First beer brew general newbieness

[Bunneez]

Hey, so I'm new to brewing and my only experience is as of this year with cider. So for my first beer brew I'm trying an extract.

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/5920/zombie-dust-clone-extract

I bought a new fermenter to my cider one, My research isn't deep but I have read several parts of John Palmer's how to brew pdf / a bunch of youtube.

I've got some different ingredients to the clone's recipe as my local brew shop didn't have some of the recipe's contents they are;

Briess CBW Golden Light Pure Malt Extract
SimCoe instead or Citra.

Some things I'm confused about are the boil / temperature.

So, thinking I needed grain bags I went to buy some but I was advised to boil the steeping grains in a separate pot to the boil pot at 70 - 80 degrees for 20mins then add it to the main boil.

So at the start of my 60 minute boil I should add the grains that have been extracted of juices and stuff in my separate pot (filter out grains) also add the pure malt extract at the start of 60min boil.

With adding the hops SimCoe, do I add them in order as the clone suggests? 1oz at 1min, 1oz at 5min, 1oz at 10min, 1oz at 15...

Is "first wort" when you have finished putting the boil into the fermenter?

That's sorta all I wanna know about the boil but with temperature...




Being in Canberra, it gets kinda cold and I've been writing down the temperature by the area inside my house that I want to let the brew ferment in.

Morning room temperature would range between 7 - 12 with outside temp being 0 - -4

after the gas fire has been on for an hour or so room temp would rise to 17 then later at 19 our fire stays on throughout the day / goes off around 10pm - 11:30pm.

I took a reading at 0445 one morning @ 12 inside / -2 outside. I forget the date.

Today or Tommorrow seems like a good week to brew as it's going to be 7 - 4 degrees at night until Friday.

Should I invest in a heat pad? My local brew shop was very convinced I would not need one which was also their advice when I was brewing cider, but my Dad is pretty dead certain it is needed.

Thanks any advice is appreciated.

edit: I have skim through the FAQ thread

 

[Rocker1986]

Hi Bunneez.

A couple of things. Do not boil the grains themselves. Simply heat some water in a pot (I wish these things were in bloody metric) to about 70C, and throw in the cracked grains for about 30-40 minutes, i.e. steep them. Then strain the grains into another pot that you'll use to boil the wort. In other words, it's the liquid (wort) from the grains that is boiled, not the grains themselves.You'll probably need a few litres of water for steeping those grains - although Munich malt needs to be mashed. If you can keep the temperature of it stable around 66-67C once the grains are in, then it's effectively a mash anyway really.

The timings of the hops are how long before the end of the boil they are added. Basically what you'd do is to set a timer for 60 minutes, start it when the wort comes to the boil, then when there's 15 minutes left, add that hop addition, when there's 10 minutes left, add the next lot, and so on. First wort refers to hops that are added before the boil. What you do is once you've tipped the liquid from the grain steep/mash into your main boil pot, you throw some hops into it, then begin bringing it to the boil. Don't start bringing anything to the boil until you've got all the wort you're planning on boiling in the main pot.

I would definitely get a heat source of some sort. Those temps are too cold for ale yeast, it'll just sit there and do nothing. Not sure what the brew shop person was smoking... :blink:

 

[Droopy Brew]

1st tip- get a grain bag or some Swiss Voile from a fabric shop. Put your steeping grains in this and as Rocker has said, add to about 4L of 70C water for half an hour.
It is far easier pulling out the grain bag than trying to strain out grains.

2nd tip- dont do a full volume boil. You can if you want to but if you have the equipment to do this you may as well go the whole hog and do an all grain brew in the bag. When I was doing extract my boil was maybe 5-6L. This will reduce your hop utilisation so you need to compensate by adding more hops- see tip 3.

3rd tip- learn how to use this-

• Kit & Extract Beer Designer V4.1.xls 1.11MB 3045 downloads

Plug all of the numbers and ingredients from your recipe into it and then you can make adjustments to hops etc to make sure you are hitting the required IBUs.

With the hop timings, the minutes refer to how much time is left. So a 60 minute addition is at the very start of a 60 minute boil. A 1 minute addition goes in with only a minute left of the boil (ie after 59 minutes) and so on. As Rocker said- first wort addition goes in before you bring the wort to a boil.


Definitely get a heat pad. Once you start getting below 14-15C your ale yeast will go on the nod.

 

[Bunneez]

Thanks for the replies, the brew shop guy was saying that the 23L body of liquid would take a long time to reach room temperature.

 

[Rocker1986]

Thanks for the replies, the brew shop guy was saying that the 23L body of liquid would take a long time to reach room temperature.

It will, but once it does it won't warm up again, and if the fermentation hasn't finished yet then the yeast will go to sleep and you'll have to warm it up to kick them back into action again. Better off keeping it around 18-20C the whole time if you can. Probably bump it up to 22ish in the later stages to encourage it to finish off properly.