Idiot's Guide to Making Incredible Beer at Home

Even if I have to after this. Are these both the same? Are they both the same? Wow! Many of you know that I've been rather obsessed with fermenting food over the last two years. Just been trying to take in as much information as possible, learn the basics, and spread that wealth to you guys. So when I'm walking through a bookstore and I see a book called The Fermented Man, of course I'm going to pick that thing up. And it's about a guy named Derek Dillinger, well he wrote the book. He's the author and he wrote about his year of only eating fermented food. Super interesting stuff but what really caught me about that book was the chapter on beer making. I really never thought I was going to make beer but the guy's talking about how rewarding it is and I could relate because I had just really taken a liking to sourdough bread which is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done in the kitchen. So this guy was very convincing and that really pushed me over the edge. I said I gotta do this. So it turns out Derek is actually the brewmaster at a microbrewery about three hours from my house so I contacted him looking for that little jump start to get me into the brew game and he obliged so I headed up to Kent, Connecticut mid-winter to really get a taste of what brewing is like. Derek started his brewing like many of us as avid homebrewers. He had a blog that was really popular and then he got this job as the head brewmaster at a microbrewery which is pretty cool because it turns out American brew culture and beer culture is the fastest growing beer culture in the world mainly because there's so many avid homebrewers out there. So these people are taking their skills to the next level. They're opening up microbreweries and they're spreading their craft which is incredible. Maybe you guys will be the next to open that microbrewery. Who knows? So when I hung out at Kent Falls Brewery for the day I was learning pretty much all the operations of a classic microbrewery. Everything from milling the grains to mashing to boiling to adding the hops. I even learned how they creatively named their beers and of course we had to do an extensive taste test. Derek also sent me home with about 12 different styles of beers so it was pretty exciting for the next few weeks in my apartment as I indulged and learned about all the different styles of beer flavorings. One of my biggest takeaways from Kent Falls other than of course learning how to make beer was learning about the extensive variety of beers that you can make. There's really endless opportunities when it comes to brewing beer because you've got so many different variables. You've got the grain type. You've got the types of hops. You've got the different strains of yeast. You've got the additional flavorings you can add. You've got the fermenting temperatures. There are so many options out there and I think that's why beer making is spreading so much because people are really just starting to get the taste of it at least over in America. People are opening up to all of these varieties. Getting away from those stupid light beers. Reinventing the beer culture. So of course when it comes to making beer you've got to get your equipment so I took another little field trip over to a local place in Brooklyn called Bitter & Esters and I talked to the owner John and he gave me the rundown on beginner's equipment. And this place is awesome because not only do they have beer making classes but you can pick out custom recipes from Bitter & Esters and then you can weigh out your grains. You can also just pick extracts if you want that. And when it comes to the actual brewing kits of course they have a ton of different options at all price points. I actually ended up going with the cheapest option which is basically two converted five gallon buckets and it also comes with everything else you need to brew and bottle the beer. Other than the glass beer bottles themselves you'll have to order those separately. My favorite are those little pop tops that you can get on Amazon. Those things are reusable and they work great. The full kit cost me a little over $100 and you can buy a similar kit online. Amazon has a great one. I'm actually going to be giving one away so click in the description for the details on that contest so you can start brewing immediately. Once you have your beer making equipment you've got to get your beer making ingredients and there's two main categories of ingredients that you're going to be dealing with. One is all grains which I'm going to be showing you how to do which is actually taking the grains, cracking the grains, putting them through a mashing process which releases all of the sugars in those grains so you can convert those sugars to alcohol. That is the more difficult process but I really enjoy it because you're doing it from scratch. I like the entire process. If you want to skip a few hours on brew day, if you don't have the entire day to actually brew beer, you can just pick up an extract which completely takes out the mashing process. It's basically the extracted form of what we do in that mashing process and it honestly takes out about three hours on brew day so you can pick from those two things. One other note about the brewing process is I'm going to be using a brew in a bag method which has become extremely popular recently with home brewers mainly because you're skipping the entire sparging process which is this entire filtering process, kind of complicated, takes a little longer and the actual end result is not going to be that much different so I highly suggest getting one of these brew bags if you are a first time brewer. They've worked great for me and that's the technique I'm going to be using in this video. Let's start out on the actual mashing process and first you've got to whip out your brew pot. I've got a four and a half gallon brew pot and that's perfect because I'm only making two and a half gallons of beer which is about a case of beer which is plenty for me. Of course if you want to make five gallons you've got to get a bigger brew pot. So you're going to need four gallons of water. There's marks on the side of my pot which makes it super easy and if you're using tap water just make sure it's not too chlorinated. I'm using a mix of tap water and filter water. So the reason you're adding an extra 1.5 gallons of water is because of the displacement that's going to happen when you're brewing in the bag along with the evaporation of when you boil your wort later on in the process. Heat up your water according to your actual recipe. For my IPA I'm heating it up to 160 degrees and then I'm going to take my brew bag which works just like a tea bag. You put it around the edges and then you start pouring in all of your cracked grains. Make sure you stir your grains around so they don't clump together because again you don't want them to clump in flour balls or you won't extract the maximum amount of sugar from your grains. So the water started at 160 degrees but because we added all the grains it's going to drop down to about 148 degrees and the goal is to maintain that temperature for 30 minutes. So what I do is I put the lid on and I check it every now and then. I give it a stir to make sure it's not clumping and if the temperature has dropped too low, if it's dropped by like 10 degrees, just turn the heat on for about a minute to heat it back up to that range whatever your recipe says. Since there's so much water and all that residual heat I normally don't have too many issues with keeping a steady temperature. Just keep that lid on give it a few stirs and 30 minutes will fly by. After that half hour the water should completely change colors and the smell is going to be amazing. You've got this sugary malty barley water. Now just like a tea bag, take your brew bag and it's going to be a little hot so you can wrap a towel around the top and just pull the brew bag straight from the liquid and let it all drain out. Make sure you don't actually squeeze the bag once you take it out of the liquid. You just want to let it naturally drain until it stops dripping. You might get an undesirable bitterness if you squeeze the beer and we're already accounting for all of that displacement so you don't have to squeeze out any extra liquid. This is now what they call the wort which is basically your liquid from the mashing process. Pretty much just sugary barley water. Another great part about the brew bag process is now you've got your strained out beer there. You don't have to transfer into any other pot. You're ready to boil your beer. And the boiling process is going to destroy all the bacteria in there so you're basically starting at a blank slate for the yeast to come in and do it's fermenting. And also during the boiling process that's when you're going to start adding hops for flavor. Now hops are a magical flower and when you smell them you instantly understand why hoppy beers like IPA's have such a distinct tasty flavor. And there are a ton of different varieties of hops. They come in pellet form for convenience. Since I'm going for a more tropical vibe with my beer the hops that we're adding have a ton of natural citrus tones which should pair perfectly with the mango. When you add your hops at the beginning of the boiling process you're going to get more bitterness because you're boiling the heck out of a flower so it's going to taste a little bitter. When you add them towards the end you're going to get more aroma and then there's a dry hopping process which we'll get into later. The IPA that I'm making uses both techniques for adding hops so first I'm going to bring my wort up to a boil. Get it at a nice rapid boil just like this and right away I'm going to add about half an ounce of my hops to the boil for the full 60 minutes. Just make sure you stir the wort every now and then so it doesn't boil over and then once that hits 45 minutes I'm going to add another .5 ounces of hops and then I'm going to boil that for another 15 minutes. Once the 60 minutes of boiling has finished I'm going to turn the heat off and then I'm going to add 1.5 more ounces of hops. Now we've got to cool the wort down to room temperature because if you add yeast to hot water you will destroy it and there are a million different techniques to cooling your actual wort. I'm going to use probably the most low tech method which is basically taking your wort putting it in the sink and filling up your sink with cold water. That cold water is going to start to lower the temperature of the beer. Once the outside temperature is really warm I drain that off fill it up with more cold water and then add ice to that water and then I would say in a half hour you should have room temperature wort. At this point everything that comes into contact with that wort other than the yeast needs to be sanitized because we've got our blank slate we don't want to be adding any weird bacteria or something that's going to spoil the beer. First we're going to sanitize our fermenter so just follow your instructions on your sanitizer and fill up that fermenter with sanitized water. Once it's all sanitized you can actually save that sanitizing liquid and pour it into your bottling jug and save that for bottling day. When you pour off your sanitizing liquid don't worry about the extra bubbles just keep those there. They're not going to harm your beer. And then just dump in your wort to your sanitized fermenter. Now you're ready to pitch your yeast which basically means just add it to the wort and once that yeast is added you pretty much have beer. Well sort of you've got to wait two weeks for that to ferment. Now give your fermenter a few vigorous shakes back and forth which is going to oxygenate your wort. So you're going to hammer on that lid and cool it in a dark place for about two weeks. Temperature control is one of the most important parts and also one of the most difficult parts about home brewing. You want to keep it at a nice regulated temperature or you can throw off a lot of things in the process. For me it's about to be summertime and I really don't have much air conditioning in this place so I actually ordered this brew bag, this refrigerator brew bag so I can put my entire fermenter in the bag and I can just switch out some ice packs every now and then and that should keep it at a nice regulated temperature around 65 to 70 degrees. If you have a really cool basement in your house you could definitely try a lager and if you have a really hot house and you've got no way of cooling it try a saison. This is an optional step but a lot of beer making kits come with a hydrometer which is basically a way to measure the sugar levels in your beer which will ultimately tell you the alcohol levels in your beer. So you can fill up a little container with your beer and take that hydrometer reading. I'm not really going to get into how to read it but I will put a link in the description below that will explain everything you need to know. And just remember if you are trying your beer during the fermentation process which I suggest you do you're not going to have a tasty product in the beginning. It's going to be a little bitter, it's going to taste weird in the very start but the flavors are going to develop and it's going to get better but even after two weeks when it's done fermenting you still have warm flat beer. So don't get discouraged if it's not perfect. The end product once it's carbonated is going to be light gears tastier than what you have there. You might have seen the term dry hopping on a beer label and what that basically means is adding hops to the fermenting process not actually cooking the hops in the boiling process. My IPA has a dry hopping process. So once the beer has fermented for 7 days out of the 14 days total you're going to take a muslin bag and make sure that bag is nice and sanitized. You're going to add another 1.5 ounces of hops and you're going to throw that right into the fermenter for the last 7 days. I thought it would also be a good time to add the mango as well. They say it's best to give the yeast just a few days on it's own to develop then you can start adding the flavorings. It's very crucial that when you're adding any flavorings to beer in the fermenting process that you do heat those things up so you kill off all the unwanted bacteria. So that's what I did with the mango. I heated it up to 170 degrees. I also froze the mango and thawed it out a few times and what that does is it starts to break down the cell walls which will release more of that flavor. So I added the mango to a muslin bag and I let the hops and the mango ferment for another 7 days. So it's been 2 weeks and the last step I'm going to do before bottling is put my fermenter into the fridge. And what this is going to do is chill the beer and a lot of that sediment and yeast is going to pull down to the bottom ultimately giving you a cleaner final beer product because it's going to be stuck at the bottom so when you actually go to bottle the beer all of the sediment will stick to the bottom. The first thing we're going to do for the bottling process, boil 2 cups of water with our priming sugar to dissolve that up nicely and your recipe will tell you exactly how much priming sugar you need. The sugar is there to actually carbonate the beer and the cool part about making beer is you're adding a very specific amount of sugar so once the yeast eats up the sugars and turns it into CO2, your beer is done carbonating. That's why beers can sit on the shelf forever and not explode. Hopefully not explode. So next take whatever bottles you have and just make sure you give them a little rinse with some soap and then we're going to add in all of that sanitizing liquid that you reserved from the first phase. Your kit should come with a tube that has a liquid release valve to make this process really simple so once you've filled up all your bottles, you can dump out all that sanitizing liquid and again, don't worry about any of those extra bubbles. Just keep those in there. Don't try to wash those out. Now this is a very important step. We are going to rack the beer into the sanitizing bottling bucket. Make sure you do this very slowly because you're going to see we did such a good job with getting all of that muck on the bottom. They actually call this the trub and you want to pour off the liquid so you're leaving a lot of that trub on the bottom so it doesn't get into your final product. Now you can start bottling your beer. Follow the same process as we did with the sanitizing solution and what I found is if you fill up the bottles completely to the top, once you pull out the actual rod, you'll have the perfect amount of head space for your beer because you do want to leave a little room in your bottles. If you're using bottle caps, make sure your bottle caps are sanitized and a lot of the kits will also come with a bottle capper and that is this process but again these little pop tops, they work great and it's a much easier process but make sure these are sanitized as well the pop tops. Now you're going to store your beer away for at least two weeks I would say. Two, three weeks would be on the safe side and keep that at about 65 to 70 degrees if you can and then you want to make sure you chill your beer. My recipe says chill it for a week. I mean that's a pretty deep chill but make sure you chill your beer for at least a few days before you drink it so it is extra crispy and extra delicious. Alright, I'm five weeks older than when I started this beer. That's how long it took to make this. Is it worth it? I brought over Derek Lucci and then my other friend over here. My name's Rat Kiley. Are you actually his brother? No. So we're going to try this guys. This is a mango IPA so IPA obviously heavy in the hop game so a lot of hop flavor and then I tried fruit for the first time so this has a mango. You smell what? It smells like mango or something. So IPA stands for International Pancake Association. It's steamer. In association with IHOP. Don't drink and drive kids. Even if I have to after this. Are these both the same? Are they both the same? How do you get the mango in there? You can do a little more. This smells good. It smells incredible. How do you get the mango? I'm not sure I can watch the video. You'll have to watch. Nice. Crisp. You know that I'm not going to lie. I've tasted one of these. I've already had this weekend I drank two of them. The hoppiness, it's the first time I went for the full IPA. I've done just the pale out. It's a little more bitter. It definitely has more bitterness. The fruitiness is there. Would you like squeeze in something into this? You really want to know how you get the mango. Would you like squeeze in some orange or something? You see, that I think would actually do a great job with the bitterness. A little bit of orange. Do I have anything? I think the bitterness is welcome. To answer your question, you'll watch the video. Whenever I taste a homemade beer, I'm expecting it not to taste like beer. Look at the carbonation on this one. To me, homemade beer, it tastes incredible but there's just a freshness that you don't get when you taste regular beer. Unless it's coming straight from the tap, from the brewery. I'm telling you guys, it's really not that hard to make beer. All you've got to do is follow the instructions every single time. I've done it three times now and it's worked out perfectly every time. You've tasted every beer I've made. The carbonation on this, is there something different? No. You're right. I think with the fruit, you might get a little extra carbonation. I like that. I feel like when you're making... I love beer. I've always loved beer but I don't really drink much these days. I appreciate just having a good... You don't need much. It's not like you're just pounding some shitty beer. I disagree with both of them. If I had five of these, I would drink all of them. Josh brings up a good point because I don't really drink too much either. It's not like you have to be some heavy... Although, a big part of the beer making industry, there's a lot of drinkers but I don't get drunk. I like drinking a beer every now and then. This is the perfect way. You make 24 bottles a month and then you come back after a long day and you drink one of these and it's more like drinking just a fresh soda that gets you a little tipsy but it's not... I'm not trying to get wasted. That is something to note. You don't have to be a huge drinker. Thank you for that beer. I've got to go drive home. I'll see you now. Do not drive and drink. Guys, try it out. It's delicious.