Remember That Beermaking Experiment?

Well, the first batch completed and was consumed. Was it OK? This is a clue: I immediately started a second batch.

To refresh you memory, I bought a very simple "Mr Beer" home brewing kit. An optimist, I also ordered a couple refill cans in advance. Here's what UPS delivered:



"Home brewing made easy!" it says, showing just four steps. OK, it's not quite that simple, but it is actually pretty easy. (Click on any photo to enlarge.)


The Mr Beer company offers a huge range of beer mixes; cans of very thick (nonalcoholic) wort concentrate. Their worts are actually produced in New Zealand. Brewmasters there do the hard work: They process the grain(s), usually barley, letting it sprout. The sprouted barley is then dried; the dried sprouts are called malt and contain lots of sugars, starches and enzymes. Flavorings (such as hops, a flower) are added. The whole mess is mashed up --- it's actually called the "mash"--- and then steeped, like tea, letting the enzymes work on the starches to raise the sugar content. Additional flavorings may be added along the way. This steeping/flavoring step does not produce alcohol. The point is to get the base flavors right and to increase the raw sugars that will later feed the yeast.

In the Mr Beer process, the mash liquid--- the wort--- is then thickened (partially dehydrated) and sealed in cans.

You can see from this picture the range of worts Mr Beer offers. Name a type of beer, and they probably have a wort like it. What's more, you can mix and match different worts to lighten, darken, strengthen, weaken, or otherwise alter the tastes and to produce you own custom beers.


This is what comes in the kit:


And here's what it looks like laid out on a table. The kit came with two cans of wort concentrate; the extra two are refills I got at the same time as the kit:


You start the beermaking process by sterilizing everything that will touch the beer-to-be. Beer (like wine and cheese) is produced through a kind of controlled spoilage: You want microbes to do their thing on the food stock you provide; but only certain benign microbes of your choosing. In this case, the only thing you want working on your wort is brewer's yeast, so you clean everything very well to make sure that the yeast will have the wort to itself, with no harmful microbes present.

The kit uses a powdered disinfectant:


You partially fill the plastic "keg" with water, and add the powder.


After swooshing the disinfectant solution around and running some through the keg's tap, you dump in all the kitchen tools you'll use, or might use, to sterilize them, too. You let everything sit for a while. (This shot is vertical, looking straight down into the keg.)


You dribble some of the sterilizing solution onto a plate, and then use the sterile plate to rest your utensils, keeping everything clean.


The "One Step" cleaner is supposed to not require rinsing, but I did anyway just to be safe. Besides, I know my tap water is safe and sterile. (One of my tasks as Condo president here is to take regular water samples for testing at a State lab. The bacteriological assays have always come up 100% negative. My mind is dirty, but my water is clean. ;-) )

Once rinsed, you fill the keg about halfway.


For the simpler, lighter beers, you use one can of wort concentrate. But one can doesn't provide a lot of sugar for the yeast to munch on, so the Mr Beer process calls for adding a yeast food to the mix: corn syrup solids.

It turns out that great precision isn't needed for this step, but this was my first time, so when they said "put 4 cups of water in a pan" I doled out *exactly* four cups, dammit.


"Corn syrup solids" or "Yeast Chow" aren't very appealing names, so Mr Beer calls it "Booster."
When it hits the water, it forms an almost-solid aqueous gel that's very hard to dissolve.


But with plenty of heat and stirring, it all eventually goes into solution.


Next, you add wort to the hot, syrupy water. For my first batch, I choose Mr Beer's Coors-equivalent wort. Of course, they'd get into trouble using the Coors name, so they call it "Cowboy golden lager." The other option that came with the kit was "American Blonde," which is their Budweiser equivalent. If you're baking in the sun in the bleachers in a ballpark on a steaming hot July afternoon, an ice-cold Bud is a Very Good Thing. But it has very little flavor, and so wasn't my first choice for a beer I'd likely consume at the dinner table or on my sofa. So I passed on the Bud, er, American Blonde. (Monty Python joke: Q: Why is Budweiser beer like making love in a canoe? A: Because they're both f*cking close to water.)

So, Cowboy golden lager it was. Yippie-kai-ay.

Each can of wort concentrate comes with a packet of brewer's yeast.


The concentrate has the consistency of molasses. It doesn't smell at all like beer.


Here's a flash-lit shot so you can see into the concentrate. The flecks and small chunks are hops and other flavorings; and perhaps small pieces of the malted barley.

The Mr Beer process produces unfiltered beer. Most of the chunky stuff falls to the bottom of the keg and doesn't go into the bottles. But unfiltered beer is always a little cloudy (mostly from dead yeast), and sometimes has small flecks of hops and such. It's only an aesthetic issue for the fussy or squeamish; it has no effect on the taste. And brewer's yeast is rich in B-complex vitamins including B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B5 (pantothenic acid), B6 (pyridoxine), B9 (folic acid), and H or B7 (biotin). It also contains chromium and selenium. You can even buy brewer's yeast tablets at health food stores. No, beer isn't health food, but a little defunct brewer's yeast in your glass certainly does you no harm.

You add the wort concentrate from the can to the hot "Booster"-laden water from the previous step and stir until it's all a uniform consistency; sort of like a heavy broth or a thin soup.


You add the hot wort mix to the cold water in the keg and then fill the keg the rest of the way with cold water. The keg holds 2 gallons, or 4.5 liters. That's about 20 12-ounce (small) bottle's worth.

You sprinkle the brewer's yeast on top of the now-lukewarm wort, wait for it to soak a bit (to "activate" or come out of stasis), then stir everything vigorously.


You then cap the keg and place it in a room-temperature spot out of direct sunlight. The keg is deliberately not airtight; this is the basic fermentation step, where the yeast eats the sugars and poops out alcohol. (Yes; lovely thought, isn't it? The alcohol in out adult beverages is yeast waste. Yum!) The carbon dioxide produced in this step is just vented away.


Next comes the waiting. It takes at least a week for the beer to ferment; and two to three weeks is better. I waited two weeks. (This is one of the steps you can modify when you get to crafting beer, rather than just producing it, which is what I was doing for this first batch. Letting the beer sit longer raises the alcohol content and smooths the beer because the sharper-tasting stuff either gets consumed by the yeast, gasses off or otherwise degrades into better-tasting compounds.)

At the end of this first fermentation you have a keg full of what smells and tastes like flat beer: There's a normal amount of alcohol, but no carbonation. The Mr Beer process uses in-bottle carbonation in a second, separate fermentation step.

I didn't photograph the bottling because it's so simple: You sterilize the bottles, add a small, measured amount of sugar to each bottle (again, to feed the yeast), fill each bottle with beer from the keg, agitate the beer to thoroughly mix in the fresh sugar, and then tightly cap the bottles. Then you place the bottle in a quiet place (but not a refrigerator--- the yeast still has work to do) for at least a week, and preferably two.

I let mine go two weeks. Then, Mr Beer says to give the beer at least a couple days in the fridge to settle down. True "lager" beers take at least three weeks of cold storage (the word "lager" is old German for a winter camp or storage.).

So you see the process actually takes a while. For my very simple first batch, maybe 4.5 weeks passed from when I started the process to when my first homebrewed beers were ready for tasting. It could have gone as much as 8-9 weeks.

Oh, the sacrifices we make for yeast poop.

Anyway, I did photograph the first pour. And that's the subject of tomorrow's post.

Cheers!