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3 – Singapore Home Beer Brewing Introduction – Actual Brewing

1403 days ago

Actual Brewing Part 1:

What you need:
a.    Stainless Steel Brew Pot (at least 8 litres)
b.    Cooled boiled water (about 6 litres, more if possible or just use bottled water)
c.    Small saucepan
d.    Beer ingredients (like those beer concentrates, malt extract, brewing sugar, hops and others). Oh yeast is already done right?
e.    Fermenter, tap, airlock and so on *
f.    Cleaning detergent and sanitizers
g.    Thermometer
h.    Cooler box (or if you don’t have a place to put your fermenter in a cool, dark place like a storeroom)
i.    Long Spoon
j.    Ziplock frozen ice pack(s) which we have done earlier

Recommended Stuff:
a.    Yeast Nutrients
b.    Disposable gloves & mask

Clean and sanitize your brewing equipment and utensils

1.    As the most important thing you do for home brewing, you need to clean and sanitize your equipment. I repeat, ALL your equipments must be cleaned. You can see that I have added disposable gloves and mask into the equipment. This is an added precaution. Mold and bacteria from your hands and mouth can also get into your wort (or even on your sanitized equipment) and do bad things. That’s the reason why doctors use gloves and wear masks.
2.    Using your cleaning detergent (one which is neutral and without any fragrance), wash all your equipment and utensils including the brew pots. The best way to clean is to use a clean plastic scrub-pad and wash gently all the surfaces. Then leave then in the detergent liquid for a few minutes. Make sure that there is no stuck food or stains on any of your equipment. For the fermenter, remember to wash the cover and cover thread as well.
3.    After rinsing them off with warm water, use your sanitizer and soak all your utensils and equipment in them. You should use your fermenter (if it is big enough) as a storage. Soak everything in the sanitizer. However, make sure your utensils don’t get corroded by the sanitizer. Oh, usually, your fermenter comes with a tap, you should clean the tap and the tap thread too. Dirt and other bad things hang around there. And wash every surface of the fermenter with the sanitizer which comes in contact with the wort. It would be easier if you have a spray bottle filled with the sanitizing solution and spray on every surface. Rinse off the sanitizer (if so needed) with warm water after you are done.
4.    For your brew pot, you don’t need to really sanitize it since you will be boiling the wort, which should kill all the molds, spores and bacteria. If you would like to be certain, there is no harm in sanitizing it first.
5.    You can of course sterilize your equipment instead of sanitizing them. You can pour boiling water on all your equipment but I won’t recommend it. Since a lot of your equipment is made up of plastics and hot boiling water and plastics don’t work well. You can sterilize your metal equipments without any problem but why bother? Star-san or Iodophor is very effective as sanitizers and they work very well for brewers.

Remember that we live in a humid environment. You should do your cleaning and sanitizing as close to the brew time as possible. You don’t want to leave your equipment lying around too long picking up bacteria and mold. And your scrubpad itself should also be clean. All sort of bacteria can hide there. 

* Beer Brewing Kit – You can get your beer brewing kit from two suppliers in Singapore. They are namely Homebrew and iBrew. Both are online stores and they do delivery as well. Good thing, since you don’t need to lug such a big heavy kit back to your house like some fishmonger. Homebrew deals with Morgan’s while iBrew deals with Cooper’s.

When you purchase a beer brewing kit, you usually get the fermenter (a plastic bucket with two holes for the airlock and spigot/tap), airlock, spigot, bottler, thermometer, hydrometer, bottles and caps (for carbonating and keeping your beer) and beer brewing ingredients (like beer malt concentrate, brewing sugar, yeast, hops and so on). That’s basically all you need for brewing beer.

Which is better? Morgan’s or Cooper’s?
No idea, don’t ask me. However, I am using Coopers Beer Kit. That doesn’t mean that Morgan’s Beer Kit is not good. In fact, I have never used Morgan’s Beer Kit before so I have no idea what kind of material or quality they have.

However, if you want like me to test both of them out, well you can always <cough><cough>…….

Singapore Brewing
But the thing about brewing in Singapore (and in other tropical countries) is that the weather is warm. It is just too warm for good tasting beer. Unless you have a cool and dry area in your house which should be around 24°C, then the approximate temperature in your house should be about 28-30°C. This is not a good temperature to ferment your wort. High temperatures will cause off-flavours to your beer during fermentation, which is obviously not desirable. You don’t want your beer tasting like some mouth puckering acid now, do you?

Of course, you can always use the fridge or air-conditioner to cool your room in which the fermenter will be. If you have them, then by all means use them. If not, then it would be worthwhile to get a cooler box. It is just a foam box designed especially for the fermenter to be placed in it without blocking the airlock. All you need to do is to add ice packs to it once per day (or twice per day) to keep a constant cool temperature. You would like it to be around 21-24 °C for ale beer. You can get the cooler box from ibrew. It’s definitely more economically than switching on your air-conditioner 24hrs. The ibrew cooler box comes with 4 high quality ice packs, unlike my own ziplock bag ice packs. You will need to change ice packs once per day or so.

If you want to further lower your temperature and maintain a better all-around temperature in your cooler box, you can try filling your cooler box with water and then add the ice packs. But you have to make sure that the tap (at the bottom of the fermenter) is either kept away from the water or before you do the bottling, you sanitize the tap first. I think that adding water to the coolerbox can be very effective. It also helps maintain a more or less constant temperature in the coolerbox.

One thing you need to pay attention – leaks. You don’t want to be cleaning your storeroom or kitchen if the cooler box leaks. In fact it would be a flood considering that the coolerbox is very big.

Hell yes, you can always build up your very own cooler foam box yourself. All you need is several thick foam cupboards, glue and a very sharp cutter. Actually, if you do it yourself, then you have the flexibility to create a foam box to your exact measurement. You should pay attention to the cover as you need to do a precise measurement. A little exposed space and heat can get into your cooler box. The advantage of creating your own cooler box is that you can save space, an important limitation in Singapore.

There are other ways of cooling your fermenter. One of the easiest ways is to dip your fermenter in a bath of water and put a piece of cloth around the fermenter. The cloth needs to be touching the water to “soak” up the water. Heat is needed for evaporation, so when the water is evaporated, cooling occurs and the temperature on the fermenter is reduced. You will need to top up the water on the water bath regularly though. But I think this is a very cost effective solution. Blow a fan at the fermenter if necessary. This will help cool the fermenter further by encouraging more evaporation.

However, be careful of mosquitoes laying eggs on your water bath if you plan to do a long fermentation. But if it is cold enough, the insects will not come.

The next thing you need to worry about when brewing beer in Singapore is the humidity. Bacteria and germs thrive in such environment (especially when both humid and hot), so you need to be extra careful when cleaning and sanitizing your equipment. Even leaving them alone in the environment for long periods can be potentially harmful to your brew. And it is important to really ensure that there is no leak in your fermenter. Bacteria can easily get into the fermenter if you don’t tighten your fermenter cover or airlock bung. Of course, it doesn’t mean that cooler temperatures there are no bacteria present, just that in tropical countries like Singapore, you will have to be more careful about things like this.

Ale Beer

That’s what we will be brewing today. Nope, not lager. Lager requires low temperatures during fermentation, something which is very difficult to achieve in Singapore. And I won’t recommend anyone to brew lager beer in Singapore unless you have a sure way to ensure constant cold temperature for your fermenter. A slight heat wave (and it happens very often in our climate) and your lager is no longer a lager.

The taste difference between lager and ale is that ale taste more robust. While for lager, the taste is usually more clear and some even say malty. This is because lager yeast takes a longer time to ferment and thus, the result is that the beer is clearer and clean. Most Singaporeans would prefer lager to ale.

We are doing a partial boil, which means that only part of the wort is boiled. We will be adding more (tap or bottled) water to the fermenter later on to make up 23 litres of wort. There are brewers out there who do full boils to make up their wort. Yes, we won’t be doing it anytime soon, especially if you are staying in a flat. The equipment need for full boils is just not practical for Singaporeans. Plus, you need a heat source big enough to boil nearly 30 litres of wort (due to evaporation it will go down to 23 litres). As I said, not practical. Extract or kit brewing should produce some decent enough beers for us.

Brewing Sugars (Adjuncts)
We can call brewing sugars or anything not malt (except hops and yeast) as adjuncts. Sort of like a cheap substitute for malt. Malt is expensive, try getting a can of ovaltine or horlicks and tell me whether there are cheap or not.

The reason why brewing sugars or adjuncts like glucose or dextrose are often used is because it doesn’t add much to the taste (well, of course there are some like honey which does add sweetness to the beer) but pumps up the alcohol content. If you use honey or some other malt substitute, you will most likely have a different taste if you use enough of them. However, it is also this fact that we can add adjuncts to adjust the taste, the feel and even the colour of the beer.

And in Singapore, we are so used to Tiger beer or whatever. These commercial beers very likely contain a lot of adjunct(to lower the cost of production) and their taste and feel is pretty different from those made from malts. So if you make a beer from just malts and for the taste, you will need a little to getting used to. Not everyone in Singapore appreciates a beer that has a lot of body and maltiness anyway. Adding some adjunct like dextrose will help “lighten” the feel of the beer, making it more suited for Singaporean tastebuds.

Return to Part 1. Return to Part 2.

Stay tuned for Part 4.