With Thanksgiving weekend just around the corner and winter getting ready to barrel down on San Francisco, I took some time over the weekend to brew a fall classic: American Amber Ale. As the name suggests, this style of beer is not dramatically dark like a stout, nor is it light in color like a hefeweizen.
Amber ales generally have stronger malt flavors that are balanced with moderate to strong hop notes. If you have ever had New Belgium Brewing’s Fat Tire, you have had an American Amber Ale.
As you may remember from It’s Not Me, It’s Brew, that last time I brewed I used malt extract. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using extract to brew, but personally, I prefer all grain-brewing. This begs the question: what is the difference between extract and all-grain brewing? The short answer to that question is the mash. In order to make beer, we need to ferment sugar into alcohol. That sugar comes from malted barley and the mash separates the sugar from the barley grain. When brewing with extract, this process has already been done.
The first step in brewing an all-grain beer is to build a mash tun. This is the vessel in which malted barley will be soaked in hot water. A mush tun must be able to hold a constant temperature so hot water can activate enzymes in the barley which will convert starches into sugars. I use an incredibly advanced piece of modern equipment for my mash tun (some people call it a cooler) and it does a fantastic job of holding a temperature.
Mash tun… aka cooler
Now that we have a mash tun, we need our gain. For this recipe I used a total of 6.5 pounds of grain which included some specialty grains and crystal malts (I’ll get into those in a later blog).
The grain bill
Time to start the mash! The most basic way to conduct a mash is to mix the grain with hot water and let it soak for an hour at a single temperature. This temperature should be in the 150-158 degree range to activate the most enzymes and get the most sugar out of the grain.
For this brew I decided to run a multi-rest mash. I first rested the grain at 104 degrees for 30 minutes and then raised the temperature of the mash (by adding hot water) to 154 degrees for the last 30 minutes. Different enzymes are most active at different temperatures and a multi-rest mash allows for more enzyme activity.
The mash: 1st rest at 104 degrees The mash: 2nd rest at 154 degrees
After a half hour at each temperature, the water (now called wort) needs to be separated from the grain bed. To do this I use a copper manifold at the bottom of the mash tun. As you can see in the picture below there are slots cut in the copper tubing that allow the wort to pass through but not the grain. I use a siphon to pull the wort out.
Copper manifold Siphoning wort
The first few quarts of wort need to be recirculated back into the mash tun. The gain bed needs to settle as wort is pulled through it and these first few quarts will be cloudy with with bits of grain.
Recirculating
After the wort has cleared up, we can begin collecting it in our brew kettle. The flow of wort from the mash tun to the brew kettle should be slow and controlled to prevent oxidation which can lead to funky flavors later on. As wort drains from the mash tun, the grain bed needs to be rinsed of all residual sugars. Additional hot water, called sparge water, is added and filters through the grain dissolving any remaining sugars.
Adding sparge water
My goal for this batch is to make three gallons of beer so I collected 4.25 gallons of wort knowing that I would lose some during the boil. My brew pot only holds 4.5 gallons so it was filled nearly to the top.
Ready for the boil
Stay tuned for an entry discussing the rest of this brewing session!
