Homemade

Guide to Homemade Wine, Beer, Cider & Mead

Alcoholic beverages; commonly beer and wines and made at home. Most often brews are made from brewing kits purchased at shops specialized in spirits. Cheap Draft features homebrew recipes, equipment requirements, and best practices needed to deliver the perfect batch!

We use the hydrometer in brewing to ascertain how much sugar the wort contains and to find out how much has been used up. This enables those who will be bottling fermenting beers to do so when there is just the right amount of sugar left to give the beer the required gas and to make sure that there is not enough sugar left to give rise to so much fermentation that the bottles explode.

We might argue that if we add a pound of sugar we know how much we have added and therefore know how much the wort contains. But it must be remembered that enzyme action has converted starches to sugar, the amount depending on the amount of malt used. Sometimes other materials are added to give starches into the wort; in this case we have no means of knowing how much sugar the action of enzymes has produced. By using the hydrometer we are able to find out, though the beginner need not bother with it unless he wants to know for sure how much alcohol he has produced.

The beginner would do well to make a few brews without using the hydrometer at the start. But if he is making bottled beers by bottling the nearly. finished-fermenting beer, he must use it to be on the safe side.

Now let me explain how it is used. Water has the gravity of 1000, often written simply as 1. We use water and its gravity of 1000 as a comparison - to put it simply. Therefore, as compared with water, or having a specific gravity of - whatever the figure might be. Now any liquid thicker than water will have a specific gravity of above 1000. The figure above the 1000 in our case refers to the amount of sugar in the wort. Therefore if we start off wi th a specific gravity of 1070, it means that the sugar content of the wort registers 70 on the hydrometer. All we have to do is take a sample of the wort in a trial jar supplied with the hydrometer, or a lager glass if you have not a proper trial jar. Let the hydrometer slide into the sample so that it floats clear of the sides of the jar. Make sure there is enough sample to float the hydrometer. Stand the jar on a level surface and note at what figure the liquid cuts across the stem of the hydrometer. This will be the figure representing the sugar content.

Comparing these to figures with those in the in Specific Gravity / Alcohol Percentage and you will see how much alcohol will be produced from the sugar. If you decide you want a stronger or weaker beer, all you have to do is to either add more sugar to increase the reading or add water to reduce it. Bear in mind that the more sugar the wort contains the higher the hydrometer will float. The less it contains the lower it will sink. Thus, as the sugar is used up by the yeast from day to day, the lower the readings will be from day to day.

It is not likely that you will take day to day readings, but if you did the result would appear like this:

At this stage, fermentation will begin to slow down so that the reading will drop by only one or two degrees a day. When the reading has finally dropped to 1.005 it is safe to bottle the still-fermenting beer. A reading as high as 1.008 is sometimes safe, but beginners would be wise to bottle their beers when the reading is 1.005 as sometimes unforeseen factors give rise to more gas being produced than expected. As their experience grows, and if they decide they want more gas, they can bottle when the reading is 1.006 or 1.007.

Note. I must mention so that confusion is avoided that readings as I have shown them are often written without the decimal point and appear thus 1006 instead of 1.006 or 1007 instead of 1.007. Don’t let this bother you if you happen to come across this elsewhere, as the figures mean the same whichever way they are written.