1. Equipment

My equipment is really bare bones. Several kettles, fermentation buckets, ordinary 10 liter buckets and one big mash tun insulated with foam matress and bedcovers during the mash. All plastics are food grade PE.

2. Selecting recipe

3. Raw materials

4. Mashing

I do infusion mashing by adding hot water. First crushed grain goes into the mash tun, then I add water to achieve desired temperature. If I must have several mashing rests I'll usually rise temp by decoction (take part of mash, boil it and return it to the tun).

5. Lautering

Preferably do outmashing at 78 C, hot mash does not get stuck so easy. If it gets stuck nonetheless, try cutting the bed with a spatula, just above the bottom. Be patient, sometimes it takes over 2 hours with bad equipment. Clear wort minimizes problems later on, so put a few liters of first cloudy wort back to your lautering tun. Avoid splashing.

6. Boil

I boil wort in stainless steel kettles over electrical stove. I use 2x10 liter, 3 liter and 2 liter kettles. Beware wort boilover. Allow steam to escape as this makes beer better, at least 10% should evaporate, even more if you wish to have higher OG than you got from lautering. Remember to wash your kettles and scrub beerstone away from them with non-scratching sponge before boiling. After typical 90 min boil cool wort quickly under 30 C. I cool just putting the kettle in the kitchen sink, allowing cold water to run constantly and slowly circulating the wort with big spoon.

7. Filtration

Just get rid of hops, I pour wort through pasta rinsing sieve. Now you can splash all you like as cooled wort is not sensitive to oxygen. Then dilute wort to OG you wish with cold tap water. Allow to sit 30 min and carefully rack with siphon to fermentation vessel leaving sediment behind. If you used hop pellets there will be lots of sediment.

8. Fermentation

9. Bottling and kegging

10. Enjoying homebrew

11. Links for surfing

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Last modified May 15 2003