Hello guys, this is my first attempt to brew without any beer kits and it’s going to be a simple one. Basically what this means is that I won’t be using some beer kit like Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale (which I used last time) Beer Concentrate but I will be using malt extracts and hops and boil them. Those Beer Kits usually come pre-boiled with hops and then it is packed for your convenience. You don’t need to do anything but to add some boiling water and perhaps some brewing sugars. The receipe is as below.

Skinny Man’s Beer -

1. 2kg of light Dry Malt Extract
2. 500g of Rice Maltose
3. 1 tablespoon of Irish Moss
4. 50g of Malto-Dextrin
5. 1/2oz of Super Alpha Bittering Hops for 30mins
6. 1 oz of Cascade Hops for 15 mins
7. 1/2oz of Cascade Hops for 5 mins
8. Some bread yeast in boil as yeast nutrients
9. Nottingham Yeast (reused from my previous batch)

As I said, this extract brewing will be a simple one because this is my first time brewing without kits. It’s better not to get ahead of myself. However, I think it is a good experience for me. So what I will be using is Light Dry Malt Extract (2kg), Rice Maltose (500g), Malto-dextrin (50g), Super Alpha Bittering Hops, Cascade Hops for both aroma and flavourings and Nottingham yeast (reused from my previous batch). I gathered a few grams of yeast cake from the bottom of my fermenter in my previous batch and stored it in a sanitized jar. After letting it rest in the fridge for a while, the yeast settled at the bottom and the beer on top. So I just carefully pour out as much beer as possible, keeping only the yeast cake. It’s a good way to save some money considering that each Nottingham Yeast pack cost about S$6.50. However, note that you should only reuse the yeast at most 3 times due to mutation of the yeast.

Here are the stuff. Light Dry Malt Extract (the pale coloured stuff), Hops, Malto-Dextrin(the white stuff) and Irish Moss. Malto-Dextrin adds more body to the beer, I don’t want a very watery beer and it also helps to create a good head. You can see that I have used Malto-Dextrin in my last brew as well. Really does help create the head but it makes the beer slightly cloudy because of the little bubbles. The bottle at the bottom is actually Irish Moss, it is to help clear the proteins in the beer wort. We don’t want hazy beer now do we?

Ha, that’s the rice maltose I bought from Sheng Siong. Some China brand stuff. About S$1.50 for the 500g pack. Pretty cheap considering that the Light Malt Extract costs like S$16 for 1 kg. And this stuff is very sticky and hard to get out of the plastic can. I had to boil the plastic can in order for the rice maltose to soften before I can use it. This is to add some more alcoholic stuff into our beer. Hope that this will turn out okay for my beer. Keep all my fingers cross!

My hops are in hop bags! A lot of brewers don’t use hop bags because they are just plain traditional. Hop bags make taking out hops so much easier. You don’t need to strain your wort, just remove the hop bags once you are done with them. Looks a lot like tea bags don’t they? Well, they are tea bags which I have stolen from Coffee Bean. And I tied a string across the top of the bags so that the hops won’t fall out. Smart right?

This is a handy little stuff. It’s a timer for me to time when I add the hops into the wort. A must have for any brewer. You don’t want to over-boil your hops. Yes, it is egg shaped. All you have to do is to turn the top of the egg to the timing you want and let it rip. Once it hits the time, it will automatically crack open.

This is the result after I added water to the Light Dry Malt Extract. Perhaps it was a mistake to throw the Malt Extract in first before adding water. It sort of foam up and it became very very difficult to dissolve. A better method of adding dry malt extract is to actually warm up the water a little first before adding the Dry Malt Extract. This way, you can slowly dissolve the Malt Extract before it boils. Remember, never add Dry Malt Extract into on-flame boiling water, it will clamp up real fast and you will have a lot of problems dissolving it. This is the reason why a lot of brewers don’t use Dry Malt Extract. However, Liquid Malt Extract is very prone to environment conditions, so if they are not kept in the proper condition, they tend to “spoil” real fast. I decided not to take the risk and went with the dried stuff.

After spending 10 minutes getting rid of the foam, I managed to make it look presentable enough for a photoshoot. Here it is, in all it’s glory.

Hoooray, the wort is boiling! You can see the hop bag I have added in. This is for the bittering of the beer. I will add 2 more hop bags into my wort. One is for the flavouring which I have added 15 minutes before the end of the boil, while the last is for aroma, which I have added 5 minutes before the end of the boil. Actually, looking at the photos of the wort, it doesn’t look at appealing doesn’t it? However, I can assure you that when it turns to beer, it is very appealing! And I have added my Irish Moss into the wort at the same time I added the flavouring hops.

Anyway, this is the end of my pictorial for this beer brewing session.The rest should be pretty standard. After finishing boiling, I added my malto-dextrin into the wort and then crash cooled the wort. After cooling the wort, I poured the wort into the fermenter. After which I add cool water to the fermenter to make sure the temperature is about 22°C and start to aerate the wort. After doing that for 15 minutes, I pitched the yeast into the wort, closed the cover and added my airlock. That’s it. Again, as you can see it is not a very difficult process, the main thing is being clean and ensuring at everything is sanitized properly. If you do that, I am sure that all your brews should be fine.

I am not sure what I am going to do for my next brew. I think I will go back to kits and see what other types of beer these kits offer. And I would really like to taste what this current batch will be. If it turns out great, maybe I will stick to extract brewing for a while and perhaps even start improving on the current recipe.