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Mini-mash beer brewing

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Marissa View Drop Down
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Joined: 28 February 2012
Location: Austin TX
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    Posted: 29 February 2012 at 18:09
This is from an ancient blog post I did almost 3 years ago. But I didn't see much in the way of instructionals for brewing, so figured out put this one up, even though it's not complete either! When I'm no longer pregnant we'll be doing a full mash and I'll do some photos of that. But hubby can't handle 5 gallons of beer by himself and 6 months is about the shelf life we've come to expect, so it needs to be a few more months in the future!

This is the process for making a 5 gallon mini-mash batch. That means that it's half malt extract, half grains. We now do full mash (all grain) but this is a great way to start.

Here are the ingredients. Clockwise from top left: instructions (very important), sugar tablets for putting in the bottles for carbonation, yeast, bag of grains, white bucket of malt extract, 2 silver bags of hops (different kinds) and more sugar for fermentation. And everything is sitting on the mesh bag for the grains. 

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You start by heating 2 gallons of water to 160F and putting the bag of grains in to soak for 45 minutes. I love the smell of this step! 

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Then you drains the grains after pouring some more clean water over them to get all the good stuff out. Bring the mash back to a boil and remove from heat to mix in the malt extract. Malt extract is just highly concentrated liquid from mashing the grains and evaporating off much of the water. It's really sweet! And now you officially have "sweet wort". 

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Return to a boil yet again and start adding hops. The bulk goes in right away and you wait an hour. These are called the bittering hops. Then add the flavoring hops and boil another 15 minutes. Finally, the aroma hops go in for an additional five minutes. The longer the hops are boiled, the less hop flavor they impart but the more bittering agents. That's why you add in stages. And the resulting liquid is called "hopped wort". 

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Then you need to cool the wort to about 80F so that you can add the yeast. This is best when done quickly so that no other (high temperature) bacterias have a chance to get a head start in the wort and the wort doesn't develop any off flavors. Last time we did this by filling the sink with ice and putting the pot in. But it still took forever and took TONS of ice. So we bought a wort chiller yesterday - just a spiraling tube of copper that has cool water from your sink flowing through. It cooled down in about 20 minutes - which is a good length of time. 

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Then the wort gets put in the primary fermenter and the yeast is added! The yeast is the magic part and makes the weird brown liquid turn into delicious beer! 

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Last but not least, an airlock is put on top so that other buggies from the air can't take over the beer. And you also have to figure out a way to keep your booze hound away from the stuff...last time we caught her licking the airlock! emoticon 

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And now wait! Once the bulk of fermentation is through - in about 2 weeks, you rack into a secondary fermenter and wait again for a week, finally bottling it and letting it age a bit longer. It's drinkable in 3 weeks from bottling, but better after 6 weeks.
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