Museum • Homebrew • All-Grain
The first step is to plan just what you're going to brew. This is my recipe for "Irish Red" Ale. The recipe calls for WLP-004 "Irish Ale" yeast, I actually like to ferment all of my beers with WLP-002 "English Ale" yeast.
Here I've assembled all of my ingredients for the Irish Red batch.
I'll need a couple gallons at around 160-something F, depending on what mash temperature I'm aiming for. I boil some water to preheat the mashtun, I have a larger quantity of strike water I'm trying to hold at the strike temperature.
My mash tun is a rectangular cooler fitted with a ball valve and a "bazooka" screen. While the strike water is heating I add some boiling water to preheat it.
Dump out the preheat water and measure the amount of strike water you're using and add it to the mash tun.
Doughing in is the name for adding the grist to the strike water. You measure the temperature of your grain, you know the weight of your grain, and you know the weight of the strike water. It's a fairly simple calculation to determine what temperature your strike water should be in order to achieve your desired mash temperature. I always add the strike water to the mash tun a few degrees hotter than that, and wait for the temperature to stabilize and cool to strike temperature. Then stir in the grain.
Check the temperature in several locations, and stir it up if it's not uniform. Make small adjustments by adding hot or cold water if necessary.
The mash takes about an hour for the enzymes in the malt to convert the sugars. I keep a remote-probe thermometer in the mash so I can keep an eye on the temperature
The first runnings are a bit cloudy because they pull off a lot of the fine powdery material from the grist. This gets collected and poured back over the top of the grain bed, which acts as a natural filter.
I use a dipstick to see how much first wort I have collected, that way I know how much sparge water I need to make the target volume.
I use a technique called "batch sparge" where I pour a measured amount of hot water over the grain, stir it up and let it sit for a while to extract the sugar from the grain. Then it is drained into the kettle with the first wort.
The boil proceeds the same as a full-volume extract batch
The immersion chiller is a copper coil which you run cold water through to chill the wort to pitching temperature. Not shown in this picture, I also have a pre-chiller coil that I put in line with the chiller. The pre-chiller is immersed in a bucket of ice and water.
You can see how well the stainless steel elbow works as a pickup tube
Aerate the wort, pitch the yeast, let it ferment.