All Grain Brewing

All-grain brewing, to the uninitiated, is where beer is brewed from the basic ingredients, no beer kits, no malt extract. Essentially doing what commercial breweries do but on a much smaller scale. There's many ways to do an all-grain brew and plenty of ways to make it more complicated, but here's a way to get started.

Take two, 5 Gal, brew bins, one with a tap and one without. On the base of the one without a tap, drill many holes with a 2mm drill bit. This bin then fits inside the one fitted with a tap. This forms the container in which you mix hot water and the various grains with and is known as a mash tun. Alternatively proprietary mash tuns can be bought.

When following one of the recipes on this site, heat up the volume of water required (usually 23 litres) to 80 C using whatever means you have, be it a brewing boiler or one or two large stock pots. Pour this water into the mashtun and wrap with some insulating material - blankets, sleeping bags, bubble wrap etc - and leave for the heat from the water to pass into the brew bins and insulation (don't forget to insulate above and below the mash tun.) When the water temperature settles down to 72 C (strike heat) stir in the grains, gradually, avoiding creating dry pockets of grain. Put the lid on and replace any insulation, then leave for 90 minutes. This 90 minutes is known as the mash and is where starches in the grain get converted to sugars for fermentation.

The strike heat I’ve given here, of 72 C, is a bit arbitrary but should do for starters. The strike heat you need can be calculated and takes into account the volume of liquor, the mass of grain, its temperature and your desired temperature for your mash. Click here for more details.

Once this mash is complete, it is time to collect the sweet liquid (known as the wort) by opening the tap. Collect the first two cloudy jugfuls and return them to the top of the grain bed to be recirculated. The rest can be collected into a boiler or stock pot(s). If the boiler has a tap, make sure you fit a hop strainer onto the back of it before running the wort into it. Whilst running off the wort, sprinkle the top of the grain bed with water at 70 C or more until you collect your final volume. To get the most out of your mash, you could continue to sparge and collect wort until the specific gravity of the run off gets down to 1.010..

Bring the wort to the boil and add your hops, boiling for 90 minutes. 15 to 10 minutes from the end of the boil, you can add Irish Moss or a product like protafloc to give you a better finish in the final product. If you are using an immersion chiller, immerse it in the wort at this point. At the end of the boil you can chill the wort by running cold water through an immersion chiller (a coil of copper piping or similar) down to the temperature range for the yeast you are to use. If not using a chiller, just run off the hopped wort through a hop strainer or sieve into a clean and sanitized brew bin. Pour chilled wort with a bit of a drop to help aerate the liquid, which will help the yeast.

Volume may be lost during the boil so make up to the required volume with cold water. If not already chilled you could make it up to volume with ice, to help the temperature come down. A large volume of liquid like this, if not using a chiller, can take a few hours, or overnight, to cool to a temperature suitable for adding the yeast. Everything coming into contact with the beer from now on should be clean and sanitized / sterilised. If cooling in the brew bin without a chiller, once the temperature is low enough to add the yeast, aerate the wort by vigorous stirring for a few minutes.

You can measure the original gravity (amount of sugar it the wort) now, if you like, to help you work out how strong the beer will be later, by using a hydrometer.

Add the yeast as per pack instructions. Leave to ferment at the required temperature for the yeast you are using for about a week, until the final gravity is reached or when fermentation activity has calmed down. Using a hydrometer at this point to measure the specific gravity will allow you to calculate the strength of the beer and will give you an indication of if it is ready to bottle or keg.