My First All Grain Beer

What an awesome weekend! Saturday I made my first all grain beer and Sunday I spent the day at the ‘Feastof Fields’ (forty booths of incredible beer, wine, spirits and food, that lasted for five hours! More on this later).

You would think that if you were going to start all grain brewing, without attending some sort of work shop, you would start with a beer that isn’t too complex, a beer that wont have a ridiculous amount of alcohol when it’s finished, thus not a lot of ingredients, therefore less things to go wrong. But no, I jumped right in the deep end. Partly out of a large desire to learn, partly scheduling reasons (later on that) and partly out of masochism I think. So what is my first all grain beer? It is a Christmas Ale, with the alcohol going to be around 8%.

What’s that you say? “It’s no where near Christmas. Why would you make a Christmas beer?” Simple, if I want to make a good Christmas beer and have it ready for Christmas, then I have to make it now. Because of the complexity and higher alcohol percentage of this beer, it needs time to mature, about 4 months.

So I am a bit of a worry ‘wort’ (yes, that pun was lame, but still intentional), in the sense that I want to make sure I know what I am doing before I do it. In preparing for making all grain beer, I have been reading three different books, a number of website and asking questions at my brewing supply store. 

I took all the literature I found and made my own step-by-step instructions. On Saturday morning I cleaned up the kitchen (a large clean workspace is very recommended), I had all the ingredients handy, and got to work.

I was expecting it to somehow go terribly wrong. It was fairly straightforward however, and I had a really good time. I did not however reach the recipes called for Original Gravity, which called for 1.078 and I only hit 1.070. That was a bit disappointing, as that is about one percent difference in the final alcohol percentage. If all the sugars get eaten, then it will be 8.8%, when it could have been 9.8%. But when I brewed it, I made sure to have a higher mash temperature. This will make the beer more full bodied, with a bit of sweetness left over. So I am guessing I might hit 8%. 

Beer in its traditional sense has four ingredients (in Germany, it’s the law that beer is made from only these ingredients), malted barley, hops, water and the ever so mystical, wonderful yeast. This beer however, being a Christmas beer, will have a few things added to it. This pic shows most of what I am adding. The process is to first add the cinnamon, vanilla and oak chip etc, to the rum, then transfer those rum soaked ingredients to beer after it goes to secondary fermentation. Oh yeah, the rum? it goes in too. But, not until I have done a little quality control on it. This process has two benefits. One, is obviously flavor. Two, is that the high alcohol content of the rum will sanitize the other ingredients before being added to the beer, so any kind of negative bacteria they might be carrying, will be killed. Mmmm, sanitization!

To make a beer from scratch requires a little more equipment (A mash tun, and a wort chiller), which yes, raises your cost of making beer. However, doing it this way means you are buying the raw ingredients of grain itself, which is a cheaper than buying the processed malt extract. So in the long run you will save money, and saving money is defiantly part of why I make beer.

If I went out and purchased ten 6 packs of beer, here in good old B.C., I would have to pay $75 – $120. That is the watered down light stuff. If I wanted something a little more robust, I could be paying anything up to $180.

Well if I make my own, for that amount of beer, I pay $25 – $40 for the ingredients. Some beers are more expensive to make than others. This Christmas beer I have spent $37 on just the basic ingredients. Rum and all that jazz costs extra. 

I have read about adding rum into the beer before, but I was a bit hesitant until at the Feast of Fields on Sunday, and I met a very helpful Brewmaster (and a lot more that that too), Mark Simpson. He suggested it and, by his credentials, I am going to go ahead and listen. At his table he had three beers on tap. An IPA, a Wheat and a dark ale (The names of the beers themselves are hard for me to recall as, there were a lot of tents, and I had had a lot of alcohol by that time. But, I do remember the taste.)

Each one, including the IPA, was very well balanced. The wheat beer was extremely refreshing. The dark Ale was paired with, at the same booth, a soft chocolate fudge brownie, that was awesome on their own, but together makes me think of the ending of a dramatic movie. The music has already swelled and now, though quite, it's more powerful than before. The camera is pulling out, leaving our hero standing, and us wanting to see more. I went and sat down and digested under the shade of a tree a little after that. 

The whole event was truly amazing. I recommend going to the 'feast of fields', next year to anyone who loves good food and drinks. You pay one larger price to get in, (compared to 'Eat Vancouver') but then get to go around and sample at every table, and not buy extra tickets. This way, you have paid for everything, so you want to sample everything, and everything is delicious. It took the whole 5 hours to get to every table, if you are trying to enjoy every table, not just stuff yourself.

My last post I mentioned that I had lost some weight (2.2 kg, or 5 pounds) after starting to drink beer. I realized that when I was going to try this year of beer challenge that I was going to be digesting a lot more beer and I didn't want to gain any weight doing it. So I thought about it and came to the conclusion that I would give up eating sugary things (for the most part that is. Sunday was an exception). So, no more sugar in my coffee, no more desert after dinner (most nights). That kind of stuff. I thought it was going to be quite difficult, as those of you who know me know how much I love dessert, well any good food actually. But if I just thought about getting to drink a beer, or have a glass of wine or two with my dinner, I could abstain. This is my beer diet. 'Eat less, drink more'.