Blackberry Surprise! (or how to make a blueberry wheat beer)

And the surprise is...
Trader Joe's was out of frozen blackberries, so it's actually made with blueberries! 
Ha ha, got you there, didn't I?

Goal:  To demonstrate all steps of the initial boil and prep of a crowd-pleasing blueberry wheat beer.
Note: It's only crowd pleasing among pansy beer drinkers who can't handle my monster hybrid lemon-pepper IPAW (india pale american wheat) 

Recipe:  Based on a the recipe I used to brew my wedding's blackberry wheat beer:  http://beerrecipes.org/showrecipe.php?recipeid=619,  with a few exceptions:

1. 6 lbs of liquid wheat malt extract (because that's they sell pre-packaged extract in 3 lb and 6 lb increments at my homebrew supply shop)
2. 3 lbs liquid pale malt extract (because they were out of amber, I needed 0.6 extra lbs of liquid extract to make up for going under on the wheat, and an extra 1-2.4 lbs of malt extract could really only lead to a stronger or sweeter beer, both of which are acceptable for this brew)
3. 1 lb of carapils (who measures grain in "cups" anyway?)
4. I've never heard of steeping grains in cold water, so I used about 120-130 F water instead.
5. Hop bags only work if you're using whole hops, I used pellets.  They were in front of the fridge and easier to find and I was in a rush at the homebrew shop.
6. I have no temperature control for 70 F, 60 F, etc.  I'll probably wrap it in a wet towel, but it's still going to be at 80-90 F for it's entire tenure.
7. ... and the biggie:  I used blueberries instead of blackberries!  Surprise!

Overall Protocol:  Basically, brewing is conducted via these steps:

1. Boil
2. Ferment
3. Move to a secondary to further ferment and clarify (optional)
4. Bottle / keg
5. Drink

In this post, we focus on the first 2 steps, which must be done together and are as far as you can get with a brew in one day.

Summary
First, I'll summarize the general steps of today's lesson, so you have an idea of the two processes that are happening in parallel here.  Then I'll walk you through how to do all of these in a timely manner using photographs to demonstrate the steps.

Boil Protocol:  The boil can be divided into it's respective steps as well.  Here are the steps for a part mash (using whole grains to make beer) / part extract (someone else does the mash for you and condenses it down so all you have to do is add water and boil) method.

1. Steep grains.  This is typically done in hot water for about half an hour.
2. Boil.  Add all your fermentables (steeping liquid, extracts) and bring to a boil
3. Add bittering hops.  All the nice flavoring and aromas will evaporate out of your wort (unfermented beer) by the time it is done, but the long boil will nicely extract the compounds responsible for the nice bitter notes of a beer done well.
4. Add Irish Moss.  (Optional.)  This is a "floculating" agent and helps pull proteins out of suspension and clarify the beer.  This helps to remove the hazy muddiness of a wheat beer, which is something I want for this beer.
5. Add flavor hops.  These are boiled with the wort for a short time to extract flavor compounds.  The short boil does evaporate off the aroma molecules, though, so I might add some to the secondary, we'll see!
6. Cool beer.  To RT as quickly as possible.  The longer it spends hot, the more chance it has to develop off flavors.

Primary Fermentation Protocol:

1. Sanitize everything that could touch beer.
2. Rinse everything really well.  (Sanitizing solution is not good drinks.)
3. Pour cool wort into bucket.
4. Pitch yeast (this just means pour your yeast into the bucket.  Brewers and their secret language....)
5. Cap and airlock the wort.  The airlock is basically a little bubbler just like you'd  use in the synthesis lab to release pressure without letting air in.  What, you're not familiar with organic synthesis hardware?  Pshaw.
6. Wait.  At about 12-24 hrs your airlock should be bubbling rapidly.  It should stop bubbling very often after about 5-7 days.  That's when the "primary" fermentation is over, and you get to level-up.

All right, are we ready?  Let's get started!

Assemble ingredients and equipment.
This photograph shows almost everything needed to get started.  Missing are the surprising blueberries (they're in the freezer), sanitizing solution, and other random hardware every homecook has in their kitchen.

We'll address each of these items later in this post, but let me point out a few components now.  (A) The grain bag is actually a brand-new knee-high "trouser stocking" for ladies.  I had a mishap with my last commercial grain bag (those things cost like $0.80 each), and I'm a cheapskate, so I went with the $0.50 option from WalMart.  Also, I wear trouser socks in the winter, anyway.  Please don't use a used trouser sock.  No one wants a beer that tastes like feet.  (B)  You may think the towel is unncessary, but I don't.  For one, we'll be working wtih a lot of wet things, and the more you can keep the water absorbed in something and off the floor the happier you'll be walking around the kitchen carrying 30+ pounds of boiling beer.  Also, I never trust my sanitization protocols for porous kitchen surfaces like wood have done the job, but I trust a chlorine-bleached and then sun-bleached towel.  (C)  The bottle of the last homebrew is kind of a must once you get rolling.  You can't make a beer without sampling some of the potential product!

Note that missing from this picture are: a small container that you can use to fill your make-shift grain bag, sanitizing solution, a normally large pot (~1-2G) for steeping, a clean long spoon, and a thermometer.  There is a hydrometer in this picture, but I can't pick it out.  No worries, I'll show it up close soon.  Maybe a few other things are missing, we'll see as we go.

Steeping crushed whole grains

In this case, we have a full pound of carapils to load into my stocking.  This is not easy, so I decided to engineer a solution by stretching the stocking over a small bowl with two spouts opposite each other.

I am not going to comment on what that looks like.  Especially since we're about to try to stuff a pound of cracked carapils into that hole.  Here's what it looks like if you fill it up once:

Basically from here it's just a game of fill up what's there, move things around and pull up more stocking, and keep filling.  It works pretty well until the bowl gets too small to hold everything you've packed into the stocking.  Then you have to resort to an alternative technique:

Now I just pour the remaining grains into the stocking, and get yet another photo I will not comment on:

Brewing is fun.  We want to tie this off pretty loosely so that when we put the bag down in the water there will be plenty of room for water to flow through. We're basically making a tea bag (prepubescent monkey giggles) here filled with grain instead of tea leaves.  The recipe I'm working loosely off of says to steep this in cold water.  I've never heard of anyone steeping anything good in cold water, so we're shooting for 120-140 F:

All I've got here is some hot tap water in a 1-2G stock pot that every home cook must have.  I'll drop the grain bag in, and:

Mmmmm, yummy malt tea.  Let this steep for about 20 minutes.  Poke at it every 5 minutes or so with your brew spoon to make sure water penetrates all the way to the core and flows around the grain a little.

While we wait, let's check in on last month's homebrew.  When I checked the hydrometer for this beer after the boil, I said it had a 12% ABV potential.  I realize I was reading it wrong, counting up from 10 instead of down, so it actually had 8% ABV potential.  I cracked open my cold one and poured it into a tube with the hydrometer in it:

You can't tell by looking at the hydrometer, it's still all fizzy and we'll have to wait several hours for the carbon dioxide to escape and stop making bubbles, but the final reading was about 0.1-0.5% ABV by volume.  This means that last month's homebrew was about 7.5-8% ABV.  Holy cow, I made a good, strong beer!  No wonder me having a couple the other day made me loopy on the night of and all cranky the next morning.  Usually my homebrew is in the 2-3% range, so I can drink it like water.  That beer?  I should be just as careful with it as I am with strong commercial beers.

Also, it tastes better drank out of a mason jar with a wedge of lemon in it.  Like most beverages do.  I broke my last pint-sized mason jar last week, so this is a jar I bought pickles or olives or pizza sauce or something in.... but it's still better than a normal pint glass.

Starting the yeast

Well, what else can we do while we wait?  Oh, I know, and this is actually pertinent to today's lesson: activate our yeast.  There are multiple ways to purchase beer yeast these days: you can get them dried in little packets much like homecooks buy for making bread, you can get liquid active suspensions, and you can get this product from Wyeast where the yeast is sealed in a small baggie inside of a larger sealed bag filled with yeast starter.  The cheapest route is to go with dried yeast, the safest is to go with Wyeast. 

Actually, the cheapest route would be to allow our beer to be "naturally" infected with local yeast strains.  That is, it would be if we lived in a world where we were turning around a batch a day and the good yeast bugs were already more predominant than the bad fungal ones.  Unfortunately, in this house I make beer, cheese, and bread, and there's all kinds of bugs all over the place.  So wild strain innoculation is out.

We could use bread yeast.  That's also cheap.  However, I once sampled two brews made side by side out of the same wort (un-innoculated beer) fermented with two mildly different yeast strains (one was a German strain, one was American, both from the same root targeted for wheat beers), and the difference between the brews was phenomenal.

Therefore the choice of your yeast strain and it's ability to beat out its competitors is highly important in achieving good results.  For that reason, I prefer to start my yeast in it's little vacuum sealed bag well away from all the contaminants from my kitchen, and go with Wyeast even though it costs about 5x more than other options.  You may not make cheese or make bread in your kitchen, and may find excellent results starting your own cheaper yeasts.  I've done this long enough at this point to know what I'm willing to spend money on, and good, unadulterated yeast is one of them.

Starting a Wyeast packet is fun.  You get to smack it really hard a number of times until you finally feel that the little pocket inside filled with yeast has been popped.  Here's a photo of one attempt:

I think I got to smack that bag about 15 times before I pulled it off.  Once you start a Wyeast packet, you get to sit back and wait, and the bag swells up like you wouldn't believe.  I'll show you photos later.

Beginning the boil

Ahh, finally, time is up for the steeping period and it's time to start our boil.  First, I pour off all our "malt tea" into the large (3 G) brew pot:

Then I add in the malt:

You have to stir a lot at this point to dissolve all that syrup, but I had to hold the camera with one hand, so all you get is this.  On the first go, there is a lot of malt left inside the containers,

so it's a good idea to add some hot water and rinse those remnants into your brew pot instead of down the sink.  Usually two good rinses are enough.  Unless you are silly like me and don't tighten the lid well enough, then when you try to shake the container to dissolve the malt, you'll spray yourself in the face with sticky goodness.  FYI.  (Begin digression:  Wait to mop the floor until _after_ brewing.  Not only is it true that you'll wind up with sticky gooey crap everywhere after brewing, but also it is a great excuse for when people stop by randomly: "Yeah, I know the floor is nasty, but I'm brewing tomorrow and I've been waiting to mop until after that," or "Yeah, I know the floor is nasty, but I just brewed late last night and haven't had time to clean up."  Unfortunately, for me, it's always true, no matter how often I mop.  The kitchen is in a constant state of needing to be mopped except for about 3 hrs every Saturday afternoon.  End digression.)

Now we get to "sparge the grains."  Brewer's love their secret language, but all this means is rinse the grain bag we steeped already with hot water and add the water to the boil pan until there is about 4" left from the top for a large (3+ G) pan or about 1" left from the top of a small (1 G) pan.  We want to fill the kettle with as much liquid as we can without being in danger of boil-over later.  Here's a photo of where I stopped tonight:

Now we cap this so that heat will build up faster, turn the heat on high, and stir every 5 min or so to prevent burning on the bottom of the pan.  (Digression:  If you're wondering what that red cloth off to the left is, that is my "face mop" to prevent me dripping sweat into the brew.  It gets DARN hot in the kitchen when you have 3+ G of wort boiling all at once.  End digression.) 

This isn't a good time to completely walk away, so we'll stay in the kitchen.  First, let's clean up the messes we just made by rinsing out our malt containers, and the bottle we just opened of homebrew.

Still it doesn't boil.  Let's start a round of dishes.

Okay, still not boiling.  Let's just go ahead and wash a bunch of dishes and see where that gets us.

Many, many dishes later, the wort finally boils.  It is time to add the bittering hops:

At first, it is fine.  Then it boils up like crazy!

Now I'm happy I left space for that.  Cleaning up burnt-on beer off a stove is no fun.  I've done that a lot.  Anyway, after it died down I added more sparging liquid.

Sanitize:
Now we have 25 minutes to wait.  It's a good time to start sanitizing the brew pail etc...  I do this these days with sodium percarbonate:

This is because percarbonate, with time and water, turns into ordinary carbonate, i.e. baking soda or the carbonation in beer or soda, while bleach (perchlorate) turns into chlorates.  Carbonate = good eats.  Chlorates.... do not.  There's a correct way to use perchlorates economically.  I've never learned it, so I just make a saturated solution (add soo much percarbonate that it doesn't fully dissolve) and call it good.  I make about 6G of this in my brew pail, and we just toss in everything else that might touch the beer, including the Wyeast packet.

I do all this on the roofdeck because, well, what's the point of being able to open your kitchen window and pass things to the roofdeck if you're not going to use it?  I used to do all this in the bathtub, but it seems like as unsanitary as the roofdeck is, it's got to be better than a bathroom.  Also, I'm covering everything, including the roofdeck, with a sanitizing solution.  Now it's clean.  Anyway, the one thing left to sanitize is the top, and I do that by scooping out sanitizing solution from the brew pail onto its inverted top:

I left a cup full of sanitizing solution in the cup on top so I can easily douse the lid every half hour or so to make sure it also gets fully sanitized.

Waiting
We just killed about 5-10 minutes of a 25 minute wait sanitizing stuff.  Normally I'd fill the time with humorous: "go do your laundry" and show a photo of 2 weeks worth of laundry hanging from the line in one shot.  This time, I spent the extra time writing this blog.  It's a lot of waiting.

Add Irish Moss
It comes in pellet form!

Boil for another 28-32 minutes, and then...

Add finishing hops

Boil for 2-4 minutes.

Rinse off equipment

Cool down wort
We used to have a copper tubing heat exchanger for this.  It went missing one day.  I suppose the rising cost of copper was too much temptation for some sorry person.  Anyway, now the best way to cool down the wort quickly is to put it in a sink of cold water.  To start off, I try cooling down the sink by filling it with cold water:

Then I put the wort in that cold water.  I change the water after it gets too hot to put my hand in comfortably about 5 times, and then pour in 5 lbs of frozen blueberries:

I try to crush them with my spoon

I get my second surprise of the evening:  Blackberries just crush.  Blueberries explosively eject their contents directly into your eyes 9 times out of ten if you're not wearing glasses.  I was tempted to grab the immersion blender, but I hadn't sanitized it, so it was officially out of bounds.  Anyway, at the end many more berries were smushed than not, and the brew was about at RT, so it was all good.


Pour
I poured the boiled wort into the brew pail:

That's a lot low, so I added cold water to get up to volume.  I measured the potential ABV %:

Looks like this could be up to 8.5%!  Dangerous!
Then I clipped the top off the yeast packet.

 See that little plastic pouch down in there?  My goal is to pour the yeast without losing that package in the beer.

Look at that style, that finesse!

Success!  HAHAHAHA!  I am the master.  Next we stir the beer a little to make sure the yeast is distributed, then we cap it and put the airlock on and move it into a safe corner.

And that's it!  Next week I'll show you what to do when your beer has finished its time in the primary fermenter.

P.S.  You may be looking at your brew pot and assorted equipment thinking, "It's late, I don't want to clean that right now."  Believe me, if you think that way, like I do, it is infinitely better to spend 5-10 minutes cleaning now than to leave it and have to spend half an hour cleaning tomorrow after the sugar has hardened into a sticky mess.

Amanda