On Sunday I went to go visit my BrewMaster, Ryan, to learn how to brew beer & to make a custom brew for me…we are working on a chile, lime & salt beer, specifically to go with a couple good pork dishes I have. Ryan (along with two other guys) are in the process of starting Filthy Brewing Alliance. Please find and “LIKE” their FB here, and also take a gander at their website…just click their logo below:
I apologize ahead of time for the low quality of the videos – used the wrong settings on my phone 
Oh well, I know better for next time)
This is Ryan, he’s my BrewMaster. Really, he knows everything there is to know about brewing beer, and brewing it well. He’s been featured at one of my grilling classes this past summer…and will be doing a St. Patty’s Day event & an Oktoberfest Event with me this year. He knows beer like I know food, so we make a good team.
This first video is a short introduction to the custom brew we were working on and also a quick lesson on the types of beer out there. It is by no means a complete run down of every beer out there, but more about the basic building blocks.
We went over an amazing amount of information. The barley, the hops, the yeast, temperatures, times, fermentation & bottling. It was a six hour day – though fun the entire time! There is too much for me to remember (not to mention we “tasted” at least four different types of beer he had previously brewed) to include in here. But I do have some pictures and videos of the basics. The rest of the videos will follow, and the pics will be in the slideshow at the end.
This video is a little snippet into the fermentation process. It shows the beer (at this point called “wort”) being siphoned out of the big glass jar (called a carboy) into a mini keg to finish fermentation. It explains in the video…but you have to siphon instead of pour so you don’t get the dead yeast at the bottom (it all sinks) of the carboy into the keg. Dead yeast won’t kill you…but it will make your beer taste nasty. We tried this coming out of the carboy – he put lemonheads (yes, the candy) into it. It had a really nice, high citrus tone to it, not too sweet at all.
You have to cool down the wort before pouring it into the carboy. Besides hot liquid having a tendency to crack glass, too hot a wort will kill your yeast. He uses an interesting piece of equipment for it (see pics in slideshow) A coil of copper with tubes. The tubes hook up to the faucet, the coil is lowered into the wort. Cold water is pumped through the coil, then empties into the sink – so it never mixes with the wort, but draws the heat away. Only takes about 10 minutes to cool down as opposed to hours.
OK, this video is terrible…please turn down the sound because you won’t be able to hear ANYTHING..its all noise. I included it because I just wanted to show the beginning of the brewing. The end result you see in the video is after about an hour of brewing barley, then adding the hops & flavors – we have achieved wort!
You start with clean water and barley in a bag. There are all different types of barley. The barley is roasted to all different roasts (much like coffee beans) to achieve different kinds of flavor. The barley is crushed & placed in a bag, then brought up to about 160F to steep for awhile. This is the beginning of your flavor. You then have to add reduced barley syrup, referred to as “malt extract”- this is for sugar to feed the yeast, not necessarily for flavor. Then you add your hops – again, MANY different kinds – boil some more to extract the essential oils and add some bitterness , then your flavors. We used chili flakes, lime zest & lime juice. This mixture is called “wort”
The bottling process. This is beer he had brewed about two weeks prior. The bottles have been sterilized, then filled up as much as possible. O2 will ruin beers, so it’s important to fill as much as you can without spilling.
Capping. All by hand. The caps are sterilized as well, then put on one by one with the handy little tool you see us using. Yes, as you will see…sometimes glass breaks But we only had one fatality, lol.
Ryan and his crew are currently only doing home, private batches. They haven’t secured a site for brewing yet – so they aren’t selling to the public. But you can contact them on FB or their site to inquire about custom flavors. If you attend one of my classes, you may even see them show up at an event with me! In a couple weeks there will be an update with video and pics of the batch we brewed that day! Stay tuned.
In the slideshow, you’ll see some pics of me making a brazilian style, garlic stuffed pork loin with brown rice and Caribbean style beans. Brewing is hard work, so of course we had to eat! Mmmmmmmmmmm!
