All grain brewing

Kit brews are easy to do and give good results but they never quite get rid of that "home brew" taste. If you want something that tastes really good then you have to move towards craft brewing, which means you'll be brewing from grains!

Making an all grain beer is a bit more work than making a beer from a kit. The wort that you normally just pour out of a can has to be made first and that will take many more take hours! You will also need a little extra equipment but it will all be worthwhile as the resulting beer will be far superior to a kit beer.

What follow are some basic instructions for making a very nice all grain beer, it came out at about 5.3% and tastes amazing.

Equipment

I've kept the extra equipment to a minimum but you will need something to boil up your brew in (known as a copper) and an insulated container to mash the grains (known as a mash tun).

Your copper can be anything that is large enough to hold your water, 20 litres is a good size. I use a large aluminium cooking pot with a lid that holds about 18 litres.

For your mash tun you can convert a picnic cool box, some homebrew shops will sell these ready converted for a good price. If you wish to make your own there are plenty of good articles on the Internet on how to do this. It basically involves fitting a tap and some form of strainer.

Other than those new items you will need the same equipment as you would use to make a kit brew.

Ingredients

4 kg Crushed Pale Malt
600 g Crushed Crystal Malt
300 g Flaked Barley
100 g Challenger Hops (for bittering)
30 g Golding Hops (for aroma)
1 pkt English Ale Yeast
1 tsp Irish Moss

Buying Ingredients

I've listed the grains in the ingredients as "crushed" but you could buy them uncrushed and crush them yourself, many people do, but the process is a fine art and knowing exactly how much to crush a particular grain is probably best left to the malting house or your local home brew shop.


You can buy grains in all kinds of quantities but you'll probably pick a base grain that you use for the majority of your mix, the mix of grains is known as the "grist". I use a Marris Otter Pale Malt as my base grain and so I buy this in 25 kg sacks. The other grains I add to make my grist, I buy in smaller 500g bags.

You can buy your hops fresh, if you're lucky enough to have somewhere near by that sells them. Most people buy them vacuum packed.

Yeast you can also buy fresh, some home brew shops will sell it as a liquid, some as dried yeast in a packet. All work well but each type of yeast will give a different taste to your beer.

Method

In a large pan (your copper) heat up about 10 litres of water to 72C. This is the water that you will mix with your grains to extract the malt.

Next mix up your grist, if you have a big enough container (such as a dry fermentation vessel) you should weigh out and mix together all your grains. Next add the grains and the water to your mash tun. They need to be added slowly at the same time and any clumps need to be broken up as you go. This is a two person job really but you should end up with a nice porridge type mixture in your mash tun. Don't be tempted to stir it up too much or you'll release too much starch and run the risk of ending up with a cloudy beer.

Leave the mash tun for about 1 hour and 20 minutes, this will allow the malts to be extracted and create fermentable sugars inside your tun. It's best to keep the temperature as stable as possible so cover the mash tun if you can with a warm fleece or blanket.

While the mash is going heat up about 5 litres of water to about 75C, you will use this for sparging soon.

Once the time is up drain the first 2 litres of your wort out of the tun, this will be quite cloudy so tip it back into the top of the tun. Start draining again into a fermentation vessel. Keep going until you see the grains drying out on top, then take the sparging water and use it to keep the grain at the top of the tun wet. You can pour it in with a jug or even better a small (sterilised) watering can.

Once your sparging water is all used up it's time to pour your wort into your now empty copper and start it boiling. Keep the mash tun draining and when it has finished you can add ant extra wort collected to your copper.

When the wort comes to the boil, add the bittering hops (100g Challenger used in this example) and leave it on a rolling boil for about 45 minutes stirring occasionally. Then add your Irish Moss and boil it for a further 15 minutes and then take it off the heat. Add your aroma hops (30g Goldings used here) and leave for 20 mins, stir, then leave to steep for another 20 minutes.

That's it your wort is now ready, pour it into the fermentation vessel and top up with cold water to 25 litres. Then leave it to cool to about 20C, once the wort is cool enough you can pitch your yeast. Check the instructions on your particular yeast as you may need to create a yeast starter.