20l Stovetop All Grain Aussie Lager

[Nick JD]

In the "Move to All Grain for Thirty Bucks" thread there were a lot of comments asking how to do "full sized" brews and not little 9L ones on the stovetop. This is a tutorial thread to show the limits of what's comfortably possible on the stovetop and how with little effort you can make 20L of full-strength beer with only a 19L pot and a stove.

There are other great guides very like this one. My intentions aren't to displace them but only to stand alongside them, and possibly advance those who followed my last tutorial thread in a familiar way.

Suppose we'd better start with some grain. But first, The World's Simplest Recipe:

4kg Barrett Burston Ale Malt (don't worry that it's an ale malt for a lager - it doesn't matter and it is low in DMS precursers)
27g Pride of Ringwood Hops

Here's 1kg of grain.

And the Ol' Faithful grinder filled with as much as it'll take.

Lid on.

The result of about 10 seconds of grinding.

After a couple of minutes we have 1kg of ground grain. This level of mincing the grain is okay for BIAB, but not for traditional systems.

Here's a close up photo of the consistency.

 

[levin_ae92]

So it doesnt take you long to grind all 4kg in that little grinder?

 

[Nick JD]

While we're grinding up the malt we can put about 12L of hot tap water in the pot and turn the element to eleven. It takes about 15 minutes to reach strike temperature with the lid on (in this case 70C, for a mash temperature of 65C).

Here's the 4kg of grain ready to go.

And this can sometimes happen.

I let it go past strike temperature by a couple of degrees. Some people like to add a bit of cold water here, but I chose to just pour a beer and wait for it to come back down to 70C. Didn't take long with some stiring.

So it's in with the bag and the grain. Then it's stirred up a bit to get out the bigger lumps and covered in 4 towels for insulation. We can then write down the "Mash In" time.

This mash is going for 90 minutes.

 

[Nick JD]

So it doesnt take you long to grind all 4kg in that little grinder?

If I hurry I can do a kg in about 2 minutes.

 

[levin_ae92]

I'd be interested to see what effinciency you get. I follow the same procedure with grain normally milled and get about 65% effic

 

[Nick JD]

Time to kill here, so may as well get some hops ready.

Here's some PoR which is the staple Aussie hop that's in every megaswill beer except XXXX. It makes your beer taste like Aussie beer without fail.

One thing to note though, is that Carlton use extraction processes for their hops so an Aussie Lager made with real hops will taste more "hoppy" than one made with hop extracts - this is a good thing IMO.

27g are weighed.

Time to relax for 90 minutes, drink a couple and watch TV - preferably sport.

 

[Nick JD]

I'd be interested to see what effinciency you get. I follow the same procedure with grain normally milled and get about 65% effic

I did this all yesterday, and am now writing it up so you won't have to wait 90 minutes, although I am a slow typer.

 

[Nick JD]

For these big stovetop mashes I like to do two things: take the pot off the stove and put it on the bench to finish the mash, and bring up about 6L of water to 75+C. I don't do this for my smaller mashes, but for the bigger ones I think it's worth it to do some "sparging" (or my version of it!).

Here's the hot water in another big pot (a 15L one).

When the mash is finished we basically lift the bag out and hold it up to let it drain - until my arms start to freakin hurt from holding it up.

Then we dump it in the other smaller pot, open it up and let it sit in there for a few minutes stirring the crap out of it, effectively doing exactly what it was doing in the larger pot. It's lifted out of this pot and squeezed, and then hung up to drain over the green brewer's bucket.

All the sweet, sweet barley sugaz are combined into the one original pot and heat is applied at maximum warp.

We can now see how we did. [Note: it's not good practice to put your hydrometer in your pot. I do it but probably shouldn't - I warm it up with the hot tap first and it never goes in hotter than 75C.]

That's roughly 15L of 1.042 at 64C - when we run that through some calculations that's 15L of 1.060 at 20C.

That's pretty much what we want because diluted to 20L, that's going to be beer with about 4.5% alc, like a Carlton.

We should (or could) really add about 300g of sugar at this stage to have an authentic Aussie Lager - but that's up to you. I'm leaving it out of this one because this is an Aussie Lager with a bit more body than usual. A few hundred grams of dextrose would pop it up to 5.0% and thin it out nicely if you are going for a closer copy. I like beers with a bit of bootie.

 

[Nick JD]

So the pot is on its way to the boil. I put the lid on for this part because I can hear the sound change when it's close to boiling (it goes quieter like a kettle). I don't recommend lidding it but it does speed it up a bit.

So let's get the hops in a bag. Notice they are in a big bag - nice and loose like a tea bag.

When it hits the boil we can chuck the bag in. I used a peg to keep it on the side but it's cool to let it float off.

Here's how loose the hops should be in the bag once they have soaked and expanded.

As you can see we've already got a bit of evaporation happening after about 30 minutes. Don't worry about these things because it's easy to add more water.

The water at this stage is only there to hold the sugaz and to extract the hop acids.

I forgot to mention that we're using about 25% more hops because we're boiling in 1.060, not 1.040. That's about $1 more hops, so no worries.

 

[Nick JD]

Now we need to make sure not to forget this stuff.

It coagulates the proteins in the boil and makes them drop out and sink, so we can leave them behind when we transfer to the fermenter. I used half a tablet mainly because I can't work out how to quarter them. They smell like the sea. It's crumbled in with about ten minutes to go.

So here we are at the end of the boil. I've taken out the hop bag. We've lost a lot of liquid but no worries, but we haven't lost any sugaz - water's free and readily available - we'll add some more soon.

Now we can quick chill, or no chill the wort at this stage - but I put some gladwrap over the top and let it sit on some tiles overnight to cool. It works fine for me.

 

[Nick JD]

Hey presto, it's the next day (today).

We sanitize the fermenter and funnel and pour the contents of the pot (cooled to ambient temperature ~22C) into the "fermenter" (a "20L" camping water container) that holds about 23L.

As you can see it only comes to halfway-ish.

But we lost a few liters of water in the boil, but no sugaz, although we did leave behind about 500ml of crud (break material) in the pot.

So now we top up the fermenter to 20L with cold tap water and bung it in the fermenting fridge with the temperature set to 11C because we're using a pack of 34/70 yeast.

I would have taken an OG but as you can see the water is sitting on top of the wort! I'll have to give it a while to let it homogenize and then get an OG.

By the time the yeast kicks off it will have dropped down to a more lager-appropriate temperature.

I'll post some more stuff when we come to FG, and add gelatin and polyclar - so we can be drinking nice, bright Aussie Lager.

Cheers. :icon_cheers:

 

[AussieJosh]

Thanks for this mate! although im not a huge fan of "aussie lager" im gonna give this a crack! i wanna move away from kits and extracts

 

[manticle]

Nick has shown you the technique and a simple recipe. You can replace the recipe using this technique.

My understanding is that you are a fan of coopers so if you simply use recultured coopers yeast with this recipe and ferment at ale temps rather than lager temps, you'll probably come close.

 

[Nick JD]

My understanding is that you are a fan of coopers so if you simply use recultured coopers yeast with this recipe and ferment at ale temps rather than lager temps, you'll probably come close.

Very close.

 

[MCT]

We should (or could) really add about 300g of sugar at this stage to have an authentic Aussie Lager - but that's up to you. I'm leaving it out of this one because this is an Aussie Lager with a bit more body than usual. A few hundred grams of dextrose would pop it up to 5.0% and thin it out nicely if you are going for a closer copy. I like beers with a bit of bootie

Nice job doing a full batch on the stove.

Just to let you know, that by adding more sugar, it won't 'thin' your beer out, it will still have the same body.
When people talk about using sugar to thin a beer out, it is using sugar and using less malt to get the same OG.

Just a common misconception that people often make.

 

[Nick JD]

Just a common misconception that people often make.

That's true.

I've added 400g of dextrose to this recipe before and it really seems to thin it out. Maybe alcohol's SG of 0.790 can make a bit of difference to FG.

You've raised an interesting point - if 5% of the beer is 0.790 SG, how many points of SG do the water and unfermentable sugars represent as a ratio? I would think beer would be at least 90% water ... raise the alcohol by 1% and you're lowering the body by a bit.

 

[MCT]

I agree it would make a difference, I just think don't think a huge difference.
It is an interesting point I haven't really thought through. How much actual alcohol (volume) would be created by adding 400g of sugar? If we knew that we could work out how that added to say 20 litres of beer with a gravity of say 1.012 would affect it.
I reckon missing mash temps would play a bigger role in the body of the beer. And yeast health.

Anyway enough thread hyjacking, I'm still impressed you did a full batch on the stove :beer:

 

[jimmysuperlative]

Superb tutorial Nick! Love your pics ... :beerbang:

 

[Florian]

Well done Nick. It's always good to see simple step by step instructions combined with pics. Your "30 bucks thread" has inspired me to do my very first all grain tomorrow. I like the idea of 9l batches to experiment, but once I've found a good enough recipe I will no doubt adapt your full batch approach.

Florian

Edit:spelling

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Nice thread Nick - a simple and easy to follow method for the stovetop brigade.

one little thing that is unimportant but a process step that might improve yield slightly. If you add dilution water to your pot before you cool it, then the 500ml of trub etc you leave behind will still be 500ml in volume, but contain less of your sugars. Not so important in normal gravity brewing, but in high gravity brewing it'll make a difference.

You ended up with slightly less than half a cube of wort, so say 11-12L in that pot post boil? And you left 500ml behind - thats 0.5/11 x 100 = 4.5% of your total sugars lost to trub. Top the pot up to 18L before cooling and its 0.5/18 x 100 = 2.8% instead. So you an get back a couple of % efficiency basically for free.

Not sure if or how that can mesh in with your method - or if its worth the bother - but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Nice post

TB