Archives for July 2013

Some commercial breweries, such as Cantillon (whose barrels are shown here), are dedicated to producing sour beers. You can produce sour beers at home without giving up the brewing of non-sour beers.

Sour beers evoke a strong response in homebrewers. Some absolutely love them, others couldn’t be more put off. In my experience, there are relatively few brewers who are on the fence when it comes to enjoying sour beers. Among sour beer lovers, however, there are some who are leery of brewing them at home. This is almost always due to worries over having their equipment forever contaminated once they let the sour “bugs” into their brewery. As someone who has brewed many sour beers, I’d like to relate what I know about cleaning and sanitizing when brewing sour beers — mostly that the wild yeasts and bacteria that make sour beers sour can be controlled with proper cleaning and sanitation. If you can brew a hefeweizen, and your next beer doesn’t turn out to be a hefe-weizen, you can brew a sour beer and not have your subsequent beers be contaminated.

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A mash/lauter tun right after mashing in. One option you have is to add the water and grains simultaneously (or nearly so).

Homebrewers sometimes debate whether it’s best to stir the crushed grains into your strike water when mashing in, or vice versa. However, there’s a third option — add them at the same time. The biggest advantage of this method is that you can monitor your mash temperature as you build your grain bed. If you want to hit your mash temperature exactly, this method of mashing in works well. Plus, it’s easy to do and requires no extra equipment.

In the not too distant past of commercial brewing, many breweries used a Steele’s Masher to mash in. (Some still do, although it’s less common these days.) A Steele’s Masher is essentially a big auger that delivers crushed grain to the mash tun. Hot water is added to the grain a couple turns of the screw before it falls into the mash tun and thus the mash tun is filled with hydrated grist, not water first then grains or vice versa.

You can do something very similar to this at home with two “scoops” of the same size. I use plastic 60-oz. beer pitchers.

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Pellets of Dry Ice. You can see the cold carbon dioxide gas subliming from them against the black background. This gas can save you from dry hopping oxidation.

Dry hopping is great for adding extra hop aroma to your beers. However, there are a couple problems that can accompany dry hopping. One is that hop tannins can lead to haze. The other is, when using whole hops, the air entrained between the bracts and bracteoles (the “leaves” or “petals” on the hop cone) can lead to noticeable levels of oxidation in your beer — especially in heavily dry-hopped beers. Fortunately, there are a few easy ways to address the oxidation problem.

Dry hopping is the process of adding hops to fermented beer. Oils from the lupulin glands of the hops dissolve into the beer, adding hop aroma to it. Because the hops are not heated (and hence alpha acids are not converted to iso-alpha acids), dry hopping does not add bitterness to the beer.

At the homebrew scale, dry hopping is usually accomplished by placing hops (whole or pellets) in a nylon bag and steeping the bag in a secondary fermenter or keg. Contact time can last from a few days to a few weeks.

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