Brew It! by Corey Herschberger

Author:Corey Herschberger [Hershberger, Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CompanionHouse Books
Published: 2015-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

When you remove the steeping bag, let the liquid drain out.

Because most recipes call for a weight of hops to be added to the boil, you can use either hop pellets or whole hops (also called leaf or raw hops) for your beer, but if you’re a beginner, I’d strongly recommend sticking with pellets. Hop pellets are simply the whole hop flowers ground down and compressed into pellets, and they are significantly easier to use than their leafy companions—pellets are more stable, less likely to oxidize (read: smell cheesy and potentially ruin your beer), and easier to handle and clean up, whereas whole hops can soak up more wort, leaving you with less of a final product, and can also clog your siphon when you go to bottle your beer. That said, whole hops are the romantic choice for home brewers looking for the maximum DIY approach, but hop pellets are a great way to begin, and we used those in The Little Jerry.

Thankfully, the boil is relatively hands-off—that’s not to say that you can just walk out of the kitchen and leave a simmering pot on the stove, but you can sit back and relax with a beer while keeping an eye on your wort. (We tossed around name ideas for a while and then launched into a discussion of future styles we wanted to try.) The main objective is to keep the wort boiling vigorously for the entire hour.

After the 45-minute boil of our bittering hops, we added an ounce of Cascade hops and another ounce of Centennial to the mix for the final 15 minutes of boiling time—these are known as flavoring hops, because they impart a significant hop flavor to the final product without adding substantial bitterness. Because pale ales tend to be hoppy but not overly bitter, you’ll notice that there were comparatively few bittering hops next to the flavoring ones. During these last 15 minutes of boiling, Dut checked (and rechecked) the wort chiller—not that I blame him. We had never used it before, and despite all of the reassurance from my research and our other home-brewing friends, the thought of putting a length of coiled copper tubing into our wort was still a little sobering because if we introduced bacteria at this stage, it could keep the beer from fermenting properly (or at all) or give it off-flavors. (Off-flavors are definitely a recurring theme in the realm of home-brew problems.)

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