I had been back to Hydro & Brew several times to check in and gain some more knowledge on brewing. The local shop is owned by a husband and wife team who both brew and indoor grow so selling their modest product line was no problem. Jennifer talked me into an all grain batch which scared me a bit due to e need for something called a mash tun. Sensing this was going to take me out of my rookie comfort zone, I went to You Tube to browse DIY all grain videos using mash tuns. I love YT. In three short videos I was comfortable with the process and ready to drop another $135 on a cooler based mash tun made by Hydro & Beer.
Using all grains relieves the process of using the thick, sticky malt extract. As the grain soaks in 158 degree water, the sugars sweeten the water making wort. After about an hour of soaking the crushed grain, we have made our own fresh extract and are ready to boil in the same manner as before with staged infusions of hops. The recipes, and there are hundreds if not thousands are based on the types of grains. We have chosen a Hefeweisen recipe to use as our base but we are going to tweak it a bit by reducing the sugar content to give us a lighter ABV (alcohol by volume). Ok, ok, to be honest we didn't crush our grains well enough and only realized about 80% of our conversion causing a light OG (original gravity). As we proceed in future posts we will break down the technical and chemistry side of this process but for now I want you to know how easy it is to brew world class beer at home.
Again we had put the cart before the horse with branded logos for our batch 2 before even tasting it. But confidence or arrogance (not sure which) won the day and besides batch 1 was killer and didn't last long as it was premiered for Monday Night Football and poof, the 5 gallon keg was dry. Hillbilly Hefer was coming out of secondary fermentation at 14 days and looked perfect in color and body. In my many hours flipping YT channels, I had learned to sample the warm uncarbonated beer to make sure it was beer prior to kegging it. Batch 2 smoked batch 1 but there's something not quite right about warm beer.
Even non beer drinkers loved this Hef. It was light hearted and crispy with significantly more carbonation than Ditzy. With or without Lemon, this brew was inspiring and all grain. The great mystery of all grain and the use of equipment that was foreign to us (mash tun) had been broken down into a simple, step by step process that kicked out a serious contender.
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