Growing hops at home can be easier than you think.
Brewing from hops that you have grown and dried yourself can be very rewarding.
Ensure that the grains are thoroughly mixed into the hot water at the beginning of the mashing process.
Hang the bag over the boiler for around 20 minutes to let all that sweet wort drain out.
Mashing at the right temperature lets the enzymes convert starches to sugars.
The alpha acids in the hops give bitterness and other essential oils give a wide variety of flavour.
Simple and economic way to brew beer from Grains, Hops, Water and Yeast
This is a great way for brewing top quality craft beers at home with minimal equipment and starting from the natural ingredients. By using just Malted Barley, Hops, Water and Yeast one can get full control over the beer you produce, from delicate lagers, through hoppy pale ales and to big bodied Royal Imperial Stouts.
A keen brewer myself, I spent quite some time getting the right materials for the best bag performance and now make these bags to sell to other craft brewers. These are the best quality BIAB bags you can get, very strong and very effective..
The basic process for making beers/ales/lagers is pretty simple, with little difference between these types.
Malted barley is soaked (mashed) in hot water (called Liquor) at around 66°C. This allows enzymes within the barley to convert the starches in the barley into sugars. The water containing these dissolved sugars and other flavours is drained from the barley and then brought to a boil. Hops are boiled in this solution (called ‘Wort') to extract the flavours from the hops.
The boiling also serves to sterilise the liquid, which is why beer was a healthy drink in times past, often much healthier than the water from which it was made. After allowing the wort to cool, living yeast is added to begin the fermentation.
The yeast is a wonderful beast for it will consume most of the sugars and convert them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. After a week or so fermenting, the beer is then ready for bottling or putting into casks.
In a short paragraph that is the basic process. However, as with any process / hobby there are umpteen variations and adjustments that can be considered to adjust the result such as:- the flavour, the aroma, the alcohol level, the fizziness, the clarity, the shelf life etc., etc., of our favourite drink.
A typical home brew batch size is 23 Litres (5 imp. gallons, 6US Gallons). Many recipes available in published literature on on various forums of the internet aim for this as a finished volume. However, brewing twice as much or half as much is not much different and many people, I know, brew 50 litres at a time or more.