Easy one or two week beer making
Here is a method I use to make 12 to 14 6 packs worth of strong, good-flavoured fresh beer in my kitchen. It takes one week to ferment, and is drinkable in 3 days following bottling. A batch costs about $20 to make, and I find it is easier to do than to bake 2 loaves of bread. Since one can hardly buy 2 six packs of commercial beer of any quality for this money, it is well worth learning to do this if you drink any regular quantity of decent beer.
Why announce the measure in 6 packs? Well, I use empty 2 litre plastic pop bottles, and you could fit about 6 341 ml regular beers in one of these containers. Take a look in the average curbside recycling bin, it will have 3 or 4. The most valuable item in the beverage industry is the container. Get a dozen or so. I rinse them with water initially. It is essential that the cap and liner comes with it. When the time comes in a week you will rinse them with a chlorine bleach solution.
You need a food grade plastic pail, 5 gallon size, any bigger and you won't be able to put it on a table for siphoning, with a lid. The lid won't go on tight, it will just sit on the pail. I got my pail at my local brew your own shop, along with the other necessary ingredient, a $15 can of malt extract. Get what you like, they all make beer. I get a $2 bag of dextrose to get the beer strong, and I sometimes add molasses for the same reason. The sweeter, the more the yeast can process.
Rinse the pail and lid with a bleach solution, and rinse with water. Fill it with cold water in your bathtub. Leave it on your kitchen floor.
Boil water in the largest pot you have, and add the can of malt extract and other sweeteners and boil it for a while. You can make a tea of hops in a cloth bag and soak it in the boil for a while. It comes out. I've used "Lemon Tea" from Celestial Seasonings as well, but the beer tastes somewhat like that, so you had better like it.
After it has cooked for a while, you can pour the boiled extract into the cold water. You want to get it almost full. If you have a large spoon or ladle you can stir it (make sure it was rinsed at the same time as the pail). Clean hands always! Add the yeast you got with the extract, and place the lid on top. I put it in a sunny window, but the idea is to keep it around the 20 degree C range most of the time. It won't get too warm unless it is summer, in which case the cellar is the best place. I don't bother with taking temperatures or anything. The yeast will go to work and there will be an initial bunch of foam after a day. Just leave it loosely covered, and keep the lid on and anything out for a week.
To bottle, rinse all 2L containers and caps in bleach solution, and rinse well with water. Add 2 teaspoons white sugar to each clean bottle and place them on newspaper on the kitchen floor. Put the pail on a table above, and remove the lid. The beer will be dry, with little or no sweetness. The bottling is done with vinyl tubing, again, rinsed at the same time as the bottles. I got mine in the automotive section of Canadian Tire - 5/16" food grade vinyl tubing.
Siphon the ale down the sides of the bottles, and leave a good inch of air at the top. When all are filled, rinse out the tubing and the pail. Cap the bottles tightly. Tap their bottoms gently to dissolve the sugar, and store at room temperature, away from light. Drinkable in 3 days. The secondary fermentation in the bottles gives finer bubbles over time, and since the ale is alive, it continues to get better for quite some time, but it isn't around that long I find.
When you start to run out (saving the containers), begin another batch.
I'm now using 7 litre pails I found from a Tim Horton's. Again, food grade. Nice small batch, that I can do with just extract and hops. I can get 750mL of Canada Malt pale extract for $3.60, which works with 7 litres of water and 15 to 30 grams of hop pellets (around $2). Fuggle is very good with this malt. The canned extract is great because it is prehopped, but this way with the Canada Malt is dirt cheap. I toss in molasses (really cheap in bulk) to get it darker and stronger. You can also reuse the sleeping yeast at the bottom of the pail in your next batch. Put some of it in a clean bowl in the fridge, covered, until your wort is just warm.
In Hamilton Ontario I get my amber malt extract in bulk from "Brew Time" at Upper James south of Rymal.
They have good prices and really know their stuff, and are happy to assist the home brewer.
A lot of the byo places just want you to show up to add the yeast, and keep you away, but
Frank and his staff are really excellent.
I get my hops from Northern Brewer. You can get one pound vacuum packs for $7 to $12, and after shipping (one week airmailed!) you can get 4 pounds for around $50, a relative bargain. So I'm not paying $2 an ounce for hops anymore. I haven't used them for yeast, because you just want small amounts of fresh yeast (kind of like spice).
Update, November 2007: Hops are really expensive now. NB is out of almost everything, and only has single ounce sales for $2 to $3.25 an ounce! No more vacuum pack pounds at $7 to $12... Hope you stocked up last year...
Molasses Beer Recipe That Works
Here's my molasses beer recipe. It makes an extremely stout and strong dark beer. It's based on the old wheat bran and molasses recipe that can be found all over the net but that isn't really usable. The one on the net you see is a bad version of something in an old Victorian cookbook I read called "cottage beer". I have made the amounts work for stovetop setups.
3 lbs blackstrap molasses, about 750 mL, $3.
6 cups hard red wheat bran, 50 cents worth.
30 grams cascade or fuggle hops, and a little Perle for finishing if you like.
Boil the wheat bran for about an hour, and strain out the water into a pot. This gives the beer a terrific head, and adds fuel for the yeast.
Add molasses to the hot wheat water, let it melt in.
Cook with the hops in about an hour.
Pour into the fermenter, add water to about 10L let it cool, add yeast.
You get a bunch of foam on the top, and need to let it work about 2 weeks (there is a LOT of sugar in molasses compared to malt extract).
1 litre plastic pop bottles are best. You must have a cap with a liner. Usual bleaching instructions apply. Add a teaspoon of honey from a squeeze bottle. Cap tightly.
Conditioning takes a long time. Early drinking gives a sweet and much too bubbly drink.
Aging smooths the wheat and hop into the licorice of the molasses, and dries out the sugar. The bubbles get smaller and the alcohol level approaches that of wine (I don't measure it but this is one strong drink). In 3 months it will be amazing. Chill and pour into a clean glass. Be careful of the strength, and of opening warm or too soon, as it will just all fizz out of the bottle. Quality, not quantity - this is not something you can drink in pints.
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