Extract Beer

This is where your life-long obsession with beer making will begin. This process, known as 'Extract Beer Brewing', opens your beer making world up to the foundations of actual brewing. Whereas with kit beers typically all of the ingredients are infused into one syrup and you basically just add water, with extract beers you evolve into a purer form of the process that separates all the ingredients and are boiled to allow for the proper chemical reactions and flavour infusions to take place.

Extract beer consists of a fairly standard set of rules or guidelines if you will. These may vary sometimes between homebrewers, yet the basics can all be agreed upon by a fair majority of brewers. The first step involved is 'Sanitation and Preparation'. In this step, you gather all of the ingredients you'll need, and sanitize any of the items you'll be using throughout this process.

In terms of ingredients, we need to look at our four essentials: Water, which can come straight from your tap in most regions; Hops, which come in all different varieties and should be available at most Beer Brewing Supply shops like www.canadianhomebrewing.ca; Yeast, again in many varieties and available at supply shop; and finally Malt Extract. This final ingredient is what makes this type of brewing process what it is. The idea here is that you have the finished product of malting certain grains, allowing you to skip a long and complex step and get right into the brewing. Malt extract is a syrup that comes in varying degrees of quality and colour grades, they should also be available at most supply shops.

Beyond those ingredients there are a wealth of other additives and your own personal experimental additions, but for our purposes here I'll stick to the basics, with the exception of a brief mention of specialty malts.

The sanitizing would include items like your fermenter, air lock device, funnel, etc... basically anything that will be touching your beer once it has finished its boiling process. Anything that touches your beer during the boil doesn't need sanitizing as the heat from the boiling process destroys all nasty bacterias.

So, here we are, ready to begin. Grab a decent sized stock pot now and fill it up approximately three-quarters with water. Stick it on your stove and bring the water to a boil. During the time it takes to come to boil is the best time to throw in any specialty malts you may want. These malts are crushed malted grains that add everything from colour to flavour for your beer. They are best placed in cheese cloth and tied up into a hand sized ball. Then just steep them in the water like giant tea bags until the water starts to boil. Upon boil, take them out and chuck them as they're not really re-usable, unless you want to make chocolate chip cookies with the grains (which a friend of mine did, nothing to brag home about, but super cool for beer geeks like us). Now you pour in your malt extract and stir it in very well to avoid it all glooping to the bottom and burning, as this creates gross beer and a very tough to clean pot. Electric coil stove tops are the worst for this problem as it's direct heat to the bottom of the pot. Propane burner stove tops are the absolute best for this process, virtually eliminating this burning problem due to its indirect and very even heating. Once stirred in, throw in your hops and any other soluble ingredients you may have. At this point mark the beginning of an hour and keep your brew at rolling boil, that point between just boiling and boiling over. After 55 minutes, throw in your aroma hops. Then at an hour, stop boiling, and start cooling QUICKLY!

Yes folks, quickly. It's important that you cool your brew as fast as possible to avoid contaminating your beer with evil beer killing bacteria. If you can cool your beer concentrate within 10 minutes, you'll be okay. One of the easiest ways to do so is to fill a large sink with icy water, and sit the pot in it. There are many more sophisticated ways, but that's for another post.

Once cooled, you'll have a somewhat syrupy beer concentrate. Strain this into your fermenter and then fill the rest of the fermenter up with coolish tap water. Give it a good stir with a long stir stick to aerate the brew. Then take a sample of it using a baster and put it in your hydrometer to measure out what the specific gravity will be. After measured, DO NOT put the sample beer back into the fermenter, it's gone too far. Instead, drink it and get an idea of flavours and what it tastes like at this phase.

Now throw your yeast in, seal it up with an airlock, and let it do its thing. After a few days have past, and the fermenting starts to settle down, you should rack your beer to get it off the sediment formed at the bottom. This sediment can cause crappy flavours if left in too long. Also sample some more of the beer at this point and take another specific gravity reading to see how much sugar is left to convert into alcohol.

Now once it's all done, bottle it, wait a week or so, and then enjoy! This method produces decent beer, well worth the brewing process. However, the next two phases of homebrewing will show you much better beer, and finer understanding of the process. Till then, cheers.