We’ve made beer at Brockley Brew School. We’ve made lager from a pack. Now we’re making our own beer from scratch.

To keep things simple we’re making basically the same recipe as we did at Brockley Brew School.

Before anything else we sterilise everything. This seems to be the key to good beer – it’s the contaminants that make homebrew taste bad.

Then the first stage is the mash, where sugars are extracted from the grains.

Grains	M/O pale malt	4.5kg
	Crystal malt	200g
	Black malt	10g
	Torrified wheat	100g
Adjuncts	Flaked maize	100g
Water	Mash	11L

The water is heated in our brewpot to 72-75C.

This gets mixed with the mash roll (all the grains and adjuncts) in our mash tun (insulated box) which should be at 65-68C before being left for an hour.

While that’s sitting we heat up another 20L of water for the sparge stage. This gets poured on top of the mash, then is drained through the mash, to get the wort that’s used for brewing.

The wort goes back in the brewpot and brought to a rolling boil before hopes go in.

Hops	Chinook	16g	60min
	Centennial	10g	60min
	Cascade	5g	30min
	Cascade	5g	0min
Extras	Irish moss	1 tsp	15min

The times are how long the hops are in for. As the boil is or an hour it means the Chinook hops go in at the start, the Centennial after 30 minutes, and so on.

The Irish Moss is there to make the beer clearer. In Germany beer is legally only allowed to contain grains, hops, water & yeast, so they’re not allowed to use this, which is why many German beers are cloudy.

After boiling the wort is quickly cooled using a heat exchanger to get it down to 20C, and goes into the primary fermentation vessel (a big bucket).

At this point we take the gravity using this weird floating thing. There must be a better way to do this. Every time I float it, it gives a wildly different reading. Anyway… it looks to be around 1035… maybe? Anyway it’s in the brown area labelled ‘beer’ on the stick if nothing else!

Finally, for today, it’s time to pitch (add) the yeast. 11.5g of US-05 yeast is sprinkled on top of the wort.

Then the fermenting vessel is sealed and an air lock placed on top. This goes on a heat mat under the stairs, which should keep it at 20C during the two weeks of fermenting.

Now we’re just left with the cleaning up… At least the spent grains will work wonders in the compost!