And now using that same pot, I'll simply fill it up with ordinary tap water.
Now some people say, well tap water doesn't have chlorine in it and is it going to cause you a problem?
Not necessarily. For instance, all the beer I make is made with tap water.
The tap water here in the local area of New York, you know, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, is very good.
So it can be used directly at a tap. If you choose though, you can use bottled water.
One thing that is definitely not recommended is distilled water.
You always want to use water with the mineral content in it.
So rainwater or distilled water is not to be used when brewing beer.
It'll give you a very flat, dull tasting product if you do.
Okay. Let's get a little bit more water in our bucket here.
Take that. And again, I'm not pouring it in all at once because I want to do it in segments because here again,
I want to pour from a height and create a nice vigorous oxygenation of my wort.
It's very important at this time when we introduce our yeast that we take a good vigorous,
we create a lot of oxygen in our wort because the yeast before it goes into its fermentation cycle,
goes through something called respiration and feeding.
And so in the first few hours, what it does is it starts to use the oxygen in the water or in the wort
and to feed itself, well actually not to feed itself, but to use it along with the food that it gathers from the malt
to get itself strong enough to begin the fermentation process.
So that takes two to three hours.
Remember, we're filling our bucket up to about this line over here, which is just about, let's say,
about five and a quarter gallons or so.
The reason I'm filling it up a little higher is that after fermentation is complete in about three or four days,
a sediment is formed on the bottom of this bucket.
And when we remove our beer, a week later, we rack it or siphon it to our secondary fermentor
or to our bottling bucket, whichever one we choose.
We're going to necessarily have to leave that true behind,
and therefore we also lose a little water to the, or a little wort to the process too.
Okay, we have enough water here.
Let's fill it in again, again making sure we have good vigorous oxygenation.
And guess what?
Right there, we're up to our point where we want to stop and we don't want to put any more water in there.
Okay, now we're at this point here.
Our yeast has been introduced, our wort, our concentrated wort's in here.
The beginnings of fermentation or the beginning of fermentation will happen within, let's say, a couple of hours.
But before we close this up, we can do a couple of things.
If we choose to, we can take a hydrometer reading at this point in time.
A hydrometer that came out of this tube.
Now this tube is also an important component of the whole process of taking a reading here.
Now, let me just put this down for a minute.
Remember, at this point, we are after the boil, we're obviously at room temperature,
and we do not want to put anything in here that's not sanitized.
So the best way to do this is to take something that you've sanitized like a cup or Pyrex cup measure
and dip it in there and take the liquid out.
It's then put in this tube that the hydrometer came in,
and you put it up close to the top and you insert the hydrometer in the tube so it floats in the liquid.
And you take the reading here, not putting the hydrometer in here.
Remember that.
Now, once you take your reading and record it, do not pour the wort back in here.
This is not sanitized.
Simply discard it.
It's very little.
Okay?
So we've taken a reading.
If you choose to, you can take that hydrometer reading.
Now, the last thing we need to do is we need to put the top on our bucket.
This gets snapped down very positively.
In other words, press down on this hard enough to get it down tightly.
We have our airlock here.
Remember, we have to install that.
The easiest way to do that is put a little water on the stem of the airlock so it's moist
and put it into the grommet in a rotating fashion, in a spiraling fashion.
All right.
Now that you have it sitting in there, what you want to do is add a little water to the airlock
and then you're going to take this big glass here and we'll just put a little bit of water in.
So it's up to about halfway in that airlock.
Okay?
Now, this little cap is a dust cap.
It has a couple of little holes in it, so you can put it on, snap it on if you choose to,
or you can leave it off.
The effective barrier between the atmosphere and what's going on inside here in the fermenting bucket is the water.
Okay, now what we're going to do is take this bucket and put it in a place that is above 60 degrees,
but yet has a fairly constant temperature, ideally around 65 degrees.
It's going to stay there for about seven days.
Fermentation will take place in the first two to three days,
and the rest of the time it will help settle out some of the sediment that's been caused during the fermentation.
An example of a beer that was made approximately 24 hours ago.
This, by the way, is a glass fermenter.
It's six and a half gallons or six gallons in size that gives us enough headroom in here for a head to build without having to blow off.
If we look carefully at the airlock, we can see approximately every two to three seconds a bubble start to go through here.
Now, that's being caused by the white foam that's forming at the top of this fermenter here.
In other words, this is the very early stages of fermentation.
The yeast has already gone through its respiration cycle, it's gone through its feeding cycle, and it's now into its fermentation cycle.
By the time the evening is out, let's say in another six to seven hours, we'll have a much higher head of foam on here,
and we'll also have a lot of churning activity going on inside as if there was a cooking.
You'll notice that this fermenter has a temperature strip on it.
This is a little tool used sometimes to monitor the temperature of the fermentation.
Remember, we do not want this, since it's an al, to be below 60 degrees Fahrenheit,
and this helps us sometimes remember that when we put it in the basement or a closet that we might not realize gets very cold.
Okay, you'll also see a lot of people ask, what's the difference between a glass fermenter and a plastic fermenter which we were using before?
The glass fermenter, unless dropped, is a permanent fermenter.
It's very easily cleaned and sanitized.
It doesn't scratch, so bacteria can't harbor in the scratches, whereas a plastic fermenter, on the other hand, will eventually need to be replaced.
Okay, so this now will take another two to three days.
All the sugars will be converted to alcohol, and we'll be able to go to the next process, which is racking to a secondary or a bottling bucket.
A week to ten days has gone by, and we've fermented all our beer in this primary fermenting bucket at this point.
We've also settled out some of the sediment, and well, most of the sediment, I should say, is settled out,
and we've also settled out some of the finer sediment to the bottom over here.
So now what we need to do is we need to rack this beer or transfer it either to our bottling bucket to do bottling
or to something called a secondary fermenter, which is this glass jug you see here, known as a carboy.
It's specifically five gallons in size.
The concept is that when you're producing beer in your larger container here, which is 6.7 gallons,
on the top of the beer, after fermentation, remains a layer of CO2, and since CO2, or carbon dioxide gas, is heavier than air,
it simply sits there and protects the beer.
When we siphon or move the beer to here, leaving the sediment behind, we lose the protection of CO2, and we're in oxygen,
and we want to have as little oxygen as possible on our beer.
So the ideal, of course, is to have our beer siphoned right up into the neck.
Failing that, anything a little bit lower is not going to hurt us.
Indeed, one of the things that seems to happen when we move beer is we get a little bit more fermentation activity,
so a little bit more gas builds up in a secondary fermenter.
It is called a fermenter, even though fermentation really is taking place in the primary.
What we'll need to do is also make sure that when we stopper up our secondary, we're doing it with an airlock and not with a solid stopper,
because we never make the assumption that all the sugars are completely fermented out.
Okay, what I'd like to do now is demonstrate the siphoning process.
First, we need to put our container that we're siphoning to on a lower level than the container we're siphoning from.
Of course, we remove our top, put that aside, and now we're going to use a mechanism that came with our kit that looks like this.
We have our rigid cane in my hand here, and we have our flexible tubing running off of it.
Now, the ideal way to start the siphon is not, by the way, by sucking on the end and then beginning the siphoning action,
but by putting water in the tube and doing what's known as a liquid start.
Okay, so let me demonstrate that for you.
By the way, the reason we don't put it in our mouths is because we're trying to avoid bacteria here.
Understand that this has been pre-sanitized, so I'm filling this with water after it's been sanitized,
either with the Bebright, the chlorine, or the iodine solution.
So I simply turn on my faucet, let the water stream in.
What I'm looking for is a solid line of water with no air bubbles in it.
Now, people say, well, the water that you're putting in here is chlorinated.
Well, I don't particularly care. There's not enough chlorine in here to really hurt us.
The level to which the water is at is approximately three to four inches from the top of each one of these, the stem and this.
Now, I have a solid block of water in here from about where my thumb is here to where my thumb is over here.
In order to control the process when I'm walking around, I put my thumb on the outer end or the open end of the soft tube,
therefore allowing me to tip this over without losing anything because I've created a partial vacuum.
So we still have our water in here. We have our thumb over here.
We go over to our bucket where the liquid is and we put this stem below the liquid line, but we don't plunge it to the bottom.
Now we can start the siphoning action by dropping this stem into our next fermenter over here and releasing the water.
Now we immediately look up here for a bubble that you can see is formed.
This bubble, you take your forefingers and your thumb and squeeze the bubble.
The bubble will go away. And as you can see, we have a nice smooth siphoning action of the beer.
You'll notice I have not dropped my stem into the bottom of the bucket where the sediment is.
I don't want to disturb it. I don't want to bring it up into the clear beer that's coming through the tube
and into what's known as secondary fermenter.
Now this process here takes about 10 to 15 minutes.
All right, as you can see, we're filling our carboy up here. We're near the top, so it's close to about 15 minutes now we've been siphoning.
And what we want to do is try to get the maximum amount of liquid or beer out of this container into here
without disturbing too much of the sediment on the bottom.
So still holding this rod, what I'm going to start to do is gently tip the bucket
so I can get more and more beer without disturbing the sediment as little as possible.
So keep a close eye on it. And we'll try to fill up this carboy a little bit more.
Now the concept we're working with here is that since we're losing the protection of CO2 that was laying on top of the beer here
and we're going into this container, we want to have as little oxygen as possible, as I said before.
But if we're up to where we are right now, we're in pretty safe position already.
Let's try to get a little bit more in there. You might want to lift the bucket a little higher.
There we go. Get the maximum amount of liquid out.
When we see the tube or we see a little sediment starting to come up in the siphoning tube, we'll stop the siphon.
Okay, that looks pretty good. I'm just going to pull back the siphon and you'll see it stop right there.
Okay.
All right. We'll just put that in here.
We'll clean that before the end of the day so none of that liquid gets stuck in there.
Now what we need to do at this point is stop this up with an airlock.
So let's put our airlock in.
Now remember this airlock's been sanitized so we're not just taking it out of a box and putting it in there.
We'll take a little bit of water and we'll put it in our airlock so we protect the beer.
And that forms a lock now between the environment and what's in here.
Now the little bit of air that's above in here, we have maybe less than a half of a gallon of air,
will probably fill with just enough CO2 to protect us.
Sometimes or most of the time I should say when transferring beer,
a little bit more fermentation takes place, a little bit more bubbling if you will in the airlock, and the head will fill with gas.
We're now going to stay here for about a week to two weeks, depending on how long it takes for this beer to clear thoroughly.
Remember we don't need to use a secondary fermenter, but we chose to get more of a clear beer in our bottles.
The trade-off would be if you didn't use this and you went directly from your primary to your bottling buckets,
then what would happen is you'd have a little extra sediment in the bottom of the bottle that you may or may not want there.
Okay, I've taken the liberty off camera to siphon, since we've demonstrated that before,
our beer from our secondary fermenter into our bottling bucket here.
At this point, what we need to do before we bottle our beer is introduce some sugar,
which we're going to be boiling in about a pint of water.
Now this sugar is already pre-measured. It's three-quarters of a cup.
It's known as priming sugar, dextrose, brewer's sugar. It's all the same thing.
It's very fermentable sugar made from corn.
Now the proper amount is three-quarters of a cup, four or five gallons.
What we do is just simply open up our package, put it in our water, which is almost near the boil at this point.
Let it dissolve in there, stir it around a bit.
All right, we'll bring that to the boil.
Okay, in the meantime, while we're waiting for this to come to the boil,
what I want to show you is, well, I don't know if you can see this, I have a pan on the bottom of the floor here.
And the reason I have that is that sometimes these mechanisms, the filler stem and or the spigot drip a little bit.
Not to worry, just catch it so, you know, no one gets upset that you mess up the floor.
Okay, while I'm doing that, let's clean a couple of bottles and get them ready.
Now the bottle that I chose to use is a 22-ounce. I happen to like that size.
It's less bottles to clean and the way I use the beer, it always seems like we're drinking more than 12 ounces.
Now this is considered a clean bottle.
In other words, I don't have any sediment built up in the bottom.
I don't have any cigarettes floating around here, whatever. It is clean.
All I need to do at this point is sanitize this bottle.
The way I like to sanitize is using the Bebright solution.
So today I've made up a solution to the Bebright.
I'm going to be using a regular cup measure with a handle to take some of the solution out of here and pour it into the bottle.
Now I pour in about an inch and a half of the solution in each bottle.
Okay, we coat the inside of that bottle.
Now you can see over here on the faucet, I've set up my jet spray washer, which is my bent brass tubing.
By the way, this has been boiling now for about a minute.
Let me just shut that off and let it cool a bit while we're talking.
And here I have this set up ready to rinse my bottles.
In the meantime, I'm giving this about approximately two minutes worth of a coating inside.
The jet spray shoots a jet of water, as you can see, and rinses the bottle very thoroughly.
Do it two or three times so you thoroughly rinse out the solution and put it on your bottle tree if you have a bottle tree.
Let me just remove this so you can see our bottle tree over here.
Okay.
All right, let me clean another bottle, shake that solution up in there, dump it out, and rinse the bottle.
Now we want to fill these bottles with our liquid here, but we can't do that until we introduce our sugar, which has cooled down now.
So I'm going to gently introduce the sugar into the bucket.
There we go.
Now, it's not enough to just introduce the sugar.
What you have to do is you have to stir this around.
Now, remember, this is a sanitized spoon.
We're not just putting a spoon in, and it has not been sanitized.
We stir the liquid gently so we don't cause too much oxygen in the liquid, the liquid being beer.
Okay, we've done enough of that, so now we have an even distribution of the sugar.
We take our sanitized bottle, or for a rack, and now for the first opening of this system, I load the bottle on the stem,
I push up against the valve, and then I open the spigot.
And as you can see, the liquid begins to flow in, or the beer starts to flow into the bottle.
It's flowing in from the bottom, gently up to the top.
In other words, again, trying not to oxygenate the beer, because oxygen damages beer.
So we're being very careful here.
We'll fill this whole bottle, and then I'll demonstrate how we cap it.
Now, normally, I fill all 30 bottles before I cap them.
Okay, now, another item you should take note of.
The way the fill of stem is designed, I fill the bottle near the top, but when I remove the stem, it gives me a displacement.
So I have about an inch and a half of space above my liquid here in the bottle.
You need that space for the gas to build in and then get reabsorbed by the beer.
So now, let me show you how we put the cap on here.
The bottle should be on a very firm surface, so, you know, don't use a table that's wobbly.
Put the cap directly on top of the bottle.
The cap is designed that has a little cup in the center that fits right over the cap.
Then as you bring the handles in, there are jaws that grab the neck of the bottle.
You bear down evenly on both handles until it's parallel to the table, and then you remove.
And what you've done is crimped the cap right onto the bottle.
Now, this cap cannot be removed without some sort of a bottle opener.
It's not a twist-off, and it's on very tightly.
These bottles now, after you've capped them all, you fill them all up, are now stored at room temperature.
For about ten days to two weeks.
In that period of time, it matures more and also the carbonation forms in the bottle.
At the end of about ten days, you should try one bottle.
Chill it down, pour it out, enjoy it, see how it is.
See if the carbonation level is complete, or at least to your satisfaction, see if the taste is good.
If you still have some, you think it needs a little bit more carbonation, leave the bottles at room temperature.
Make sure a little bit more time passes. In another week, try another bottle.
By that time, two to three weeks in the bottle, almost always you have full carbonation.
At that point, chill them all and enjoy.
The beer has been in the bottle about two weeks now, and we're ready to try it.
So I've chosen a chilled mug, give ourselves a nice crisp beer.
And as I said, we'll need a church key or some sort of bottle opener.
Open it, open it, there we go. Put that away, and here we go.
Nice amber color.
We'll pour it all in. We've got a beautiful head on the beer.
We've got a nice creamy head, nice amber color.
It's beautifully chilled, and here we go.
Oh, that's good. Cheers, relax, and have a home brew, everyone.
New York Home Brew prepackages 12 different styles or 12 different types of ingredients to make five gallons of beer.
Each box that you see in front of you here contains the ingredients for five gallons of a particular style.
The 12 styles that we offer are American beer, Irish stout, German dark beer, our nut brown ale, our very popular amber ale,
a porter, a pilsner beer, a steam beer, a very popular pale ale, oatmeal stout, and two forms of wheat beer, one a plain wheat and one a raspberry wheat beer.
For the purposes of today's demonstration, we'll be using our amber ale.
The New York Home Brew catalog reflects approximately five to six hundred different items.
Not only are there beer making items in there, but we have equipment and ingredients to make your own wine at home, your own cordials, your own soda.
It's rather a complete catalog, and I think you'll enjoy thumbing through it.
By the way, I hope you've enjoyed and found our instructional video to be of some use to you,
and if you have any questions or would like any further information, just contact us at 1-800-U-BRU.
That's 1-800-Y-O-O-B-R-E-W.