Palmer - How to brew : everything you need to know to brew beer right the first time

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated to all my brewing friends all over the world. I couldnt have done it without your enthusiasm and support.

I am constantly overwhelmed by the generosity of brewers in sharing information, their time, and their passion for beer and brewing. There are so many people I need to thank for making this third edition possible.

My wife, for raising an eyebrow and saying, Well? (Get going!)

My friends in the Crown of the Valley Brewing Club: Tim Aberle, Herb Adams, Michael Babcock, JT Blancett, Brian Dearden, Jeff Crowell, Bob Curtiss, Brian Dellosa, Bob Gunner, Erik Kobulnick, Dale Lauterbach, Shawn Olsson, Doug Parker, Mike Peterson, Todd Peterson, James Reynolds, Andrew Sayeg, Jamie Smith, Robert Streutker, Paul Valvidiez, Scott Velasquez, Vitol Wiacek, for friendship, project support, and good beers.

There are several people that I would pester with phone calls and late night emails to answer tough questions, and they had a real hand in helping me develop this book:

A.J. deLange

Steve Alexander

Bob Hansen of Briess Malt & Ingredients Company

Brian Kern

Berne Jones, Ph.D, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture

Evan Evans, Ph.D, of the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research

Greg Doss of Wyeast Laboratories Inc.

Chris White of White Labs Inc.

Mark Jilg and Todd Peterson of Craftsmen Brewery

Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker Brewery

And I want to thank Ray Daniels and Randy Mosher for enthusiastically getting behind the third edition and asking the tough questions that made it better.

John

October 5, 2005

Notes on the Third Edition

How to Brew Your First Beer was created in 1993 as a twelve-page electronic document that contained everything that a beginning brewer would need to know to get started. It contained equipment descriptions, process descriptions, and some of the whys of homebrewing. I posted it to electronic bulletin boards and homebrewing ftp sites such as sierra.stanford.edu. (Would you believe that the World Wide Web didnt exist back then?) It was written to help the first-time brewer produce a foolproof beerone he or she could be proud of. That document apparently served quite well; it was requested and distributed to every continent (including Antarctica) and translated into Spanish, Italian, Czech, Korean, and Japanese. Glad I could help.

As time went by, I received requests from brewers to write how-tos for the more complex brewing methods, such as extract-and-specialty-grain and all-grain brewing. There is a lot to talk about with these methods, though, and I realized that it would be best done with a book. After years and years of writing and rewriting, I published the first edition of How to Brew online with the help of the Real Beer Page in June 2000. But I immediately started receiving requests for hard copy. Of course, in the process of laying it out, I couldnt resist the chance to improve it. The second edition was self-published in 2001. It added different sparging techniques and a more technical discussion of fluid flow in the lauter tun, as well as more pictures and data tables than the online edition.

Since that time, there have been a couple of changes in the state-of-the-art of homebrewing:

• The brewing quality of malt extract has been improving for more than a decade and is, in fact, excellent, but the basic extract brewing methods have gone unchanged since we brewed with bakers extract.
• Batch sparing and no-sparge methods for all-grain brewing are now as popular as the continuous-sparging method, which used to be the only method discussed in the literature.

To give these changes their due, I had to rework most of the chapters of the book. Sometimes it was just a sentence or two, other times it was the entire presentation of the chapter.

This was also an opportunity to improve on topics I had only touched on before:

• Brewing sugars other than maltose
• Beer clarity and controlling beer haze
• Beer color and how to estimate it in a recipe
• Acid calculations for controlling mash and sparge pH.

I also re-took a few pictures.

Cheers!

John

TABLE OF CONTENTES

Discretion Is the Better Part of Flavor - 246

Continuous Sparging Procedure - 306

Brewers Publications

A Division of the Brewers Association

PO Box 1679, Boulder, Colorado 80306-1679

BrewersAssociation.org

2006 by John J. Palmer

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any

form without written permission of the publisher. Neither the author,

editor nor the publisher assume any responsibility for the use or

misuse of information contained in this book.

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7

ISBN-13: 978-0-937381-88-5

ISBN-10: 0-937381-88-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Palmer, John J., 1963

How to brew : ingredients, methods, recipes and equipment

for brewing beer at home / by John J. Palmer.-- 3rd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-937381-88-5

1. Brewing--Amateur's manuals. I. Title.

TP570.P275 2006

641.8'73--dc22

2006004807

Publisher: Ray Daniels

Technical Editor: Randy Mosher

Copy Editor: Daria Labinsky

Index: Daria Labinsky

Production & Design Management: Stephanie Johnson

Cover and Interior Design: Julie Lawrason

Cover photo: Souders Studios/Square Pixels

Interior photos: Naomi K. Palmer and John Palmer

INDEX

Entries listed in boldface refer to illustrations or captions.

abbey ale,

acetaldehyde. See off-flavors

adjuncts, See also Free Amino Nitrogen, malt, mash and mashing, sugars

cereal mashing procedure,

and diastatic power of malt,

roasted barley,

Some Typical Color Ratings of Common Malts and Adjuncts (table),

Starch Gelatinization Temperatures (table), 144

aeration,

airlock. See equipment

alcohol by volume. See also gravity estimating,

Percent Alcohol By Volume (ABV) From OG and FG (table),

ales,

and length of primary fermentation phase,

and secondary conditioning,

and cold conditioning,

and yeast,

Recommended Pitching Rates for Ale Yeast Strains As a

Function of Wort Gravity (table),

all-grain brewing. See mash and mashing

alpha acid unit (AAU), . See also hops, International Bittering Unit

calculating,

altbier, . See also ales

amber ale,
Joe Ale (recipe),

American lager, . See also lagers

Typical American Lager Beer (recipe),

American pale ale,

Cincinnati Pale Ale (recipe)

Lady Liberty Ale (recipe),

American wheat beer,

attenuation. See yeast

autolysis. See off-flavors

bacteria. See gushing, haze, off-flavors

barley. See adjuncts, malt

barley wine,

beer kits,

beerstone removal. See cleaning

Belgian-style ales. See individual styles

Belgian-style strong ale,

Berliner weisse, . See also wheat beer

bitter, . See also British-style ale