Advanced Extract Brewing

So Jeremy and I had a couple of extract recipes we'd planned on brewing indoors, but the weather here in Chicago has been so unseasonably warm that we ended up being able to brew them outside this past weekend with our all-grain gear.

After doing exclusively all grain last summer and then dicking around in my kitchen with a couple of extract batches this winter, brewing an extract kit literally felt like cheating. (The extract recipe out of Brewing Classic Styles was only slightly less so.) It felt like last summer was really about dialing in our process and getting acclimated to the new equipment we inherited, bought or built along the way. With the exception of adding a whirlpool return to the immersion chiller, everything else that we use in brewing is familiar at this point.

Jeremy had a "Dead Ringer" kit from Northern Brewer which didn't get brewed last summer and we'd gone in on the ingredients to brew an extract version of Janet's Brown. (The hops and yeast from the original kit were tossed and replaced. Buying cascade and centennial by the pound makes it a far less painful decision to consciously throw away 6 ounces of hops after opening a bag and getting some of that barely present cheesy aroma.)

But back to the process - getting starters ripping 24 hours in advance and being able to use our gear outside made cranking these batches out wickedly efficient. From starting setup to having pitched the yeast and getting the carboys situated with blowoff tubes in the chest freezer was about four and a half hours. (And we probably lost about 30 minutes troubleshooting the propane burner putting out low heat.) The actual process of starting the water, crushing the specialty grains, steeping them, getting to boil, adding hops and extract per a schedule, and then chilling back down just flies by.

Not to mention the fact that the only variable which affects whether you hit your numbers in this process is if your evaporation rate in your software is correct or not. OG was dead on in both beers.

So after a largely painless brewday, I'm excited for the summer. We've got an ambitious plan for some awesome all grain batches. And I'm excited to taste the end product of these batches, bring it to club night, and enter it into competition in a couple of months. If these taste good to Jeremy, me, the club and fare well in competition, it'll be a great sign that we're starting to actually understand the inputs which matter to making great beer.

Extract Process (Revisited) Part II

So what better way to ring in the new year than by brewing a couple batches of beer?

As I mentioned in a prior post, I had been planning on doing a couple of extract batches this winter to try to stay out of the bitter Chicago cold but keep up on brewing.

I wrote up my process here ahead of time, which ended up working relatively well. Unfortunately, it's been quite a while since I brewed inside and I ran in to a couple of trouble spots on the first batch. (Imperial IPA from Brewing Classic Styles)

Firstly, I did a full 6.5 gallon boil instead of the 3 gallon boils I used to do on the stove. I remember reading somewhere that natural gas has significantly less heat energy than propane, but didn't really take that to heart. It took almost two hours to get it up to boiling, with two burners on my stove at full blast. That sucked.

Secondly, the cooling stick I bought ended up barely having any effect on the temperature of the wort at all... I probably should have thought out the physics on that one. 1 gallon of frozen water really doesn't have much of an impact on 6 gallons of boiling hot, sugar laden wort. It got the wort down to about 165 in 30 minutes. Not so good either.

All in all, six hours start to finish on an extract batch is pretty weak in my opinion.

So, I adjusted for those issues on the second batch of the long weekend. (Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout - recipe to follow.)

I did a 3 gallon boil, which made an enormous difference in the time to get the water up to temp. After finishing my boil, I used an old trick Alton Brown recommended on his episode of Good Eats about brewing. Dump a 7lb bag of ice plus a gallon of near-freezing distilled water into your wort as soon as you kill the heat. That alone dropped the three gallons of wort to 115F in about 3 minutes.

Three hours start to finish on the second batch. That's more like what I expect from extract brewing!

Extract Process (Revisited)

Faced with a Chicago winter (albeit an unseasonably warm and dry one - knock on wood) I've moved my brewing inside for the winter and switched back to extract as an experiment. Having developed a solid all-grain process, I'm going to try to incorporate what I've learned into a better extract / stovetop process. If you're just starting out, this should provide a good outline for a regular brew day. Just ignore the steps you don't know anything about or don't have equipment before.

So without further explanation, here's a first crack at it:

1. [24 hours ahead of brew day] Prepare my yeast starter
2. [24 hours ahead of brew day] Freeze the chill stick (I work in the restaurant industry at my day job...)
3. Get all of my ingredients and necessary equipment together
4. Fill the fermentor with sanitizer and sanitize the transfer hose, airlock, carboy bung, and oxygenation rig
5. Get my instruction sheet out (seriously)
6. Fire up the ten gallon kettle with a spigot and fill with 6.5 gallons of distilled or reverse osmosis water
7. Treat with Gypsum or Calcium Chloride only to accentuate bitterness or malt flavor, not to adjust pH. (Extract removes the need to worry about this.)
8. Steep the specialty grains while heating the brewing water up to a boil. (140F for 10-20 minutes. Although exact time and temp don't matter that much from what I understand.)
9. Ramp up to boil with my weak-ass gas range (It take two of the burners to get the ten gallon pot rolling.)
10. Add fermcap
11. Add the extract and hops per my recipe, making sure to add whirlfloc at 15 minutes
12. Kill the heat and whirlpool with the chill stick for about 15 minutes
13. Take a gravity reading and adjust for wort temperature
14. Transfer 5.5 gallons to the fermentor
15. Add more fermcap
16. Oxygenate for 15-30s, depending on the gravity of the beer
17. Pitch the starter once the wort has cooled to roughly 64F
18. Seal it up and drop it in the fermentation fridge, racking a small sample into a test jar with a hydrometer in it for watching the gravity.
19. Keep the temperature steady for the first 72 hours and then ramp up the temperature up 4-6 degrees F during the last 25% of fermentation. If the recipe calls for dry hopping, this is the time to do it.
20. Once fermentation is complete, let the beer sit for a few days at the final temperature, then cold crash in the fermentor to 34F. 
21. Let the beer sit for another 1-2 weeks on the yeast to let them do some further diacetyl cleanup and the other good work they do.
22. Rack 5 gallons of "bright" beer to a corny keg and force carbonate with CO2 to get to an appropriate level for the style.