rich-armstrong-brewing-notes

My recipes and approaches from home-brewing 500 gallons of beer

You can have excellent beer that you made and can share with friends, with minimal hassle and minimal equipment. But, like anything in life, there's a price to pay. I'm assuming here that your reason for brewing beer is

These are:

1. No chill
2. No sparge
3. No rack
4. No bottles

A lot of these practices are essential in producing "professional quality beer" at scale. Home brewing as we know it today was not modernized from a customary home practice. Rather, it was reverse engineered from professional brewing, which had driven much traditional home brewing out of practice. To do this, it needed to be better quality than traditional homebrew, and to achieve economies of scale.

, and professional brewing a refinement and scaling of that home practice. True home brewing , In order to understand why homebrewers

Understanding Commercial Brewing

Beer is highly commoditized. A

Chilling

Why Skip It?

No-chill brewing saves on equipment cost and storage, water usage, and active time. On the other hand, it constrains the styles of beer you can brew, primarily hoppy beers.

If we're going to skip it, we need to understand why commercial brewers need it.

Three reasons:

• Economies of scale
• Microbial purity
• Flavor considerations

So why do brewers chill? They have no other choice. There's just no place to put 1000 (or 10,000) gallons of boiling hot wort to wait for it to cool down. And its ratio of thermal mass to surface area means it would take days or weeks to get down to fermentation temperature. When I visited Captain Lawrence Brewing in Pleasantville, NY, they had a 20 barrel kettle but they needed much higher volume to make a viable business. On brew days, they would work 6am to 11pm. They'd do four boils to fill their massive 80 barrel fermentation tanks. Each boil had to be chilled and run to the fermenter so they could start the next one. Pro brewers chill because they have no other choice. No chill is not an option.

In the old days, some brewers would chill by exposing their beer to the air. This is how the naturally fermented sour beers of Belgium and Flanders came about. It is also one theory as to how "steam beer" like Anchor Steam got its name, from the steam released from the brewery cooling its beer in the open San Francisco air.

Second, microbial purity. Unless it's entirely kegged and never stored at room temperature, beer needs to be free of most microbes. Ale yeast can eat many of the

A lot of homebrewers chill, but very few filter.

Chemically, chilling serves some important purposes.

First, it minimizes the formation of dimethyl sulfide. This is a "canned corn" aroma. DMS formation relies on precursors, which come from malted barley. When those precursors hang around in a hot liquid together for many hours, they link up and make DMS. Luckily, precursors are driven off during the boil. It's one of the reasons beer has to have a boil time at all. (Cider and mead don't.) Precursors reach an acceptable level, provided you chill the wort fast, after around 60 minutes of boiling. By 90 minutes, they're even more reduced. Why don't commercial brewers boil 90 minutes to get this benefit? Remember, they have to chill anyway to get the wort out of the boiler, so there's no point in spending the extra time and money. It provides no benefit to them.

Second, and most significantly for your choices in homebrewing, chilling is one important way to lock in hop flavor and aroma. Hop "volatiles" are water soluble, but like DMS precursors, subject to being driven off.

Lastly, chilling serves a microbial purity purpose. Note that I don't say "safety". No known pathogens can live in beer. That's why colonial times and before had things like "ciderkin" and "small beer". Both of these served to make water potable by

My Recommendation: There are a zillion deliciously hoppy beers out there. Hazy IPAs are difficult, tempramental, and short-lived. You don't have to completely give up on hoppy beers, but you're probably not going to make the next Heady Topper without a lot of investment. Why not brew a few hundred gallons of your own beer first and then see if you want to delve deeper.

How to Skip It

No-chill is actually just "slow-chill". The wort is going to get cooler, There are two main ways to slow-chill: in the kettle and in the fermenter. You can actually do both.

First, extend all your boils to 90 minutes. Many hop schedules assume a 60 minute boil. Just boil for half an hour before starting that hop schedule.

Second, when your boil is done, put the lid on and walk away. By the next morning, your

What about the "danger zone"?

Sparging

Sparge refers to the rinsing of the grain bed with hot water to get all the sugars. Backing up, the grain bed is part of all-grain brewing. If you are a purist who wants to avoid all extracts, then go figure out how to do that. The parts before the boil are the mash and the sparge.

Highly recommend brew-in-a-bag. 5 gallon kettle for 3 gallon batches.

1. No hop-forward beers. Of course, all your beers will have hops, but there's an army of poorly paid but passionate brewers dedicated to getting big hop flavor and aroma into beer, and then keeping it there until you drink it. The big thing this will save you is chilling. Chilling is equipment-intensive, and it requires