase in bottles; getting themselves nice and carbonated.

 Most homebrewers use Carboys to transfer the beer once the active yeast cycle is over.When using a glass Carboy, make sure it is in a dark place where light can’t get to it, or else wrap it in a blanket or towel to keep sunlight off. Sunlight will cause the beer to get “skunky“. Although the term is frequently used to describe beer that’s gone bad for any variety of reasons, to be precise “skunked beer” refers to beer that’s been over-exposed to sunlight, or “light-struck.” Regardless of what your favorite type of beer is, there are plenty of ways to ruin it, overexposure to light is the only way to skunk it.


     It helps that when you place your carboy(s) for the initial fermentation, they are somewhere up high, where you can later siphon them using gravity. If you move your carboy just before siphoning it into the secondary fermentation vessel, you will severely sabotage your efforts to leave behind the sediment. The jarring and sloshing will mix some of the sediment back into your brew, thereby negating the full effectiveness of the process of secondary fermentation!

All in all, secondary fermentation is a very important step towards refining your home brew.

Brewing HBK # 9

Good people of the HBK:

It's past time we had a word about the actual brewing process of the much anticipated Eartha's HBK # 9 : Sweet Corn Cream Ale!

The brew took place earlier this month on August 8th, 2012 to be exact. Preparations were made the day before by Chief Tim Himself and my trusted co-blogger, the Queen Bee Kelli wherein they purchased all of the grains, yeast and other ingredients needed for the brew.  If you haven't already checked out the concise and informative blog about this, don't hesitate to do so! Here's the link: Grain Shopping

Now I'll begin by describing the process of brewing, as I experienced it.  I'm going to try to be concise because there were a lot of steps taken and a whole lot to talk about but I don't want anyone feeling like they're reading from a textbook here - that's not the point.  It was a lot of fun.


We began by mixing in 2.5 pounds of fresh sweet corn in with some of our base malt (Maris Otter) and some water and put it all on to cook.  The idea behind this is that the sugar inside of corn comes in the form of starch and is pretty complex and hard for yeast to start breaking down (into alchohol).  This isn't any good because we want the beer to ferment so we cook all this corn up real good like to break the starch down into simpler sugars.  This makes it easier for the yeast to get started in the fermenting process. 

As you can see from the image the total volume of the mixture was probably only about 10 - 15 cups worth.

In the meantime while I stirred this mixture, Tim had a ~15 gal modified keg (that is awesome by the way) warming up to about 150°F on a propane burner on the front porch.  The whole process of simultaneously warming the water and cooking the corn mixture took about 45 minutes.

When the water in the keg was hot and after strong man Justin (excuse me) CHRIS Yoda carried it into the kitchen, we poured the cooked mixture and all of the rest of the dry grains and flaked corn into it.  The idea is that the relatively small amount of cooked mixture will 'kick-start' the yeast into fermentation where then it will be lively enough to take on the more complex starches in the rest of the un-cooked corn.  We also added a considerable amount of rice hulls to the mix so that when we were to drain it later on, all that delicous, sticky cooked corn wouldn't clog the opening of our awesome keg turned Mash Tun by HBK welder Adam (props!).

So the whole concoction was stirred up a bit and left to sit for about an hour basically to steep, just like you would have your tea do.  Only it's a 15 gallon cup.  And it's beer, not tea.  So we all sat back tasted previous HBK creations, talked about beer, had some totally delicious Eartha-made hummus and edamame and watched water polo.  Very nice.

 Once break time was over we prepared to drain the "tea" that had been steeping, called wort, through the filter at the bottom of the mash tun into yet another awesome spouted keg.  So we began draining the full mash tun into the empty one by spout and hose and slowly adding in fresh hot water to the top (since a good deal of the volume in the first mash tun is occupied by grains).

So once our second mash tun was full of good filtered wort, beginning to look a lot like beer, we put it back on the burner and began bringing it to a gentle boil, which happens at around 212°F.  The purpose is to let it boil for 60 minutes and at certain intervals we would add beautiful, marvelous hops as follows:
Boiling begins - 2 oz (about 2 pints full) of nugget hops added.

30 minutes into boiling - 1 oz Cascade hops added.




 45 minutes into boiling - 1 oz Cascade Hops.



 57 minutes into boiling - 1 oz Cascade Hops.

And at 60 minutes we turned off the burner and began the cooling process wherein we ran cold spout water through a copper tube coiling placed in the keg.  Sadly, I can't find a picture of this but You'll get to see it on subsequent brew logs (blogs).

In the time between adding hops we kept ourselves busy by practicing our washer throwing arms.  If you haven't played this game, just come by for the next brew the first Sunday of September and I'm sure you'll get a chance.

Once the wort was cooled to room temperature-ish we went ahead and poured it into iodine-sterilized carboys to get them ready for the ~ 4-5 week fermentation process. 






All in all the brewing was a great success.  We had no accidents, no real delays or errors.  A few HBKers swung by during the whole things to help out and to hang out.  The whole process from beginning to end took about 8 hours but the greater part of that time was spent pitching washers and horseshoes, drinking beer, jib jabbing and laughing our heads off!  It really was a lot of fun and what we'll have to show for it is some undoubtedly very tasty ale!  We'll keep you all posted on the status of our beloved cream ale and any further important HBK related operations.





Until Next Time,
Jester out.

Grain Shopping

Eartha sampling a previous brew

It's time for Home Brew Kimener to start beer number 9. Each HBK batch of beer is started on the first Sunday of the month and in keeping with the rotation August is Eartha's choice, she has decided on a Sweet Corn Cream Ale.  Tim has in his mind the ingredients to make this interesting ale be so. But to do the first step in brewing we must go shopping! 







Any good brew must first start with picking out the ingredients and grain, you will be surprised how excited that Tim guy can get about grain. First we went to Kruger's Hawthorne Farm Stand a local farmers market. We looked to see if they had sweet corn on the cob, and we were in luck! They had bi-color corn and after some quick smart phone research and them letting us try an ear (by the way it was awesome raw!) we knew it was in fact a type of sweet corn.  Sweet corn comes in three colors: yellow, white, and bi-color (yellow and white). We were aiming for 1 pound of kernels once it was off the cob; we got 13 ears, and did not estimate very well. Tim ended up using 2.5lbs in the mashing and had plenty more ears to spare.

The grain at U-Brew

Next stop was to get the grain at a local friendly home brewing store called U- Brew (http://www.portlandubrewandpub.com/).

3 grains mixed

Going off of Tim’s notes of what to get we started with 16lbs of our base malt Maris Otter Pale Ale- (2.5-3.5°L) Maris Otter is a British barley malt variety known for producing beers with a full malty flavor.  Next was 3lbs of Biscuit Malt- (25°L) Biscuit is a roasted malt, with a slightly burned biscuit like flavor, with a brown color. Then 1lbs of Cara-Pils (Dextrin) - (1.2°L) Used to increased foam, improved head retention and enhanced mouthfeel (the perception of body in the beer. Body is how heavy or how light a beer feels in the mouth.).  You probably noticed the numbers with the °L in the parentheses; the numbers are “Degrees Lovibond”, from the system used to characterize beer color. The original lovibond system was created by J.W. Lovibond in 1883, and used colored slides that were compared to the beer color to determine approximate value. For decades, beer was compared to colored glass standards to determine the Lovibond color, and we still use the term “Degrees Lovibond” extensively today to describe the color of grains. Moving on, once we had all our grain measured out and poured into the bucket it’s time to mill.

Milling station

Grain after milling

Milling is crushing malt to retain barley husk integrity while exposing starchy endosperm.  The goal is to expose the starch parts of the barley kernel. You don’t want to pulverize malts into flour. By simply cracking the grains and leaving the husks mostly in tact you will have the best brewhouse yield (percentage of sugar liberated from the malted grain) while still being able to sparge and lauter effectively (don’t worry we will get into those fun words later). Most homebrewers do this at their local homebrew shop like us. You can also use a rolling pin to crack the grains if simply steeping a small percentage of your malts as in partial mashes. U- Brew has a great machine that you just pour in your grain and it spits it out the bottom, Ta-Da! You’re done.



     

Rice hulls



Once the milling is done we measured out 2lbs of Flaked Corn (Maize) - Flaked corn is a common adjunct in British bitters and milds and used to be used extensively in American light lager (although today corn grits are more common). Properly used, corn will lighten the color and body of the beer without overpowering the flavor. The Corn must be mashed with the base malt.  Then 2lbs of Flaked Barley- (Unmalted barley), Flakes are easiest to use. Otherwise, the unmalted barley must be gelatinized (made soluble by heat and pressure) prior to mashing. Flaked unmalted barley is often used in Stouts to provide protein for head retention and body. It can also be used in other strong ale styles. Flaked barley also must be mashed with the base malt. Next was 2lbs of Rice Hulls - the hulls of rice are not fermentable, but they can be useful in the mash. The hulls provide bulk and help prevent the mash from settling and becoming stuck during the sparge.

 



  

Last but most definitely not least Tim grabbed a few packages of yeast:

1056 American Ale- This has very clean, crisp flavor characteristics with low fruitiness and mild ester production. A very versatile yeast for styles that desire dominant malt and hop character. This strain makes a wonderful “House” strain. Mild citrus notes develop with cooler 60-66°F fermentations. Normally requires filtration for bright beers.

Flocculation: Medium-Low
Attenuation: 73-77%
Temperature Range: 60-72°F

Alcohol Tolerance: 11% ABV

2124 Bohemian Lager- This Carlsberg type yeast is the most widely used lager strain in the world. This strain produces a distinct malty profile with some ester character and a crisp finish. A versatile strain, that is great to use with lagers or Pilsners for fermentations in the 45-55°F range. It may also be used for Common beer production with fermentations at 65-68°F. A thorough diacetyl rest is recommended after fermentation is complete.

Flocculation: Medium-low
Attenuation: 73-77%
Temperature Range: 45-68°F
Alcohol Tolerance: 9% ABV

Next up Co-Blogger Josh will talk about what happens in the first day of beer making.

IPA Day ~ August 2, 2012

Today August 2, 2012 is IPA Day!  Join beer enthusiasts across the land in a collective toast to one of craft beer’s most beloved styles: India Pale Ale!

Founded in 2011 by Ashley Routson (aka The Beer Wench) and Ryan Ross of Karl Strauss, IPA Day is a universal movement created to unite the voices of craft beer enthusiasts, bloggers, and brewers worldwide, using social media as the common arena for connecting the conversation. IPA Day makes way for all breweries, bloggers, businesses and consumers to connect and share their love of craft beer. It is an opportunity for the entire craft beer culture to combine forces and advocate craft beer through increased education and global awareness.

Now, some of you are thinking, Why the IPA?  Please keep in mind that, although you and your friends might drink craft beer, craft beer only makes up 5% of the overall beer market meaning that everyone in the world does NOT, in fact, drink craft beer,  or IPA for that matter. This is an opportunity to change that!

This style represents the pinnacle of brewing innovation with its broad spectrum of diverse brands, subcategories, and regional flavor variations—making it the perfect style to spur craft beer’s social voice.  At the 2012 World Beer Cup®, the most-entered category was the American-Style India Pale Ale with 150 entries. The second most entered was its close cousin, the Imperial India Pale Ale (93 entries). Its popularity and accessibility makes the IPA the best overall style for brewers, retailers and consumers to collectively celebrate.

The history of IPA Day started just last year, hundreds of craft breweries and bars joined forces to launch the first IPA Day. Events, tastings, dinners and other IPA Day celebrations were hosted all over the world. Roughly 10,000 tweets were sent over a 24-hour period using the official #IPADay hashtag—with thousands of tweets sent in the weeks leading up to and following the event. The official hashtag trended in six major U.S. metropolises, including Portland, Seattle, New York, Chicago, San Diego, and Raleigh. Mentions of #IPADay spread across six continents—truly making it the most extensive craft beer celebration the world has experienced to date.

So what’s the goal of this year’s IPA Day? To make it even bigger of course! Getting involved is easy; the only requirements are an appreciation for great beer and the will to spread the word. Anyone can participate by enjoying an IPA with friends, making some noise online with the #IPADay hashtag, and showing the world that craft beer is more than a trend.  HBKers that still have some (or for some strange reason) have yet to enjoy your ”Infuriating IPA” –there’s no better day than today to crack open one of those bad boys and better yet share it with others. So get out there and become a craft beer steward in your community. Encourage non-craft beer drinkers to take a break from their normal beverage routine and join the collective toast. Let’s set the goal of converting at least one person, nay the whole world of drinkers, to IPA lovers!

Share and submit your favorite IPA-based cooking or cocktail recipes or for more information on IPA Day visit IPADay.org.

Now a word from The Beer Wench:

How to Participate in IPA Day

1. Organize or attend an IPA Day event at a local brewery, brewpub, restaurant, bar, bottle shop, home or office. Check out the CraftBeer.com Event Calendar to find or submit an IPA Day event near you! (If submitting an event, please check out Tips on Submitting an Event before getting started.)

2. On August 2, share your photos, videos, blog posts, tasting notes, recipes, and thoughts on IPA with the world. Be sure to tag your posts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and other social media platforms with the #IPADay hashtag.

3. See what other people are saying on Twitter by searching #IPADay. Follow the conversation closely by adding a #IPADay search column on your Tweetdeck.

And remember, just have fun. After all, that’s what IPA Day is all about — having fun with craft beer!

HBK #4, Day One, Part Three: Hops, Sterility, and a Tiny Bit About Yeast

When last we left our Char-Cole Porter, it was sitting in a boiling kettle, 147 °F, and giving off a delicious aroma into the brewing space (i.e. Tim's kitchen).  But that, obviously, is not the end-game of our beerly pursuits:  the beer was still in its wort form, essentially just a flavorful sugar water.  If we were to pour it into bottles and let it sit in Tim's basement for a few months, we would still just have sugar water (note:  not beer) when we opened it in the Spring...except most of the sugar would probably have been converted to toxic and generally unpleasant things by the copious bacteria to which it had been exposed. This is why our next step is to take the wort in the boiling kettle and - wait for it - boil it.

Tim's awesome propane burner can boil this amount of liquid (probably between seven and ten gallons) inside of ten minutes, but it's very important that the wort be monitored carefully.  That's right:  in blatant defiance of the "watched pot" proverb, Tim stood and waited for the wort to boil.  If a wort is allowed to boil out of control, the result is more detrimental than if the water from a pasta pot were to overflow.  The bubbles that form when a wort boils are formed from the surface tension of the water enclosing pockets of air, and these bubbles are especially hearty because they have a high sugar content.  Consequently, if the bubbles exit the kettle, the wort loses sugar disproportionately...and lost sugar means lost potential for alcohol content in the finished beer.  (And while high alcohol content isn't the sole reason we make beer, it certainly doesn't hurt, right?)

So, skipping ahead, the wort has reached a boil (it's not lost on me that both warts and boils are gross skin conditions...but try to pretend this sentence doesn't sound so revolting), and the burner has been adjusted so the boil is under control.  We want the wort to boil for an hour, both to establish sterility and to infuse flavor, which is where the hops come in. 

(A brief side note:  I apologize for the lack of images available from this point on.  See, the fun part about making beer - a generally time-consuming and tedious process - is that you get to enjoy beers that have been previously made while doing so.  Around the time of the boil, I had established a buzz well past sufficient to cause me to forget my duties as a photographer.  I'll try to get some pictures of the post-boil process for future entries.  For now, though, I hope that you have a good imagination, and that you can appreciate that I was having a far better time drinking than I was shooting photos.)

Now that we've gotten the disclaimer out of the way...  Hops are wonderful.  If you enjoy a good, bitter, IPA, then you probably agree with me.  If you've ever handled hops in their pre-beer form, then you definitely know what I mean.  Hops are technically flowers, though they look more like green pine cones while still attached to the plant.  They are then dried, packaged, and sold almost exclusively as a beer ingredient, as they haven't found many other uses in the world.  In their dried state, they're light, fluffy, and uniquely aromatic.  You know the flowery scent of a strong IPA?  Imagine that, but more concentrated, and without any undertones of "beer smell." 

Hops are added at several points during the hour-long wort boiling process.  Hops added earlier are used to infuse flavor and bitterness to the beer, and hops added later are the ones that give that hop aroma I just mentioned.  Chemically (alert!  whenever you see the word "chemically," feel free to skip ahead a few sentences to avoid falling asleep), the reason for this is that hops contain both alpha acids and beta acids, which react differently in the heat of the boiling wort:  alpha acids isomerize (memories of high school chemistry class, anyone?), or convert by rearranging their molecular structure, into bitter-tasting molecules; beta acids do not isomerize, and therefore do not contribute to the flavor but instead accentuate the floral scent of the hops' natural oils.  To maximize isomerization, the "bittering" hops (higher in alpha acids) are added early in the boil; to affect non-bitter hop flavor and aroma, "aromatic" hops (lower in alpha acids, higher in beta) are added in the last half of the boil.

So, an hour goes by and various amounts of various hops are added (sorry, I don't have my notes...but do you really need to know the names, times, and alpha-acid contents of the different hops?  What, are you trying to steal our beer?  ARE YOU?!), and the boiling hot, hops-infused wort is taken off of the burner.  By this point, it has boiled down to roughly the exact amount of liquid we had hoped to end up with...I assume this was just due to Tim and Chris's experience with brewing...and it's filled with nasty, soggy chunks of hops.  Oh, and it's still boiling hot.  Not a good temperature for brewing.  Thankfully, Tim is in possession of a badass copper coil which attaches to a garden hose (did I mention the boil took place on the front porch?  Quaint, right?) and runs cold water through the wort without diluting it at all (I know, a picture would really be nice here, wouldn't it?).  The coil is placed in the pot about ten minutes prior to the end of the boil so as to keep the process as sterile as possible.  Then, when the boil ends, water is run through the wort until it's roughly down to room temperature, and the kettle is brought inside.

Now, before we go any farther, let's talk about MICROBIOLOGY!  (Again, I'll try to do it in three sentences or less; skip ahead if your eyelids just got heavier.)  Bacteria are everywhere all the time, and while air is considered to be more or less sterile (though this is technically not entirely true, it's just something that we assume to be "true enough for our purposes"), NOTHING ELSE IS FREE OF MICROSCOPIC LIFE, and so we must sterilize everything.  If we pour beer through a non-sterile funnel, it will rot; if we store beer in a non-sterile fermenter, it will rot; if we so much as fail to sterilize the caps for our bottles, the stupid beer will rot.  In short, since it's going to be stored at roughly room temperature, we need to kill any bacteria before they even have the chance to thrive in this delicously sugary environment we've just created for them.

As a result of these prokaryotic terrorists' incessant attempts to ruin our brewing party, we have spent part of the boiling time prepping in our battle against them:  our funnels, our carboy (the six-gallon jug we'll use as a fermenter), and even our hands have been soaked in an iodine-based (no bleach here, Tim is all-green) disinfectant.  Once everything is sterile, the kettle is emptied (through a sterile collander to catch the soggy hops, and through a collander-sized funnel to catch the, you know, beer) into a carboy, where it will sit for the next several weeks, bacteria-free and fermenting away.

But wait, how is it supposed to ferment if it's still just glorified sugar water?  That's where the yeast comes in...and, really, that's about all I'll say about yeast, since I plan on writing about it in great detail in the near future (with pictures!).  Basically, the yeast is added, an airlock fermenting cap is put on the carboy, and the beer is put away to ferment.  The long process (and the long-winded, sparsely illustrated blog entry) has finally come to a close...for now, anyway.

HBK #4, Day One, Part Two: Mash, Lauter, Sparge

So, when we left off, we had a big bag full of ground barley freshly milled at Portland's lovely U-Brew Home Brew Supply Store.  We'll skip the part where the three of us stood in line, paid for the grain, and drove out to get a beer and pizza, and instead move straight to the mashing process.

Our ultimate goal with mashing is to turn malt into wort.  Or, rather, we aim to take all of the starch and flavor out of the grain, but leave the fibrous solid matter behind.  We do this by soaking the malt in hot water at a constant temperature for about an hour, then filtering out the rich, sugary deliciousness known as wort in a process called lautering.

The whole thing starts with a well-insulated container, called a mash tun.  It looks a lot like the Gatorade cooler that gets dumped over a football coach's head after a championship win...the key difference, though (besides the fact that dumping these scalding hot contents onto a person would be tantamount to attempted murder), is that a mash tun has a false bottom - essentially a grate - which keeps the milled grain in the tun but allows the wort to run out of a nozzle at the bottom.  During this process, tiny particles of grain are filtered out...though not by the grate itself, but instead by the tightly packed larger chunks that collect in the grate's mesh.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Water which has been heated to about 180°F is poured into the mash tun until it's about half-way full (this, as far as I could tell, was a matter of eyeballing the space needed to fit all 12 pounds of grain in addition to the hot water).  Here, the insulation of the tun will keep the water at a relatively constant temperature for the hour or so of the mashing process...but 180°F is far warmer than we want our grain for the mashing to be successful; in order to get the ideal breakdown of starch-into-sugar (you were paying attention during the last blog post, right?), we want our grain to be right around 150°F (or, according to several homebrewing websites, between 144°F and 163°F).  So why make the water so hot in the beginning?  It's because we've got 12 pounds of room-temperature grain that are about to be mixed into it, which will cool it down significantly.  Tim's goal (and he had extra hot water on hand in order to make sure he could meet it) was to mash in the upper 140s, and we ended up doing just that:  the grain was added, the temperature was adjusted with some extra water, and the whole thing was stirred like crazy with the largest spoon I can recall having ever seen in someone's silverware drawer, resulting in a 147°F mash for one hour.

Now, the smell of a bunch of grain being mixed with water is neither the most pleasant nor the most unpleasant scent in the world...in fact, it's pretty inoffensive; it smells pretty much like a farm, minus the manure and diesel.  But the delicious aroma of grain that's been mashed for an hour is one of the more incredible things I've ever taken in:  imagine a dark, rich beer, except with no alcohol, tons of sugar, and hot.  (Okay, reading that back to myself, it sounds gross, so I'm going to have to ask you to just take my word for it:  it's amazing.)  What we have now is a wort, mixed with a bunch of almost totally spent grain, just waiting to be filtered out.  However, we only have about four gallons of water in there, and a lot of that has been sucked up into the grain...but we have a six-gallon container to fill full of wort.  WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?!

Before we get all bent out of shape, I should mention another new vocabulary word...my favorite that I learned in this initial foray into brewing, in fact: "sparge."  Sparging is the process of running water through the grain after the mash, trying to extract the last of the sugars while simultaneously heating the grain enough so that the starch-to-sugar conversion stops...yet not hot enough that we leech tannins out of the grain (as this would add unwanted bitterness to the final product's flavor).  So, water is heated (again, to about 180° or preferably a little under), the filter at the bottom of the mash tun is opened, and the wort is allowed to slowly trickle through a tube from the tun into a boiling kettle below (again, this part is called lautering).  The water needs to be added slowly so as not to disturb the grain's self-made "filtering system" in the bottom half of the tun, and this was accomplished (with, in my opinion, only partial success) by pouring it through a metal sieve, a small amount at a time. 

This process was continued - slowly - until the color of the wort coming out of the tun was significantly diluted from its original almost opaque black (though this is not always the color of wort...this is just because we're making a porter) to a translucent brown.  We stopped adding water, allowed the wort already in the tun to drain into the kettle, and found that we now had what appeared to be more than six gallons of wort, allowing plenty for our next step...

TO BE CONTINUED

HBK #4, Day One, Part One: The Grain

First thing's first:  the beer that I selected for brewing (and for the blogging inaugural) was a smoked porter.  Beermaster Tim and his Yoda Chris discussed how best to accomplish this in terms of different malt styles to blend.  This discussion drew from their shared base of knowledge regarding malt varieties, the styles of beer that each is generally used to produce, and the flavors that might result from combining them.  This, of course, is all knowledge that they've gathered after having each brewed dozens of beers in the past, and I therefore can't report too heavily on all the ins and outs of their ultimate decision...but I sure can try to sum up the process and experience of selecting and preparing grain, plus share a few pretty pictures along the way.  First, though, some basics...and some science, if you can stand it:

Beer is, quite basically, made from water, yeast, flavorings (like hops), and grain.  Lots of grains can be used in brewing (and I fully intend to request something weird for my next pick--millet beer, anyone?), but barley is the most common by far.  Wheat, rye, and oat are common secondary grains, as they add flavor and color, but barley is the most common base grain because its husk contains high levels of amylase, an enzyme that converts starches in the germ (i.e., the non-husk portion) into sugars.  Most of that sugar, in turn, becomes "yeast food" in the fermentation process, which creates alcohol.

In order to maximize the amount of potential sugar that can be extracted from the barley, it's first subjected to a process called malting.  Basically, the barley is soaked in water and allowed to germinate - to begin the very first steps of growing into a plant - then dried in a large and relatively low-temperature kiln before the sprouted grains are allowed to mature into full plants.  Without malting, barley grains don't contain the correct proportions of starches (complex sugars) to enzymes (to break down the starches), and therefore wouldn't produce enough sugar during extraction to ferment a good beer.

Different malting processes produce different malts, and we therefore end up with a wide variety of colors and flavors of malted barley, each of which can be used to produce different kinds of beers.   A light malt results in a light color; a dark malt results in a darker beer.  Likewise, malts have different enzymatic contents, and therefore require different lengths of time for their starch content to fully convert to sugars.  There are numeric scales that rate each malt by its color and enzymatic content (called its "diastatic power") respectively, and while getting into those scales in depth is probably beyond the scope of this blog, suffice it to say that a good brewer is familiar with each rating system and knows how a malt's number on each scale will effect his or her beer.

Enough Already, How About Some Pictures?

So, for this particular beer, we used:

 1.  A base malt - a requirement for every beer...this is a malt with a balanced enzyme-to-starch ratio which breaks almost entirely down into sugar and therefore makes easily fermentable malt extract, or "wort."  Tim's standard base is a pilsner malt, light in color and easily overwhelmed in terms of flavor by other secondary grains.

2.  A smoked malt - this Rauch malt is kilned over an open flame rather than on a heated surface (which is how most malts are made), which gives it a strong smokey character.  Since Tim wanted to beat people over the head with its smokiness, our porter is roughly equal in proportion between the base malt and this Rauch.

3.  A roasted wheat - even though it's only a minor ingredient compared to the first two, a relatively small amount this intense grain (which tastes burned when sampled in its solid form) lends the beer its dark color, as well as a bit of acidity and bitterness.

The grain is weighed out in proportion (a sum total of about 12 pounds of grain went into our six gallons of beer), mixed together, and ground in a mill.

...okay, admittedly the picture on the left is of a different mix of grain post-milling.  (You're not crazy; the roasted wheat didn't suddenly disappear).  But the other pictures didn't turn out, and I wanted to share a shot of the texture:  grinding the grain, obviously, turns it into a bunch of tiny pieces easily permeable by water, thus shortening the amount of time it takes to extract the sugar in a process called "mashing," which will be the subject of the next blog.  'Til then, I hope everyone is excited about the soon-to-be-bottled "Char-Cole Porter".

What is the BeerShare?

Given that this is the first post of our blog, and that probably the only people who will bother to read it are already members, it seems a little redundant to explain what exactly HBK is.  But, damn it, I'm going to do it anyway.

Started at the end of 2011, The HBK (Home Brew Kimener) Beer Co-op is nothing more than an excuse for founder/brewer Tim Kimener to show off his affinity for making beer, and to get the people around him as excited about the process as he clearly is (just ask him a question about malted barley or IBU ratings and you'll see what I mean).  His passion for brewing seems - at least to me, a largely uninitiated nonbrewer - to exceed that of a typical beer nerd or hobbyist DIY-guy...I have it on good authority that he harbors hopes of some day brewing beer professionally, and this wouldn't surprise anyone who has ever shared a pitcher of a good IPA with him.

"The whole idea is to get people into it," he says.  "My Yoda passed knowledge on to me, and I want to pass what I know onto the HBK."  (He's always saying shit like this.)  "But it's fun, it's not too hard, and you get beer at the end of it.  Why wouldn't people want to do it?"  Plus, he says, the beer co-op will encourage him to research methods of making beer styles that he's never attempted before, and force him to innovate new techniques and broaden his horizons.  "Then I can become a BEER MASTER!"  (See what I mean?  Always.) 

"If people want to be a part of it, they have to help out with the batch."  One of the requirements of membership in the co-op is that you help him out with some step of the weeks-long brewing process:  help bottle the beer (save your bottles so he can re-use them!), provide ingredients (one member volunteered a pound of chocolate after suggesting that Tim brew a chocolate stout), or write a blog about the whole HBK concept (cough, cough).  This plus a small membership fee to offset the cost of production makes you a bona fide HBK member.  Your reward?  A growler full of the finished product.  Not to mention each member's right to choose a beer for the group (i.e. Tim) to brew.

The membership fee, for the time being at least, should not be viewed as a purchase price for beer.  It's more a product of Tim's altruism and his lack of attention to mathematical detail where money is concerned.  "It would be awesome if I were breaking even.  I'm pretty sure I'm in the negative.  But I don't care too much for now.  I just want to get people into it."  And that's why helping out with the brewing is the crucial part of membership:  HBK is not a brewery, or a liquor store, or anything along those lines.  It's a collective of people who are interested in making and sharing a product.  If it ultimately ends up serving as a platform for a future brewery, then we'll all have had the pleasure of being a part of it from the beginning.

In the process of helping him make a beer, Tim hopes members will become inspired to take up the hobby for themselves, and use his counsel and advice to establish a strong start.  And trust me, there's a lot of advice.  Even asking him a three-word question (e.g., "What is 'sparging?'") will result in twenty minutes of unsolicited pointers on minutiae like heating temperatures, pouring techniques, and specific gravities.

So, that's sort of where I come in...with the three-word questions.  Tim said he wanted to start a blog to follow the HBK Co-op, and I thought it would be a good chance for me to throw myself head-first into a new hobby...and not a fruitless hobby, either, but one that results in alcohol!  Taking up the responsibility of the blog would mean that I would need to learn all the ins and outs of the process, to take detailed notes on his rambling about wort boil-overs and glass sterilization, and would therefore know my way around a...brewing...set-up...place.  (See?  I don't even know enough yet to finish that sentence smoothly.)

So, the goal of this blog is to follow each beer that Home Brew Kimener produces from its inception.  With half-assed photography, and as much information about each step of the process as I'm able to retain from Tim's ramblings, I hope to post enough updates to guide people (myself included) in the brewing process.  Conveniently, the next beer to be brewed, and the first to be blogged, is my pick.  (Smoked porter?  Alt?  Scotch ale?  Or maybe something with a weird ingredient...pistachios?  Cardamom?  Avocado?)  So I'll get to see how Tim decides to go about meeting my weird demands.  And my only contribution is to write about it.  And photograph it.  And be there for every step of the production of every beer so I can keep up with all of the important details.  You know, easy stuff.

So, if you care, keep checking in here.  Barring disaster (or disastrous laziness), we'll have plenty to talk about.  And, provided I understand this blog platform as well as I think I do, we can all have an open discussion in the comment threads.  (First suggestion for a comment topic:  "Why the hell would Justin want an avocado beer?")