Some Ways You Can Brew Beer (#5 of 30)
Has this ever happened to you? You are 30 seconds into a conversation and haven’t told the other person you brew your own beer yet.
“I BREW MY OWN BEER” you exclaim while they were rambling on about their weekend plans or something. This declarative statement is often followed by a long awkward pause. I assume the pause is because they aren’t quite sure what you mean. “He brews his on beer? How? In his kitchen? His garage? What does brewing your own beer look like?”
It can be tough to know where to start when it comes to homebrewing, especially with so many different types and levels of brew systems out there. In today’s post, we'll help you fill that awkward silence with more information your buddy definitely cares about.
Regardless of how simple or advanced your system is, your brew day will typically consist of (at minimum) a mash, a lauter, and a boil. Many other steps exist depending on how intense you want your brew day to be, but let’s keep it simple. Of course a large amount of the brewing process revolves around fermentation, but for this post we will focus more on the first three.
Mash: When brewing beer, the mash is the process of mixing malted grains with hot water to create a sugary liquid called wort that will eventually become beer.
Lauter: Lautering is the process of separating the liquid wort from the solid grains after the mash.
Boil: Once the wort has been separated, it is then boiled with hops to add flavor, aroma, and bitterness to the beer, and to sterilize the liquid before fermentation.
With all of this in mind, lets get into it!
Extract Brewing:
Extract brewing is where most people will get their start. The “system” is a large pot and (usually) your kitchen stove. Extract kits come with Dry Malt Extract (DME) or Liquid Malt Extract (LME)…or both! You will also see people do a “partial mash” where they utilize extract and traditional grain in a muslin bag that gets steeped like a big tea bag.
The Mash: For extract and partial brewing, your mash consists of heating a pot of water and steeping your grains.
The Lauter: Very straight forward here, if you mixed in LME or DME, you have nothing to “separate”. If you are steeping some grains in a muslin bag, your lauter is lifting the bag out and letting the wort naturally drain out.
The Boil: Like making spaghetti or whatever else you use your stove for, your boil consists of turning up the heat and waiting for the bubbles.
Brew-In-A-Bag
With most systems going forward, they can typically be electric or gas. The system I use is an electric brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) system from Spike called the Solo. My “bag” is stainless steel basket with cuts at the bottom (you may be able to see how it sits on top of the brew kettle in the picture above). The more traditional BIAB system is exactly what it sound like. The picture above from Hazy and Hoppy shows a large bag filled with grain on top of a kettle.
The Mash: Like the muslin bag in the previous section, the bag or metal basket lets the grains steep at proper temperature and allows for easy removal when it is time to lauter and boil.
The Lauter: For the Spike Solo, the metal basket has hooks on the back end. This lets you lift it out and set it over the kettle to allow the remaining wort to drain down. Depending on the size of the system/brew day, traditional BIAB brewers will hand lift the bag or use a hoist to drain the wort.
The Boil: Inherent to the term, the “Boil” is pretty similar across all systems. How you get to the boil can vary. For my system, I use the control panel on the far left and set the temperature output to 100%. If you are using a gas system, you crank up the heat.
3 Vessel System
Image courtesy of BrewHardware.com
Most 3 Vessel systems I see out there utilize the HERMS method (so I apologize if I’m omitting other common systems). HERMS stands for Heat Exchange Recirculating Mash System. As the handy graphic from BrewHardware.com shows, the Hot Liquor Tank submerges the HERMS coil with only water (the wort will never interact with the water here). The heating element in the HLT holds the water at the precise temperature needed for your mash. Then, in the mash tun, grain and water combine to create wort. The wort is pumped out of the mash tun, through the HERMS coil in the HLT. This is where the “Heat Exchange” part of the HERMS process happens. Since the wort travels through the coil, and the coil is submerged in the water, the wort and water should reach equilibrium by the time it reaches the out port. You’ll notice that the wort and grain never come in contact with the actual heating element in the HLT, so the possibility of scorching the good stuff is greatly reduced. This differs from a Recirculating Infusion Mash System (RIMS) like my Solo, where the heating element is in direct contact with the wort.
The Mash: Maybe I beat this one to death, but the mash in a 3-Vessel system takes place in the Mash Tun
The Lauter: Many 3-Vessels have a “false bottom” in the mash tun. This allows the grain to sit on top of a metal/mesh like a strainer. When you move the wort over to the boil kettle, the tube resides below the false bottom so you are getting all wort and no grain (hopefully)
The Boil: The boil happens in the boil kettle. Hopefully no questions there.
I’m sure I missed something major here, but that should be enough to give you an idea about how homebrewers scale. If you are working on a different system please let me know in the comments. I’m always interested in learning more about brew day set ups. Thanks for reading!
