Malt Extract Brewing.

On Saturday I was able to test out all my newly built brewing equipment!
Up until now, all my brewing has been with canned kits where you dissolved the canned syrup in water and ferment it in a big bucket, but I have been investing in several new items of equipment over the last few months so I can move to the level of brewing complexity, Malt Extract Brewing.

The new kit consists of:

• A massive boiling pan.
• A massive propane gas boiling ring.
• Several copper cooling coils and a long hose.

I decided to move on to malt extract brewing, as I’m keen to produce a much hoppier brew and this is much easier to achieve when you boil your own wort and add your own hops.

The day started with assembling all the equipment in my neighbour’s back yard – we don’t have enough private space at our own flat!
I then boiled up about 6 gallons of filtered water, added the malt extract (a thick sugary syrup) and the first bath of hops to add bitterness to the beer.
This was boiled for about an hour and a half, then I added Irish Moss, a type of seaweed that makes the proteins in the beer clump together and the last batch of hops to give the beer a good aroma!

This was boiled for another 15 minutes, before being rapidly cooled using a submerged copper coil with cold water being pumped through it. You need to cool quickly so the protein in the beer drops out of solution – this avoids cloudy beer!

Once the wort was cooled, it was transferred to my fermentation chamber (a big converted fridge, where it will remain at 12oC for the next two weeks!

You can see the rest of the pictures in the gallery - click here to visit now! I’ll post some more exciting pictures as it ferments!