Sackheads Collective Brew Tips

From Brewwiki

These are not instructions, per se, but just the things that stand out to us as important things that we had to learn. Time-saving tips, shortcuts, improvements, etc. The things the books usually don't mention.

Contents 1 Equipment 2 Sanitizing / Cleaning 3 Brewing 4 Fermentation 5 Bottling

Equipment

• Auto-siphon HTH.

Sanitizing / Cleaning

• Rinse out your bottles immediately after emptying them - swirl vigorously a few times to remove all the sediment. This will make cleaning them a snap, removes 99% of the need to brush them, and prevents funk from growing in them while they sit idle. So, later, you can generally just sanitize them as if they were new.

• I have used the dishwasher to clean my bottles on five batches of beer to date with no problems. Maybe I've been lucky. I do know that I am lazy so I will continue to do it this way. I make sure there is no yeast poop in the bottle when by using the previous tip. I put the dishwasher on "Pot Scrubber" mode with water heat and the drying cycle. I start them around noon and by 8:00pm when I am ready to bottle, they have been washed, heat dried and are completely dry and ready for beer.

Brewing

• Alton Brown's method of replacing part of the plain water input with a 7lb bag of ice, and refrigerating the other water first is apparently somewhat controversial, but early on I found it very convenient. As soon as your wort is in the fermenter, it is at almost exactly the right temperature, thus requiring neither of: hours of waiting for the temperature to drop, or special chilling equipment. It can cause there to be a protein haze in your beer. If you care about such things, then more careful cooling methods are available. An immersion chiller is pretty handy.
• The Wyeast liquid "smack packs" are far better than the little packets of dry stuff you find in a kit. If you get a kit, that's perfectly fine, but get some new yeast for it. For that matter, even if you use the dry yeast, getting a fresh, known-good (refrigerated) packet is a good idea.

Fermentation

• I used to think that yeast starters were unnecessary until Scromp experienced a bad batch of yeast when he brewed the America LagerNOT. A yeast starter would have potentially identified that the yeast was kaput. It also speeds up the start of fermentation. The first time I made a starter, the airlock was bubbling in less that two hours as opposed to 24 hours with just the volume of yeast you get with Wyeast or White Labs. Wyeast suggests 3 to 4 Tablespoons of DME for every 2 cups of water. See the chart below for larger volumes. Starters to add another layer of complexity and a not necessary. But for me, this hobby is about exploring all possible ways to improve my beer and while I may not taste any differences in the final product, I have possibly removed another area for infection by getting a quick start to fermentation.

• 2 cups Water + 1/2 cup DME

• Don't worry about it. Sometimes it can take a day or two to start up. You can speed up the initial bloom by getting your yeast ready ahead of time - prime it with some rehydrate dry malt extract, etc. - but I've never bothered.

• There is no replacement for a good starter. You can make a starter a week(s) ahead of time and store it in the refrigerator once it's ready to pitch. Remember to allow it to warm to room temperature when you are ready to pitch.

Not to mention the fact that liquid yeast is by far the most expensive ingredient in any of my brews. I tend to get 2-4 starters out of each vial.

• Primary fermentation takes 3-5 days, it is usually done by 7. It's safe to leave it for as long as 2 weeks, but any longer and you risk the production of nasty flavors as the yeast begin to consume their own yeasty poopings.

• Transferring beer to a secondary fermenter is not absolutely necessary. If you are making a brown ale, I think it is silly to create all of this extra work. The general concensus is that secondaries general result in a clearer (in appearance) beer. You are making a brown ale...it is not going to be clear. If you are a making a light blonde ale and want it to be (slightly) more appealling in the glass, by all means, move it to secondary. The other reason to transfer to secondary is for a flavor infusion of hops or fruit. If you don't use a secondary then it is generally recommended to leave it in the primary for 10 - 14 days just to make sure fermentation is complete. Otherwise you might end up with some bottle bombs when the yeast is reintroduced to oxygen.

• Fruit Flavors: After looking around the Internet, I have decided how I will handle fruit flavorings. First, put 3 lbs of fruit in 180° water for 10 minutes. This will sanitize the fruit. Next, add the 3 lbs to the primary fermenter. Repeat this when you rack to secondary. Leave the beer in secondary for two weeks to absorb some flavors. Again, this is just gleaned information. I will report the results when I actually try this.

• More Fruit Flavors: An "easy" way to extract the fruity goodness from fruit is to freeze it beforehand (but after you've sanitized it in the fashion mentioned above). Since water expands when frozen, and since fruit juice is mostly water, freezing the fruit is the equivalent of sticking a zillion very tiny pins into the fruit. As it thaws, the beer has greater access to the fruit, and has an easier time leaching out the flavors.

• Oxygen: Yeast is not anerobic. It needs oxygen to do it's thing. You don't want oxygen in your beer after it's fermented, but you want a lot in your beer beforehand. Sometimes a stuck fermentation happens due to lack of oxygen. So aerate your wort before pitching in the yeast. If you use carboys, this is as "easy" as putting the bung on the carboy and shaking the whole thing for a minute or so. If you're using the pickle buckets, stir the bejeezus out of it with a long-handled sanitized metal spoon.

• Oxygen II: You can also swirl the beer during fermentation to put oxygen back into the system. Remove your air lock, don't forget about sanitation, and slosh the carboy or bucket around a bit. Do this to kick start a stuck fermentation or encourage slow acting yeasts such as Saison yeast.

Bottling

• Alton recommends using a bottling bucket as your primary fermenter, and filling the bottling bucket straight from the spigot by means of gravity. Given that the spigot is 2 inches at best above the bottom of the bucket, we find that this disturbs a lot of the 'trub', or 'leftover yeast poop' as I prefer to call it. This reintroduces it to the beer and it gets carried along into your secondary fermenter or bottles, which is sub-optimal. Siphon it off with your self-racking cane instead, and leave the trub be.

• Don't dump the boiling priming sugar in the bottling bucket first. The heat will leach poisons from the plastic, and kill the first yeast that comes down the pipe. Instead, start the siphon and let it run a minute or two. When you have a few inches of wort in, then start slowly drizzling in the sugar mixture.