Watch The Next Video Here: Pitch Your Yeast
Wort stands for unfermented beer, and creating it is nothing more than adding a couple ingredients to the water we’ve already boiled and steeped the grains in.
This is really where exceptional award-winning beer starts to separate from others.
After you steep your grains, you’ll add your DME (Dry Malt Extract) and bring it to a boil. When you add your malt, the powder will clump up in the water and get a feel almost like a tootsie roll… maybe a little bit harder. But just like a woman, once it heats up it will soften up…
This can and should take a while. We are not making chicken soup, but we should still take our time doing this.
If you overheat the malt, you could scorch it or caramelize it and will become unfermentable. Not just that, but you could end up with a boilover and a story about when crap hits the fan…
Now, the process from here on out is as unique as snowflakes depending on your beer. You can add all of your bittering hops as soon as it starts to boil or you can split them up and add them at different times throughout the boil.
The important part here is to make sure that the boil is a slow boil so you don’t scorch the malt.
The time will vary depending on your recipe, but 50-60 minutes is about as common as grandma at bingo. Before time’s up, you’ll be adding your finishing hops (or aroma hops) and Irish Moss.
Irish Moss is basically seaweed used as a clarifying agent. Without going mumbo jumbo on you telling you that the negative ions mix with the positive ions from the protein, the short of it is, without Irish Moss your beer will be as clear as mud.
Finishing hops usually are only boiled for less than 15 minutes or you can dry hop as well… whatever lifts your skirt (or should I say Kilt?)
Now comes the part on cooling your wort. Now you don’t want your wort to end up colder than a witches toe, but you want to get the temperature right around 66-70 degrees. Unless you are brewing a lager of course…
I usually use about 8-10 pounds of ice (coming from the same water I used to brew) and cold water to top off my fermenting bucket.
That alone usually puts me at 74-76 F. I then place the bucket in ice cold water to continue cooling it. I don’t like the idea of cooling it too fast, but that’s just me.
What you do want to do at this point though is oxygenate the beer. When you pour the beer from the pot into your fermenting bucket you should splash it (another reason why I like buckets over carboys), then agitate the wort.
Then right before you pitch your yeast, grab about half a cup to take a hydrometer reading. And as far as preparing your wort, that’s all she wrote…
Next step is to pitch your yeast and ferment the beer … (Please push the tweet this and share on facebook button on the top right of this post and then click the link to watch the next video…. thx)
