That’s it. We’re at the end. Today we’ll go through the steps to make a beer starting with some malted barley, some hops, water, and yeast. I just recently brewed up a batch of my Saison, which has been tweaked to my tastes, and is fairly popular with visitors:
Saison:
Yield: 5 gallons
Grain bill (assuming 80% efficiency)
6 lb 2-row
4 lb Pilsner (preferably Belgian)
1 lb Crystal 8L
1 lb Malted wheat
Mash at 148 F for 90 minutes
90 minute boil with the following hop additions:
1.5 oz Saaz (2.8% AA) at 90 minutes
.5 oz Saaz (2.8% AA) at 20 minutes
This should end up with an OG of ~1.050, and a FG of ~1.008 for about 5.5% ABV
Pitch with a saison yeast (I usually use 565, but used a new one for this batch).
So what’s different with All Grain versus Extract? For All Grain beer, you’ll be starting with malted barley, and need to convert the starches in it to sugars. This is done in the mash. You’ll need a 10 gallon (or larger) insulated (or heated) container with some manner of filtering out the grain from the wort. This can be done with a stainless steel false bottom, which is something like a colander with smaller holes that sits on the bottom of the mash tun over the spout where you’ll be draining the wort. Or, you can use a bag that you attach to the side of the mash tun. The bags are cheaper, easier to clean, and prevent stuck sparges. The only problem is you’ll have to lift a heavy (water + grain) bag out of the mash tun in order to clean it.
There are two main enzymes that will break the starches into sugars, Beta Amylase and Alpha Amylase. Now, these two enzymes have different temperature ranges that they’re most active in, for Beta Amylase, that range is 131-149°F; for Alpha Amylase, that range is 145-158°F. Anything above those temperatures will denature (break) the enzymes, and they’ll stop working. The lower the mash temperature, and the longer, the more fermentable sugars you will get from the grain. The higher the mash temperature, the more unfermentable sugars you’ll get. Too high of a temperature (or too short a mash time), and you’ll have unconverted starch in the beer instead of sugar.
Using a calculator, we figure out what temperature we need to heat the water up to so that when it is mixed with 
the malt, it’ll be at our expected mash temperature. This is known as the strike temperature. In this instance, my strike temperature came out to be 160 F. We then take the malt and add the hot water to it.
During this part of the process, you’ll want a mash paddle, which is used to stir up the mash and break up any dough balls that form. You can use a big whisk (or spoon) if you want, but stay away from the $5 cheap plastic mash paddles, they do not work all that well for batches over 1 gallon..
Then we put the top on the mash tun and wait, stirring it every once in a while if you so desire (which will up your efficiency a bit). So since this is a 90 minute mash, we’ll take this time to discuss efficiency. There’s two main measures of efficiency that matter to the home brewer: Brewhouse efficiency – how much of the sugars did you get to out of the malt and into the fermenter at the end of the day (80% is a good standard to reach for); Conversion efficiency – How many of the sugars did you get out of the malt. These numbers will be different, because there’s going to be some loss in water absorbed by the grain, left in the mash tun, and left in the boil kettle at the end.
So while the mash is going, we’ll also heat up water for sparging (rinsing more sugars off the malt). We want this water to be hot (I usually aim for 185 F and boiling), because we want to stop the conversion process, and because we need to get all of this wort up to a boil anyway. I do a 2 step batch sparge. So after draining the mash tun, I’ll dump hot water over the grain and drain it twice. You can do a single batch sparge, or even a continuous sparge (where you have a pump recirculating the mash over the grain).
All of these runnings will go into the boil kettle and brought up to a boil. At this point, you follow the same steps as you would for an extract batch. Now you just have to clean up your mash tun, and decide what to do with the spent grain. The grain still will have some sweetness to it, and can be used to feed livestock, dried and ground into flour, or used in its current state to make spent grain bread.
And for sitting through all of these columns, here’s a bonus recipe:
English Mild
Yield: 5 Gallons
OG: 1.034
FG: 1.008
ABV: ~3.3%
60 Minute boil
Grain bill:
4 lb Maris Otter
1 lb Crystal 90 L
1 lb Crystal 30 L
1 lb Carapils
Mash at 150 for 90 minutes.
Hops:
1 oz East Kent Golding (7.2% AA) at 60 minutes
Ferment with a Dry English Yeast (I use WLP007 for this one)
Comments
109 responses to “Enslaving Yeast – Brewing an All Grain Beer”
So… beer?
Beer.
Jimmy Carter was a shitty President overall, but damn, didn’t he have something up his sleeve; his deregulation of brewing and trucking were massive wins for the Reagan administration.
If you ever want proof about how removing regulation can lead to economic growth, just point at craft beer. It’s an industry that didn’t exist 30 years ago. It’s still heavily regulated, but the amount of growth has been insane.
Airlines too right? Or was that later under Reagan?
No, I think you’re right. And now you can fly to London or Aruba for pretty much the same prices you could fly for in 1976. Except inflation means it’s about 1/5th the cost.
…in real terms.
When I was brewing, I always thought about trying an all-grain brew. I never made the transition from extract brewing.
The guy that used to own the local homebrew shop told me one day that whenever anyone asks him about all-grain brewing, he’s careful to give both the pros and cons and make sure the person understands both. He said the reason why is he didn’t want to lose a customer who decided that all-grain takes too long, and then gave up brewing.
It takes more time, requires more equipment, and has more chances for error. On the plus side, it’s cheaper, and allows greater control of the final beer. I jumped into it because I put a grain bag into my cart for free shipping, thinking it was one of the small ones. It was not. Then I just picked up the 10 gallon water cooler and ran with it.
I’m working up to all-grain. I made the transition to legging, which was well worth it. I’m now slowly accumulating equipment to make the process easier (wort chiller is coming this week). Soon enough, when experience level and finances allow, I’ll pull the trigger on all-grain. The guy at the homebrew shop said that pretty much everybody has gone to beer in a bag rather than the traditional tun configuration, so I guess I’m an insulated cooler and a brew bag away from all grain.
*kegging
I wanted to see the pics of you in leggings. 🙁
ask and you shall receive
I tossed all of my homebrewing equipment a few years ago.
I stored the equipment in the basement.
Yellow Jackets got into the basement through a crack around one of the basement windows.
After failing to defeat them through chemical warfare, I called an exterminator. He also waged chemical warfare. He was successful on his second try. No more yellow jackets.
However, the homebrew stuff was right next to where the nest was hiding. I decided to toss it all.
At some point I’ll get back into homebrewing and maybe I’ll jump right into all-grain.
As a clarification, the yellow jackets skillfully hid their nest. That was the problem. I couldn’t find it, and it took the exterminator two visits to find it.
I got my wort chiller from JaDeD, but it looks like they’ve discontinued making the model I picked up. It’s able to chill my wort down from boiling down to about 10 degrees above groundwater temp in about 15 minutes. I know one guy who went with a standard plate chiller, and wound up getting an infection inside of it, so the second or third carboy that came out of their system was consistently infected.
Definitely looking forward to beer when I get home tonight.
Yay! Family friend who towed my car took a look and thinks it’s probably a blown cylinder! Only four more payments! Fun day at work!
Sorry.
? So sorry.
Sorry
Nice. Have an extra drink tonight.
Doesn’t sound good. Problems of the 21st Century.
Eesh, that’s not a cheap fix. Sorry.
Sorry CPRM.
Dumb question: warranty?
No.
Saturn has always been a bastard.
My brew kits show up tomorrow. I’m looking forward to making my first gallon of beer. I think I’ll do a write up on it.
What.the.fuck
Cummings isn’t even high enough on the intelligence scale to qualify as retarded. He’s like Hank Johnson only not funny. Seriously. This is the dems plan for… what?
Get ready for a two year shit show in the House.
Well, Maryland is one of the states under scrutiny for gerrymandering. So there is hope he gets pushed up against another incumbent after the census, or maybe he gets run over by a truck.
He has it made. Half of the voters in his district vote for him because they’re racists. The other half vote for him to prove they’re not racists.
Anything that doesn’t involve doing their fucking job.
Tying down the Trump administration with investigations. It’s similar to what the Rs did during the last two years of the Obama administration.
To be fair, I do remember them pretending that they were going to repeal Obamacare.
They fooled me. I was dumb enough to think they were serious.
They were serious that they were going to do it until they were actually able to do it.
Symbolism is great, actually doing shit is scary.
Thank you fucking McCain.
Their plan to lose everything in 2020 and have a total freak out.
If Trump wins in 2020, I will literally pop champagne and stay up all night reading the prognostications of doom from every Lefty media outlet and laughing my ass off.
You won’t be alone.
It can’t happen again, because they assured me last time that:
Trump would never be allowed to take office.
That Trump would voluntarily never take office.
That Trump would resign the first week.
That Trump would resign the first month.
That Trump would never make it 6 months.
That Trump would be impeached inside a year.
That Trump would be impeached before the midterms.
That Trump would resign before the midterms.
That Trump would resign right after the midterms.
Need I go on?
I can’t decide which will be worse, him losing or winning. Because the antics of the resistance are even worse than Trump’s twittering.
Just decide whether you want to ignore Trump’s tweets or get ass raped for another 40% of your stuff.
My first beer was all-grain.
I entered a brewing competition (any alcohol was welcome, and I entered a mead). Everyone that entered was given a bag of grain. I took home the grain and though, well fuck, now I need to buy some more equipment. 😉
I have done three or four extract brews in the middle of winter when I had to work in my kitchen. I much prefer working with all grain.
This batch was brewed in the kitchen. I love that my stove can get a full pot of wort up to a boil. This yeast is a slow one, it’s still got a thick chunky krausen on it, and it’s still bubbling away. If I get back up to the brewing levels I was doing a couple years agao, then I’ll be looking at getting my own mill.
I’m going to try a small brew-in-bag batch in the kitchen in a couple of weeks.
I am going to make a braggot. Starting with all-grain for the wort and then adding honey a the end of the boil.
We’ll see how it goes.
Thanks for the article Neph! My experience drinking Saisons and Farmhouse brews has been hit or miss. Seems like I either really like it or I really don’t. The flavors seem to be all over the place.
Saisons can be all over the place. About the only thing that’s needed is to use a saison yeast strain. Some of those strains will create a wide variety of flavors, depending on the fermentation temperature, and the specific strain. There are even some hop forward saisons, reading the guideline for saisons can be entertaining. The only thing that’s generally agreed on is that it’s dry, rustic, and will have some grainy notes.
That explains it:) Thanks for the info!
Go Eagles!
Family friend who towed my car took a look and thinks it’s probably a blown cylinder!
Not sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound good.
Yeah, not sure exactly I had to get to work. The word was relayed to me through my uncle who doesn’t know much about cars. I’LL deal with it tomorrow.
Hope it’s just a head gasket and that there was no cylinder damage. One is an expensive fix, the other is a really expensive fix.
“Blown cylinder” – As in the head gasket went?
The way it acted it’s worse than a gasket ?
Fingers crossed.
That sucks
Wish you the best of luck.
“a blown cylinder!”
Wish you were being euphemistic with that.
The Saints are channeling their inner Chargers.
That’s low.
Look’s like they might have got heir groove back.
“Their”
The Pats only played half a game against the Bolts. It was all that was needed. The entire 2nd half they just went into clock kill mode with no attempt at real offense. Resting up I guess.
Cummings isn’t even high enough on the intelligence scale to qualify as retarded. He’s like Hank Johnson only not funny. Seriously. This is the dems plan for… what?
“Are you now, or have you ever been… a WITCH?”
Venezuelan opposition leader pulled out if his car and arrested by government thugs.
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/01/13/us-joins-calls-oust-venezuelan-dictator/
Looks like at this point, Maduro has resigned himself to being the next Cuba.
Yeah, it’s not going to be a good situation
The Bolivarian Revolution has run upon hard times.
Of course.
That always ends well.
Russia and China are going to be surprised when the post-revolution government hates them and repudiates their debts.
As the great American fake government shutdown continues, is there any chance that I could be expanded as time passes?
I propose everyday that its shut down, another 1% of it is cut until sometime in April, we get anarchy land and I can be happy.
Of course not. What it means is that we need government too big to be shut down.
I think we’re well beyond “too big to fail” at this point.
Democrats want to guarantee every person a government job. Maybe the term we’re looking for is ‘Too big to NOT fail’.
Hence why cosmotarian is a failure…
But what are you going to cut?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-fly-to-puerto-rico-amid-ongoing-government-shutdown
A couple of million new permanent democrat voters? Sounds like a WIN/WIN for Democrats to me. They’d better hurry up and get that new referendum up before Trump sends more hurricanes.
DEA
EEOC
ATF
TSA (well, the entire Homeland Security department)
HUD
Departments of Education and Energy
That’s just a start.
I would expand this to include anything where every state has its own department. Every state has a Department of Transportation? Then why the fuck is there a federal one as well?
As I said, that’s just a start.
Yea, I gotcha… I’m just ranting.
It boggles my mind that so many people think that the world is going to fly off the axis and crash into the sun if you cut one penny of funding from anything.
Trump may not pass the Libertarian Purity Test™, but to his credit, he’s one of the few presidents to actually ask why we’re spending money on this or that.
But, but, but, things are HORRIBLE. At least according to a few people:
“Shit is pretty fucking fucked up right now.
I mean, it just is. Look around. This country, and by proxy the world, is a hot, hot mess. It’s like a preschool where all the toddlers are drunk and have been given power tools, oh, and also, they’re not toddlers but actually tiny grifters pretending to be toddlers, and they don’t just have power tools, but also, THE POWER TO REWRITE AMERICAN POLICY AND LAW AND THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM FOR SEVERAL GENERATIONS AND…”
And:
“Add to this economic policies that seem designed to hasten a collapse rather than prevent one. Oh, and there are also plans to defund the CDC. You know, the organization that helps prevent epidemics. Remember that big ebola epidemic in the U.S. a few years ago? THAT’S RIGHT YOU DON’T. Because there wasn’t one. Thank you, finely honed bureaucratic institutions that handle things like people bringing dangerous contagious diseases into the country.”
That is some quality tears.
The horror and anarchy.
Beer and cheese discovery for me!
I’m eating a chaourse (a soft-ripened bloomy rind with ash — it’s been in my refrigerator for about a month, so the outside of the cream line is starting to liquefy) and drinking a Great Lakes Brewing Co “Commodore Perry” IPA. The cheese makes the beer taste sweet and creamy. I haven’t noticed this radical of an interaction before. I’m thinking it’s the mold.
Same fungus as Camembert. I bet that is good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillium_camemberti
Plus you don’t get any bacterial infections?
Beer and food pairings can be quite interesting. Garret Oliver has written a book on the subject. Some basics are spicy food with hoppy bitter beers; fruit beers with chocolate desserts; and brown ales with roasted foods.
Browns including Newcastle go really well with hot wings.
The best pairing is not to drink beer with your food.
But +1 Sutter Home White Zinfandel, amirite?
I’ve told the story a couple of times before, but when my niece graduated from college, my sister threw a graduation/going away party for her. It was an outdoor grilling affair, and my sister put out three bottles of wine:
Chardonnay
Moscato
White Zin
Way to reinforce those stereotypes.
(Right now, I’m working my way through a Grenache for when I eat foods that go with red, and a Vouvray for foods that go with white.)
Actually, it’s a Spanish Garnacha, but I assume those are really the same grape.
It is. Grenache is also the primary grape for most Gigondas from France.
And also for Dr. Barolet Gevrey-Chambertin ’29.
I will admit that in my early 20s, I did go through many cases of SH White Zin. It’s a secret shame.
When Dad found out I like reds, he bought me a bottle of… White Merlot.
God it was awful.
Is that you Paul Giamatti?
Is that you Paul Giamatti?
You Know Who Else liked to repeat Paul Giamatti’s name?
I ate some Brie cheese once, and it made plain water taste really bitter.
I like a good stinky washed rind cheese with my water.
So you’re really eating Cheetos and washing it down with a Rolling Rock.
Cheetos are the one junk snack food that has no appeal for me.
Pretty much any other variant of fried cornmeal (with or without flavoring powder) is awesome.