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Hi, my name is Tom and I'd like to demonstrate the New York Homebrew
beer making kit to you today. First of all, when you get your kit at home what
you should do is inspect it to make sure that all the pieces are here and that
they're all in good condition. If there should be any problem with anything you
can simply call the store or come on down and we'll be happy to replace or
repair whatever's wrong with the kit. Okay, you'll notice that we have a back
label that lists everything that should be inside so you can check against this
to see that everything is there. All right, let me see what we have. The first
thing we have is another checkpoint. We have a list of parts and also some
assembly hints on how to put things together. We'll be going over that a
little later on. We have our catalog which is of course what each kit is the
current one for that season. Now let's see, we have a bottle brush. This helps
us clean our bottles out. We have a hydrometer which helps us take the weight
of the work and the beer to find out how much alcohol we're producing and also to
check if fermentation is complete. We have our capper which is we're going to
be showing later on demonstrating some bottling techniques. Now we have a
filler stem. This is going to attach to a bucket that will be coming out of here
that will show you that comes off a spigot and this helps us bottle our beer.
So we use that later on. Oh, this is our sanitizing concentrate. It's an iodine
based very concentrated iodophore which is specific for beer. A half ounce of
that to five gallons of water is more than enough to take care of any germs
you will have on your equipment. This is our spigot that we'll be installing in
our bottling bucket later. We have a basic booklet that gives you some
recipes and some concepts although we recommend the book called The New
Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian which is really the beginners
Bible. We have our airlock which is actually constructed of three pieces. A
top, a centerpiece, and also a little cap that goes over the centerpiece so the
gas when it comes up it bubbles out through water that you're going to be
putting in here. This little cap can be either left off or put on as you wish.
Okay now let's see what else we have in here. We have these buckets. We also have
some siphon equipment. All right let me remove the box from the table. Now we
have two buckets here. One is larger than the other. This larger bucket which has
no holes drilled in it is our fermenting bucket. This is accompanied by a lid
that's drilled and grommeted. This is to accommodate our airlock that we took out
before so the whole assembly would look something like this and this would give
us a closed fermentation system where our beer will be fermenting. Okay now the
smaller of the two buckets you'll notice has a hole drilled in it. This is our
bottling bucket. We'll be demonstrating it later on but this is where we'll be
fitting the spigot to it and also to the spigot we fit this filler stem which
then has a valve on the very bottom here a spring-loaded valve that when depressed
in the bottle it gently loads the bottle from the bottom up. Okay last but not
least in the box is our very important siphoning equipment. Nothing more than a
rigid cane and some flexible tubing which we'll be demonstrating later as to
how to move the liquid for instance after fermentation is done we need to
bottle our beer. We're going to have to siphon it from here to here and we'll be
using equipment just like this. Okay so this is a complete kit we have all the
parts and they match up to the back label on the box. New York Homebrew also
carries a deluxe equipment kit. Our deluxe kit is based upon our basic
equipment kit which you've just seen demonstrated. The additional pieces in the
deluxe kit are as follows. First we have here a secondary glass fermenter or five
gallon carboy which is used to rack the beer from our primary fermenter to here
and to let it clarify before we go into our bottling bucket and we bottle. This
by the way will be demonstrated later on in the film. Along with that comes an
airlock with a stopper. Of course we never assume fermentation is complete
even though most of it has been done in the primary fermenter. We always put an
airlock on our secondary. We also include in the kit a brush this is known as a
carboy brush a large brush to help you clean the carboy out with. Okay another
very important tool we consider to be the complete the new complete joy of
homebrewing by Charlie Papazian which is a considered to be the beginners Bible
has very good information for the beginning homebrew a lot of interesting
recipes and it's a generally a good reference guide for the first year or so
of the hobby. So that's included in the kit. Another piece we have is although it
looks like a hydrometer that was in the basic kit this is not this is a
thermometer and this is known as a floating thermometer. This you can use to
check whether your works down to room temperature before you pitch your yeast
or if you're doing some partial mashing and more advanced brewing you'll be
needing something like this to check the temperature of your water. Another couple
of pieces of equipment that we include in our kit are known as a work chiller
which is this copper coil I'm handling over here and also a brass carboy jet
washer this helps clean out carboys and bottles of beer it shoots a jet of water
into them rinses it very well. Okay this attaches up to your faucet and what we
include in the kit is a little adapter that if your faucet has an aerator you
can take the aerator off and adapt this up to it. The very same adapter is used
to adapt our work chiller which will be demonstrating later on. What this is used
for is actually to cool the work down after the 60 minute boil very rapidly.
Again you'll be seeing that later in the film. One other thing I wanted to show
you while we're still at this point in the demonstration is just how to install
our spigot into our bottling bucket I mentioned it before but let me actually
show you what's involved. Here we give you the bottling bucket of the hole and
we have our spigot that comes with two washers basically and a nut okay. Each
washer should be placed on either side of the holes in other words first take
your spigot put one washer on install it in the front face put your second
washer on and your your lock nut over here and then just turn it on very tight.
In some cases you will need to perhaps apply a little pressure with a pair of
pliers be careful to do it very gently and check that everything's in here
before we begin brewing and the way you can do that is just check against the
list on the front label here. Okay the first thing we find are the
instructions to make the embryo which we have on one side of the sheet of paper
on the other side of the bottling instructions that will be following
approximately a week or two weeks from now. Okay we have our priming sugar which
comes pre-measured and pre-packaged like this there's five ounces or three
quarters of a cup. We have our caps there are 60 caps so it accommodates as many
bottles as you require for five gallons of beer that you're making so these two
items will be used during the bottling time we can put them off to the side but
here are our actual ingredients that we're using today to make our beer. All
right this is crystal malt and looks like there's about a half a pound here
of crystal malt and this is a grain malt which gives red tone to this beer since
it's an amber we want it to be red it's also going to give us a little bit of a
flavor too. We have our hops here and they're in pellet form they're like
rabbit food here each one is labeled to tell you exactly what it is and how much
for instance this is an ounce of progress hop. We have two more packages of
hops and each one of these there's a half ounce of Kent Goldings now when we go
ahead and do our brewing you'll see how we'll use these various packages. The
base of the beer is going to be two packages of dry malt extract like this
we have one two each package is three pounds or a total of six pounds for our
five gallon brew it's going to make a fairly hearty beer medium weight about
four to four and a half percent in alcohol. Okay we have a little muslin
bag here which we're going to put our grains in here that we looked at before
the crystal after we gently crack these a bit and we'll show you how to do that
and finally last but not least there's two packages of dry ale yeast and this
will be using when we go after we boil our work and create our brew we're
going to be putting it into our fermenting bucket and pitching our yeast
we'll be doing that later on. Now these grains should be cracked very gently all
we really want to do is separate the husk on the outside from the kernel of
the grain on the inside so anything like a coffee grinder or anything as violent
as that is not to be used because it'll powder the grain which we do not want
now of course the easiest way is if you're brewing within the near futures
let's say up to about a week or so you can ask for the grains to be cracked at
the store and we'll be glad to do that for you but let's say you buy the kit
and you won't be brewing for a few weeks we want to keep them fresh and you want
to do it at home what you do when you get home is of course open up the bag
of it with the grains and get another small bag or whatever size you happen to
have around and put as much of the grain in there you feel as comfortable at a
time to perform a little gentle rolling across it to give it a little bit of a
crack so I'm gonna put in I'd say a little bit about a third to half of the
bag over here put the rest aside oops okay and now I'm gonna gently seal the
bag a little bit over here so we don't have these grains running all over the
place and now if you don't have a rolling pin an ordinary beer bottle will
do of course I like a nice hefty 22 ounce one like this just take the bottle
and gently go across the grains like this you'll hear a little cracking sound
and that's fine that's what we want but at the end of the day we don't want you
to spend like all day on this maybe a good minute might do with this volume of
grain that's probably enough right now let's take a look it looks pretty much
like when we started but we've actually cracked some of the husks away from the
kernels okay remember we don't want to powder this okay at this point what we
can do is start to load up our muslin bag that came in the kit because we want
to create actually what we call a tea bag of these grains so of course the
easiest way to do this is just simply put this over this turn this upside down
and then go the grains now of course you would take the remaining grains that
I've already spilled on the table here and crack them gently also and put them
in the bag now what we're going to do first in the brewing process is bring
this tea bag over and put it in our pot of water now again this is a four gallon
pot and I've already filled it to about halfway so I've got two gallons of water
in here and you'll notice the flame isn't under on under it yet so we'll put
our tea bag in here and we'll turn the flame on and I adjust it all the way to
high because what I want to have happen now is a good vigorous boil start and
start working on these grains now what you should have in your kitchen a good
brew spoon this is a rather long one it's made out of plastic but stainless
steel is also recommended wood is not as good because of the amount of bacteria
that can harbor in the wood so either pick a nice plastic spoon for yourself or
a stainless steel one now what I'm doing is just pushing this grain bag around so
the grains start soaking in the water and now that I've done that I'm going to
leave it in here and we're going to allow this water to come to the boil
and as it comes to the boil we're going to take this grain bag out and discard
it and we're going to go forward there and put our malts in okay now that the
waters come to the boil we want to remove our grains at this point so what
I've done is I've taken a little plate here to the side and now that I have my
grains I just lift them out with my spoon let all the goodness drip off into the
water here all the this is kind of a form of sparging by the way let all the
sugars and the color and the taste and everything drip back in there and now we
just take these grains and put them aside okay at this point we're now ready
to start adding our malt extract our malt extract is the powdered stuff the
three-pound bags that came with the kit so what I'm going to do is start adding
into the water but at the same time I'm going to be using my spoon to stir in
this malt extract this is very sweet and has a tendency to float on the surface
of the water as we pour it in but if I continually stir we start to get it to
dissolve into the water now one other thing that does happen when I'm using
dry malt extract as the steam comes off the pot it tends to cake some of the
extract on the end of the bag as you see here so all I need to do is dip the bag
in the water a little bit to get the full amount of malt into my boil now the
reason I can do this is that I'm before a 60-minute boil so any bacteria that
might be on that bag will be killed during that hour boil so we can put this
aside we're going to
now give this a good stir around we're going to add our second bag of malt do
we do the same thing we just basically get any of that loose malt down cut the
top off and repeat the procedure make sure you're stirring while you're
adding of course the water now at this point has dropped below the boil and
will take approximately another 10 to 15 minutes for it to come back to the boil
again I'm going to take that malt off the end of the bag by dipping it in the
water and now a very important point during this period of time while the
malters in the pot and we have the water coming back to the boil and we're
stirring in all our malt so it dissolves totally we don't want to use a top on the
pot if we were to put the top on the pot at this point we would never know when
it's coming to the boil because this is so sweet in here the malt it tends to
foam up when it comes to the boil so a cardinal rule at this point is do not
leave the room make sure you're near this pot and every once in a while walk
over to it and give it a little stir around and see how it's doing our malt
extract is coming to the boil and you can see how it's foaming to the very
top of the pot now now this is the point at which you must be here to adjust your
flame so this does not boil over now remember I have quite a bit of headroom
in this pot I have like at least this much space for that foam to come up now
I've adjusted my flame down and we have the head now gently falling back into
the liquid now stir around a little bit more and at this point now that we've
brought the malt extract back to the boil we're now ready to add our first
hop so let's refer to our instructions here and according to the amber kit
instructions the first hop or what's known as the boiling hop this is the
hop that gives the bitterness to beer it's also known as a kettle hop is one
ounce of progress for this particular brew so what I'll do is I'll just open
this up and these are pellets these are actually milled hops so we don't need to
put them in a bag or anything like that we're simply going to dump them straight
into the boil this has happened and I've adjusted my flame to I have a nice
vigorous rolling boil here you want to have a good boil but yet something that
doesn't threaten to go over but normally what happens once you adjust it you're
not threatened by a boil over for the next 60 minutes so you can actually
leave the room if need be all right here we go we put our first ounce of hops in
okay stir them in a little bit what they do they tend to float as a pond scum
initially on the surface of my work in here by the way this is called a work
the work is defined as the water the malt and the hops being created or
boiled together or brewed together it's not beer until we introduce the yeast
and fermentation begins so this is known as a work now I've got the hops in there
I think I want to adjust the boil a little bit more rapidly here so let me
turn my flame up there we go
all right and now the next time we'll wait about let's see according to our
instructions I believe the next thing we do is we're going to be adding our
flavor hop which is not until 45 minutes later after this one at this point by
the way this is when you begin timing your boil so right now we're at the
beginning of our one hour 45 minutes from now we'll introduce our flavor hop
but before then about 40 minutes from now we're going to be putting in
something called a work chiller work chiller there's this copper coil here
with these hoses coming off of it now why are we doing this I want to put this
copper part into the pot so I can sanitize it if it sits in an hour boil
for about 20 minutes in that hour it's more than enough time for any bacteria
to be killed on the surface of this copper now why am I doing this I'm doing
this so that at the end of the 60 minute boil I can rapidly chill my work down to
room temperature the reason I want to do that is because I want to be able to
introduce my yeast very rapidly into the process now let's say initially you
don't have a work chiller well that's okay the next best thing to do if you're
not using a work chiller is to go ahead and at the end of the boil you can then
for the first time use the top to your pot which I've hidden all this time and
put it on your pot and take it and put it in a sink of ice-cold water in other
words some water with some ice in it and in about 15 to 20 minutes of the water
circulating around the outside of the pot it'll come down to room temperature
so remember during the boil this top does not go on the pot and the next
thing we're ready to do is put our work chiller in okay so let me take this over
here of course we want to keep the hoses out of there so we just put the copper
part right into the pot and what I do is I just laid my hoses down here now
you'll notice something about this setup here I've kind of had an accident here
along the way and I just added another piece on here but when I did that I made
it long enough so it reached my sink over here so this is kind of a customized
unit for my kitchen you can do that also just simply add or subtract any pieces
that you might need now we don't need to hook this up right away but we'll be
hooking this up in a minute to the force and I'll show you what we'll need
to do that but now we have 20 minutes left in the boil and we just let that
copper sit there and let that water boil around it or though I shouldn't say
water the wort boil it and kill all the bacteria okay the next thing we're
going to do is we're going to be adding according to our instructions here our
flavor hot which is a half ounce of Kent Goldings and that's it right at this
point now or the 45 minute point before the end of the boil so this is going to
be on the boil for another 15 minutes so what we've done is we've purchased an
aerator adapter I've taken my aerator off here and now we have this little
adapter that we can put on in its place which adapts now this for a garden hose
and we want to start chilling our work first thing of course to do is to shut
the heat off under the under the pot and now if we go over to our sink and what
we want to do is turn on the cold water but gently we don't want to start it too
rapidly by the way since I use this equipment a lot I've checked all my
connections before I used it this today that's what you should do every once in
a while make sure all your fittings are tight so there's no leakage in your
work chiller right now this clear tube that I'm holding up at this point is
exhausting the water that we're putting in with the green tube over here now I
have it running at a fairly modest rate and we're gonna keep it like that all
right now my in my house I have a tendency for this to kink over here so I
have a little trick where I just simply loop this over here so it keeps a loop
up like this now if we were to choose to leave this in this position and just run
chilled water through here it would take about 15 to 20 minutes to chill this
work down but one of the techniques that I've developed that I like to use to
speed the process along a little bit is the movement of the work chiller in here
now by moving this I'm creating an action of the work flowing over these
coils that are picking up the heat much more rapidly now now the way I can tell
by the way is by feeling the temperature of the exhaust water here coming out of
this clear tube initially it's very hot so please don't put your hand in there
initially but after the first couple of minutes you can start to feel the
temperature go down now let's say you wanted to be more precise about what
temperature you were at and how fast it was chilling you could use something
like a floating thermometer now one thing I have to caution you about we
have to remember that we're at the end of the boil we now cannot just put
anything in here without first sanitizing it and we'll be talking about
sanitizing in a few minutes so if you do choose to use a thermometer you must
sanitize it first before you put it in there for a reading it actually is not
necessary because frankly every time I move this I'm removing more heat and I
feel the temperature going down and very shortly I'm going to be at room
temperature it's been about seven or eight minutes we've been moving this
coil around here and I can feel by the temperature of the exhaust water that
we're definitely down to about 65 to 70 degrees here in the pot so we've really
chilled this down quite well so at this point in time we just simply shut our
water off and because the work in here is very you know sweet and sticky we
don't want to drip this all over our kitchen so what I'm going to do is drain
off as much of this external work from the coil as possible you see I just take
an ordinary dish here so I can just slip it under here and put this aside for
cleaning later now later means today because there is a very sticky substance
on here that you definitely want to remove before it hardens on here so make
sure that by the end of the day today you clean your coil off and at that
point you can simply store it for next time usage no sanitizing required okay
now we're ready to take this work and pour it into our fermenting bucket we're
ready to take the work and put it into our primary fermenting bucket but let
me spend a moment on sanitizing because we cannot take this work and put it
directly in here without first cleaning the inside of the bucket out and by
cleaning I mean sanitizing the bucket is brand new so as you can see there's no
scum or anything in there but what we need to do is clean or kill as much of
the invisible germs as possible that are on the inside of this bucket and now
there are many different ways to go about doing this one of the easiest ways
is to use something known as an iota for or an iodine based sanitizer now as you
can see it comes in a very small bottle because it's very concentrated a capful
of this to about a gallon or two of water is more than enough to kill germs
so we've got about a six gallon seven gallon bucket here which I've already
taken the liberty to sanitize I filled it with water I put in a little bit of
this iodine let it stand for about two minutes after two minutes of contact I
simply rinsed it out and we're ready to use it one of the nice features of a
sanitizer like this the iodine is that I didn't have to rinse it out I could have
just left it air dry but for the sake of moving things along a little bit more
quickly I chose to rinse the iodine out another type of sanitizer sold by home
brew shops are in a category of chemicals that look like white powders
so I sometimes use something called bee bright which is nothing more than a
white powder that is concentrated again and you use about a teaspoon excuse me a
tablespoon per a gallon of water now the difference between a sanitizer like this
one and the iodine is that this doesn't just sanitize this also dissolves or
cleans any beer scum or anything that might be inside your bottles or your
buckets or whatever you're using to put the beer in so this is another type now
the only other one I want to mention oh by the way this must be rinsed off with
water you cannot simply let this air dry the only one you can let that happen to
is the iodine the third and the one of the most common sanitizers used by home
brewers is ordinary common household bleach again that's analogous somewhat
to the bee bright or the powdered substance we're using here in that very
little of it needs to be used normally about a third of a cup to five gallons of
water so it's very concentrated or very I mean the chlorine is very concentrated
so your solution is very weak and let that again contact for about two minutes
and then you simply rinse it off with cool water okay so what I've used is
I've used the iodine and we've cleaned our bucket out now and we're ready to
pour our work directly into the bucket so let's do that all righty now you'll
notice while I'm pouring I'm choosing to pour from a bit of a height not high
enough that I'm splashing out of the bucket but high enough that I'm causing
a lot of aeration in the work okay you'll also notice something else I
didn't use a strainer of any kind I simply chose to pour everything into
this bucket which is okay now what I've done is I've created a nice foamy
appearance here in the bucket aerated this work somewhat and what I like to do
at this point before I put my water in here because we need to add water to
about this point here which is a little bit more than five gallons to get our
full five gallon brew needs to put my yeast in I like to put my yeast in at
this point now the kind we're using is mutton fist and dry ale yeast and I have
two packages now I'm going to simply put this in dry by cutting open the top
ripping off the tops here and sprinkling them both on to the surface okay here we
go is one and let's put the second one in another practice that you can read
about on the back of the package is something called rehydration what I
could have done is I could have taken these packages of yeast and put them in
a small quantity of water warm water about 80 or 90 degrees and let that
dissolve in there and let it rehydrate for about 15 minutes before I poured
that whole amount in here that's not actually necessary because of the amount
of yeast that you're pitching here if you were pitching one package you might
want to choose to rehydrate otherwise if you're using a great amount of yeast
like we did we could simply let it go without doing that now the next step is
to add some cold clear water to this so what I'll do is I'll remove my word
chiller here from our sink and using the same pot that we boiled our work in I'm
going to add some water to there make it easier for ourselves let me put the air
heater back on so it doesn't splash all over the place