Making Beers with Grain Malts
As will be seen, this chapter deals with a slightly more elaborate method of making beers than when malt extracts are being used. It is in using the following recipes that you will be following very closely the commercial brewer. Do not let this worry you. Just follow directions, but read first all I have had to say about commercial brewing; you will then understand why you are working in this fashion and why it is necessary to do so if good beers are to result.
Note. Do not forget to crack grain malts before use.
All the recipes in this chapter are designed to produce four gallons of beer -less the little that will inevitably be lost as deposit at various stages; so you should finish up with fifteen quart bottles of finished beer. The reason for working in four-gallon lots is that not only is the mash tun (polythene pail) most convenient in size, but also because the 50-watt heater recommended will keep this amount of mash at the required temperature at negligible power consumption. Later, when the mash is strained into the fermenting vessel and becomes wort and is made up to four gallons, the recommended fermenting vessel is also of ideal size.
However, there is nothing to prevent you making two-gallon lots as initial experiments if you want to. But because the heater might make half the amount of mash too hot, you will have to start off with two gallons instead of one. The procedure when making two gallons would be as follows: reduce all ingredients by half. Put as much of the two gallons of water (liquor) as you can into the vessel with the ingredients. Then when this is strained, for boiling, the total amount of liquor can be made up to two gallons.
If you alter the amounts of ingredients to suit a special whim of your own bear in mind that:
- The more malt you use the more flavour and body you will obtain.
- If more body is produced, more bitterness will be required to balance it to some extent.
- Additional hops will produce this necessary bitterness.