First Brew Day

Brew Day!

After literally months of waiting for our Grainfather brewing equipment to arrive, it is all finally here and it was time to do our first "proper" brew. We've dabbled with grain+extract brewing with mixed success, so it was inevitable that we graduated to all-grain brewing.

We've committed pretty heavily to the Grainfather system, having forked out for:

• Grainfather Connect - this is the combined mash tun and boil kettle
• Grainfather Conical Fermenter - as its name suggests, the fermentation vessel (FV)
• Grainfather Sparge Water Heater - essentially a glorified tea urn

Sam also bought me a very cool gadget that I had been drooling over for some time now - a Tilt Hydrometer. This is a small cylinder that you drop into your FV and it continually monitors both the specific gravity and the temperature of your fermenting brew, broadcasting the data via bluetooth. I will no doubt blog about this more in future!

The plan was to install all the equipment in our Brewery Shed but that too is massively delayed (probably around November now) so we've cleared out the garage and turned half of it into our picobrewery. My poor Fanny - banished to the driveway :( 

Preparation

The day before, we spent a good few hours familiarising ourselves with the equipment and giving it a jolly good clean to get rid of any manufacturing residue. I also spent far too long installing a new fluorescent tube light in the garage to give us plenty of light to work with.

Brew Day

You would have thought that, given the hours and hours of GF videos I had watched on YouTube (particular shout out to David Heath), I'd have been positively blasé about the whole process. But I was instead filled with nerves and worry. New brewing technique, new brewing kit, new brewing ingredients, new brewing location... No pressure then.

Rather than boring you with a detailed description of the day, I'll just summarise the various stages we went through:

• mash water - this involves filling the GF with the required volume of water and getting it to the right temperature (the strike temperature - typically around 67C)
• mash in - this is where you gradually add the grain to the water and make sure it is properly stirred in
• mash - the GF constantly recirculates the wort (sugary, malty liquid) from the bottom of the mash tun to the top of the grain bed; this typically lasts about an hour
• mash out - a slight rise in temperature (75C) for about 10 minutes to halt the chemical conversion of starch to sugar and to make the wort a bit more free-flowing
• sparge - raising the grain basket to let it drain into the boil kettle and taking the water heated in the tea urn a couple of litres at a time, pouring it over the grain to rinse it of all its final goodies and to bring your wort up to the required volume
• the boil - as you might expect, this involves removing the grain basket and bringing the wort up to 100C; this does a number of things including sanitisation, boiling off unwanted chemicals and helping proteins to coagulate, hopefully making a clearer beer
• hop additions - you add hops at various stages of the boil to get different levels of bitterness, flavour and aromas; there are infinite possibilities here which is what makes craft beer so interesting and varied
• sanitisation - everything your wort touches after the boil needs to be sanitised; this is primarily the FV, so I took the hour-long boil as an opportunity to do this
• chill and transfer - once your boil is over and you've added any final hops in a "hop stand", you need to chill your wort quickly - to again help clarify your beer and get it to a temperature that your yeast likes (always be nice to your yeast - it is she who turns your wort into beer). We did this using the included GF counterflow chiller as we transferred to the FV
• start fermentation - add the yeast to the FV, give it a good vigorous mix, add the airlock, set the target temperature (20C for this yeast) and sit back
• clean - not so quick on the sitting back, you! Until you've got bigger premises and a crew of eager minions, you need to empty the grain basket, get all the residual gunk out of the boil kettle and give it all a good clean

Much of this procedure is effortlessly controlled by the GF. With its accompanying smartphone app and beeping control box, if it were any simpler I really don't think you could take any credit for the beer you produce! Although I am eagerly awaiting the equipment cleaning app.

The Recipe

I nearly forgot the most important thing: what is my first brew?!

Using the rather excellent Brewfather web app, I created a recipe for a fairly generic American-style IPA using my favourite hop - Citra. As a first brew, I really just wanted a simple beer that I knew I'd like - if it worked - and if I didn't like it I'd hopefully be able to do some problem determination for the next batch.

For those interested, the recipe is:

• 5.5kg Maris Otter pale malt
• 250g Munich I malt
• 200g oats
• 80g Citra hops (40g at start of boil, 40g at hop stand)
• 18g Fermentis US-05 yeast

Conclusions

The end-to-end brew day was much longer than I had expected - it must have been about 5 hours in all. I'm sure this will get quicker as we do more brews, and in all honesty spending half a day in the garage with shiny stainless steel and the ingredients that make beer - well, what's not to like?!

The day is also very up-and-down from a stress perspective. There are short bursts of frantic activity followed by lots of waiting around, drinking beer. Then just as you've slipped into an alcohol-fuelled state of laid-back self-satisfaction ("I'm a brewer!"), the GF will beep at you and it's back to panic stations.

The counterflow chiller worked really, really well. It was amazing to feel the very hot "in" tube and compare it to the cool "out" tube - all powered by the counterflow chiller and water straight from the tap. Compare that to our kitchen brewing process of using countless ice blocks in the sink...

There are a couple of notable pain points I need to figure out:

• getting the mesh plates into the grain basket is a right royal pain in the arse. Both Sam and I tried for 15 minutes each and every time the rubber gasket round the edge kept sliding off. Maybe it's just a technique thing: we need more practise.
• despite putting that white tape around the tap thread in the garage and tightening it to within a micron of its (well, my) life, water still dribbles out of it during the counterflow chilling process: annoying, need to change the connection
• filling the FV with the valve on the bottom still open isn't ideal: get a better brain

There are a couple of things that we have already ordered to make the brew day a bit easier and/or better. These are:

• a hop spider - this is a mesh cage that sits in your wort, into which you throw your hops. The idea is that all the oils, aromas and flavours of the hops can mix with your wort, but the majority of the sludge left behind will be captured in the spider and not drop down and clog your filter
• a wooden mash paddle - the stainless steel paddle we bought is great for the boil stage of the process, but when adding the grains to the mash, it gets more and more difficult to mix the concoction. I have seen chunky wooden paddles on countless videos, so we've ordered one

There will no doubt be countless more "improvements" (gadgets) to be purchased going forward.

Two final observations:

In retrospect, I needn't have stressed about brew day. It all went pretty well, with no major screw-ups.  The sanitisation of the FV and the cleaning of all the GF stuff wasn't too bad. I think the key here is doing it all at a leisurely pace. I definitely wouldn't want to do a brew day if I had a deadline or appointment. Maybe as we get better at it...

Finally, and most importantly, I couldn't have done this without Sam. And I'm not only talking about the brew day today, but the whole brewing thing. Even in the days of our kitchen brewing on the hob, she was the one that was driving me forward and just getting it done. The purchase of the GF kit, and getting me past my worries about today was just the same. Besides, having someone beside you to learn, laugh and clean with makes everything 100 times better. Thank-you, wifey, for all your support today and always.

And true to form, it is said wifey that put together this short video to give you a feel for brew day. Enjoy!