Happy Birthday Mom!

Never one to stick to schedules I milled the malt before bed last night. Had the pot cooking by 8AM. Doesn't mean I'll be done any sooner. The process of making sugar is all about when to stop. You generally stop whenever you think you'll be able to finish the boil before bedtime. The longer you spend in this process, the more killer the beer. So there's never any escaping without consuming the entire day.

It's been ten years or more since I've been able to make beer on a gas stove. It's a much more pleasant experience than with an electric. I've got a 12-gallon cooker straddling two burners. Talk about precise temperature control. No scorching.

OK, so let's make some sugar. How?, you ask... I start with malt. This is germinated barley that has been frozen in the germination phase by a process known as kreusening. Making malt is left as an exercise for the reader. I just buy it by the 50 lb. sack. Take 25 lbs. out and save it for next time.

Now you've got to crush it somehow. What y'all need is a grain mill. You can use a blender in a pinch but it doesn't come out tasting quite as good as if you just crush the grain and not actually pulverize it. There's a company in Mexico called Corona that makes one pretty cheap. They sell them to peasants to grind corn into tortillas.

The next step is to extract the sugars. We're gonna' make malt syrup. Throw all that crushed grain into a huge pot with about 7 gallons of water. You've got to get it above 142F, preferably 148F, but never exceed 155F. This is the tricky part. it's like a huge pot of oatmeal. Keep it at this termperature for a long time and all the sugars will leach out. When you think you've made enough (at least 1-2 hours, preferably more) you raise the temperature to 168 to dissolve the newly formed sugars into the surrounding water.

Now you need to dispose of all the grain hulks. Pour it all into a big bucket with a bottom spigot. Drain the liquid off through the spigot. Put it back into the cookpot. This is malt syrup. You've had another pot of water heating to 180F. This is your rinse water. Rinse the husks by pouring some of this hot water over the top as it slowly drains below. This process takes a few hours. You're left with incredibly potent malt syrup. Now you can make beer.

Find your largest drinking glass and fill it half full of your newly created syrup. Let it cool to just a couple of degrees higher than room temperature. Add a teaspoon of sugar (corn sugar preferably) and some yeast. Lager yeast, ale yeast, wild spores from the refigerator, whatever. This is the starter. Cover with plastic wrap and set on a plate. It will bubble over within an hour or two.

Bring the cookpot to a raucous boil and let it go like that for an hour or two. Throw in some flavoring hops if you want. If you dunk them in a giant teabag you can avoid a final filtration step. You really want to avoid that step. Add any other secret ingredients about five to ten minutes before you cut the heat.

Now get it back to room temperature. The quicker you can do this (like with a chiller) is generally a good thing, but you can also just wait overnight. It's highly susceptible to wild yeasts at this time so unless that's the flavor you're after - keep it well covered and sealed. As soon as it hits room temperature throw in your starter and cover it up. Allow Co2 to escape because it's going to bubble like mad in the next day or so. You're all done - for now. After the first wild day, you need to move the beer into long-term fermentation vessels which will keep bad oxygen out while letting fermentation gasses escape. Then some time much later put it in bottles or kegs.