Hard Liquid Bread

Yesterday, I tested the SG of the PNB. It seems fairly stuck at 1026. However, in recent days, it has shown increased bubbling activity on the surface.

It still tastes pretty crappy - with a strong sour note. I think the can of extract may be to blame - the ends were pushed out by internal pressure before I opened it.

I used a turkey baster to collect a sample for SG measurement. This method is really good. All I have to do is sanitize the baster, and get a couple of samples. The airlock is off the carboy for less than 30s. Much easier than trying to syphon.

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So I decided to try out the homemade barley and wheat malt. This ties in with an ambition to brew beer with only ingredients and equipment that can be bought in regular grocery stores or hardware stores. Anything bought in homebrew specialist stores is banned!

With that in mind, I think the Reinheitsgebot is out of the window. I can't imagine any "regular" store that woud sell hops; only brewing stores. So I'm going to have to drastically improvise. I'll try substituting herbs and spices. You might remark that if it doesn't have hops, then it's not beer, and you'd be right by today's definitions. However, going back 500 or more years, you'll find that most "beer" was brewed this way. So I think we can describe this as "ale", but not "beer", and I guess the technically most correct term is "gruit", but I think this is an unattractive word, so I'll ignore that one.

As for the other ingredients:
Water - not a problem - I'll use tap water.

Malt - Well I've already made my malt. Here I'm stretching the rules a bit here, because the barley and wheat grain was purchased in Wholefoods Market, which is not really a "regular" supermarket. However, on its website, it does describe itself as a supermarket, and they are a nationwide chain, so I'm going to let this slide.

Yeast - I have two options here.
1. Try to culture yeast from a bottle (OK if bought in a supermarket).
2. Use bakers yeast. I've read that bakers yeast will impart a "bready" flavour if used for beer. Well duh... Anyway, since this is much easier and I'm already brewing something that is not beer, then I'll use this.

In fact, since I'm using wheat and various herbs, I'll call this next brew Hard Liquid Bread (HLB).

So here's the recipe:

13 Oz malted barley
13 Oz malted wheat
5 Oz brown sugar
1 sachet Fleischmans "Active Dry" yeast
0.5 tsp whole black peppercorns
0.5 tsp whole cloves
2 tsp dried oregano
2 cardamon pods (seeds only)
2 tea bags
zest from one orange

The aim is to make 8-10 pints.

I chose most of the herbs/spices/tea for their bittering, anti-bacterial and anti-oxidative properties. I would have prefered lemon to orange, but that's what I had.

I loosely interpreted all-grain instructions at http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter18-2.html

Grain Milling.
I put the malt in the blender, until all grain was at least split in two. This created a lot of flour, which is not ideal.

Mashing.
I did a simple infusion mash. I put 5 pints of 165 degF water in my 1 gall glass juice jar, and mixed in the malt. The combined temperature is 152 degF - apparently what we want. The juice jar was covered with a towel in attempt to keep the temperature steady. I stirred every 15mins for 1 hour. The temperature fell by more than 5 degF during this period, so I attempted to keep it stable by adding near-boiling water.

Lautering.
I had about 10 pints of 180 degF lautering water ready. I was hoping to lauter through the tap at the bottom of the juice jar, but this was continuously clogged, so I improvised a plan B. I got the vegetable steamer that fits inside my big stock pot, and lined it with a towel. I dumped the whole mess on top of the towel and slowly lautered onto the mashed grain. I poured the water onto a slotted spoon to disperse it to prevent it channelling through the grain. The lauting probably took about 20 mins to complete. I gently squeezed some of the remaining liquid out of the towel. The resulting wort was a little cloudy, amber colour, and quite sweet. 1.3 galls had a SG of 1023, so apparently I got a mash efficiency of 29.9, which is supposedly quite good.

Wort Boil.
Since the fermenter I'll use is only 1.3 gall, I want to reduce the wort to about 1 gallon, which should have an SG of 1030. I added sugar to boost this. I found a nice website with tables to look up how much sugar to use to boost SG, but I can't find it now. Anyway, I calcuated 5 oz would give a 20 point boost, and come in at just under 20% of the grain bill weight. So I expect a OG of 1050. Since I want to lose a lot of volume, this will be a fairly long, hard, open boil. I put the peppercorns, cloves, oregano and cardamon in at the beginning of the boil. Hot break occured about 5-10 minutes into the boil. After an hour, it was down to about 1.1 gallons. I put the orange zest in for the last 10 minutes and tea for the last 5 minutes.

Wort Cool.
I used my lauder bucket with ice to cool the wort. 30 minutes and 3 fresh baths did the trick. Meanwhile I rehydrated the yeast in 1/3 cup water for 10 minutes and proofed it with 1 tsp sugar for 10 minutes. The yeast obliged and produced plenty of froth.
Once the wort was down to 70 degF, I measured SG, and it was 1050.
I'll use the 1.3 gallon mini-keg for the primary. I poured the wort in, taking care to leave as much sediment (and spices and bits) behind. I shook for 3 minutes, then pitched the yeast, then shook for another 3 minutes. Yeast was pitched at about 8pm (on Sunday). Activity seemed to take off nicely - by 11pm, we had 15bubbles/min.

This morning, I found a little bit of mess. Some wort was blown through the airlock. I cleaned it up and put the airlock back. Activity was at 30bubbles/min.

By this afternoon, activity was down to 20bubbles/min. The airlock smells very beery!

Since this is a small batch, and pitching rate was relatively high, the primary may well be done in a couple more days...