Brewing Beer for a Good Cause! #TeamWater Fundraiser

Without water there is no beer. In our hobby, we often take water for granted. We turn on a faucet and it comes pouring out into our kettles. Or maybe we head to the store and buy gallons on gallons of H2O to turn into delicious wort. And not to mention the ridiculous amounts of cold water needed to chill down your beer at the end of a long brew day. We use water without thinking of how fortunate we are to have an endless supply on demand. But in other parts of the world, water is not easily So today we're doing our part and joining Team Water and Water Aid America. Joining thousands of creators and people like you. The goal is by the end of August to raise 40 million dollars to provide clean drinking water to 2 million people around the world. That's the big goal. But my mini goal is just to raise a thousand dollars through home brewers and fermentation enthusiasts like you and me. So I need your help. And as an added challenge, I'm also going to attempt to brew a batch of beer with the least amount of water possible. And I encourage you to try along at home and brew up your own low water ale. And in the end, I'll calculate how much water I use so I can attempt to offset it with a donation. So let's not waste any more time and let's get brewing. While water is essential to beer, we can certainly minimize the amount we need using a few tricks. One, we can make a smaller batch. And smaller usually means less, right? So I'm opting for a two-gallon batch, which means I'll probably use about three gallons of water total. Two, in order to increase my yield, I'll use a higher amount of grains. That way, even though I'm brewing less, I'll be making a higher ABV drink, which means more bang for my buck. And three, instead of wasting water to chill, I'll be skipping that step altogether and using a no-chill method. More on that later. Now another thing to consider is that the ingredients in beer can also be water intensive. Barley and hops are both crops that require water to grow. Hops in particular are thirsty devils and require a lot of water to grow properly. So if you wanted to be extra cautious of water use, it might be a better idea to brew a low ABV and low hopped beer. But it's hard to quantify how much an extra pound or two of malt and an ounce or more of hops can cost water-wise. So today I'll just be making an IPA. Plus the smaller batch helps with overall water usage. But I thought I'd just mention it. But if you're curious to learn more about how to brew an eco-friendly beer, I made an entire video on it that you can check out after this one. Anywho, here's the recipe. I'm making a West Coast IPA, bold but crushable and filled with fruity hops. And I'm making it outside on my old burner and brewing a bag setup. But feel free to scale this recipe to whatever system you use. For water, I'm just using tap water as it is. Because one, it's the most efficient source. And two, it's the cheapest source of water. And in order to get the best results, I'll use a Camden tablet to remove any chloramines, which can lead to off flavors. I live in San Diego, which generally has great water for brewing, especially IPAs. But if you don't know how to treat your water for brewing, be sure to check out my video all about water chemistry in beer. Water is a big part of beer's flavor, so it's important to get it right for the best tasting results. For grains, I'm keeping it simple with 100% two row. For this size batch, that's about five pounds. I'll mash it at 150 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. I'm definitely pushing this small kettle to its limit. In fact, I'm only using half of the three gallons of total water, so I don't overflow. Or at least try not to overflow. And then I'll add the rest of the water later. This is a great way to brew larger batches if you have a smaller kettle. You'll essentially make a stronger wort to start and then dilute it later. I make sure to stir occasionally and turn on the heat every now and then to keep the mash temps consistent. And then after the mash was done, I pulled the bag of grains out and brought it to a boil for 30 minutes. Having a pulley like this is an awesome way to get the grains out of the kettle. Plus it gives you a chance to really squeeze it for all it's worth. Every penny and drop counts. And once it's boiling, I set a timer for 45 minutes and then added the following hops. 0.4 ounces of CTZ at 45 minutes. This is my favorite bittering hop for IPAs and will give most of the bitterness for this beer. Just be careful of boil overs when brewing in small pots. Yeah, at least I'm brewing outside today. I followed that up with 0.2 ounces of Citra at 20 minutes. I then added 6 ounces of dextrose or corn sugar at the 10 minute mark. I love adding a little bit of sugar to my West Coast IPAs as it drives the fermentation a little bit lower, making it slightly more dry and drinkable. Lastly, I added 0.4 ounces each of Citra and Simcoe at flame out. Speaking of flame out, at the end of the boil, I killed the heat and covered the pot. This is where I usually whip out a wort chiller to cool this down as fast as possible. But today we're going no chill, which shouldn't take too long thanks to the smaller batch size. But I also remembered to add the remaining water, which was just chilling out. And by adding that, I almost got things down to yeast pitching temp. I also took a quick gravity sample to see where the alcohol content could end up. And if you wanted more volume and a less strong beer, you can always add even more water here. But for this batch, it has an original gravity of 1.062. After a couple of hours, the wort had chilled down, so I prepped the fermenter. Just using a homemade bucket fermenter, I cleaned it and sanitized it before adding the wort. I then added in the yeast. I'll be using Voss Quake because it's summer and it's hot here, and this works perfect in warm conditions. Plus, it should add a little orange citrusy thing to this beer as well. But random side note, did anyone notice how they changed the packaging on the Voss? This new style is just not doing it for me. Either way, I let it ferment at room temp. About five days in, I added in some dry hops, another 0.4 ounces each of Citra and Simcoe. And then another five days later, fermentation had finished, and I took a final gravity reading, which read 1.008, meaning this beer was done and was about 7%. I then kegged it up and let it carbonate for a few days before finally giving this water-friendly IPA a try. Take a look at that. Just beautiful. Nice and clear for only being in the keg for about a week. The aroma on this is absolutely insane. It is just coming through with so much citrus, and there's a little bit of a grapefruit thing. Citra is always one of my favorite hops to use for IPAs, and Simcoe is a great complementary hop. And I am just so excited to give this a try. This was a relatively fast beer, too. I brewed this on August 3rd, and now it's August 19th. And it is looking great and smelling great, and I'm excited to give it a try and see how it tastes. So, cheers. Oh man, that is so good. It's definitely got a strong bitterness. I think maybe a bit too strong bitterness, but Chinook always tends to give me a bit of a sharp bite. If I were to do this again, I might dial it back just a tiny bit. But this tastes fantastic, especially for considering the mistakes I had on brew day, like boil over, and how quickly this was able to turn around. I'm super pleased with this one. So, with the beer a success, let's take a second to talk about the reason that I made this video, which is the Team Water initiative. This video is part of the fundraiser, Team Water, which has a goal of raising $40 million that gives water to 20 million people around the world that don't have access to clean drinking water. And as of today, we're at 30 million of the 40 million total, so we're almost there. And there's only a week left to donate. So, in order to do my part, I'm going to do a little calculations now to figure out how much water I use for this beer and offset the balance with the donation. Pull up a calculator. So, according to this graphic here that I got from the Johnny Harris water video, it costs .000052 cents per ounce of water. And I used three gallons to make this beer. So, first we'll times that by 128, which 128 ounces in a gallon. And then I'll times that by three, which will give me .019. So, basically two cents worth of tap water to make this beer. Now, of course, I use some water to do some cleaning. So, let me just double that and say times two. So, six gallons total, which comes out to .039, or about four cents worth of water to make this beer. And I'm not going to donate just four cents. So, let's go ahead and times that by 1,000. And that comes out to 39.9. So, we'll round that up to $40 and I'll make that my first donation in our 1,000 goal. So, if you want to contribute to Team Water, I have a link down in the description where you can donate directly to my Team Water page, where I have a goal of $1,000, which I think is very attainable and something we can achieve in the next week. This is something that I've always wanted to do, to do a fundraiser like this. I just feel like there's more I can always be doing, especially with my platform. And this seemed like a great opportunity, especially how much water is used in beer. I mean, if you're thinking about big breweries, they're using gallons and gallons and gallons of water, sometimes just wasted water for chilling. So, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to do a fundraiser. So, I have a challenge for you now. If you're going to brew in the next week or so, do a little calculation, figure out how much water you're going to use, and maybe just consider offsetting the costs of your water with a little donation. It'll make you feel better and you'll have some great beer to enjoy with it. And if you made it this far in the video, I want to say thank you so much for watching. I just passed my five-year mark on this channel, which is just insane. So, whether you've been watching or subscribing for a few days, or you've been for five years, I just wanted to say thank you so much. And also, I'm about to hit 100,000 subscribers, and I got big plans for that. Right now, I'm in the middle of a move. There's some things off-camera here that are in complete disarray, but I got a new space that I'm going into where I'm going to be building out a brewery. So, I'm going to film all that and I'll share it with you, and I got a lot of other great things coming. So, from me and Willow, cheers and happy brewing.