Beer Forum

Hi, my friends and I are beginners and we found this recipe:

In a stainless steel pot, soak 250 grams of yellow corn and 500 grams of barley in 10 liters of water (good spring water quality) for four hours.

Then add 15 grams of hops and 600 grams of brown sugar, and boil all of the ingredients for two hours. After this, let the mix cool down.

Add 15 grams of beer yeast (diluted), and cover the pot for 48 hours of fermentation.

After this, filter the liquid and bottle. Store the bottles in a cool place for 6 days before consuming.


I have recently been told that this recipe is no good, but nobody has bothered to tell me how to improve upon it.... Any suggestions?

We do not have expert beer equipment, but we know enough about the ingredients and the level of sterility that the pot/bottles need to give it a try.

I got this response from a different forum:

In a stainless steel pot, soak 250 grams of yellow corn and 500 grams of barley in 10 liters of water (good spring water quality) for four hours.

Merely soaking it will do you little good, it would need to be mashed at 150 degrees Fahrenheit. I would not suggest doing this for more than 60 to 90 minutes maximum. Be aware that if you are using whole grain corn, it will be adding nothing to your beer. it would need to be pre cooked and flaked to help this recipe much.

Then add 15 grams of hops and 600 grams of brown sugar, and boil all of the ingredients for two hours. After this, let the mix cool down.

Bring the liquid to a full boil before adding either of these. A single hop addition will give you bitterness with little flavor or aroma. If you have more hops, add the original 15 grams, and add an additional 15 g after 30 minutes and another 15 g 25 minutes after that for a total boil time of 60 minutes. 2 hours is excessive and not needed.

Add 15 grams of beer yeast (diluted), and cover the pot for 48 hours of fermentation.

Be sure the beer is cool to room temp before adding that yeast. There is simply no way the beer will be fermented in 2 days. Let it sit for at least 2 weeks before bottling.

After this, filter the liquid and bottle. Store the bottles in a cool place for 6 days before consuming.

If you let it sit for 2 weeks, there will be no need to filter it at all. Siphon off the beer into a sanitized vessel and add 1 cup of sugar (assuming this is a 5 gallon batch, if not, adjust accordingly), stir well then transfer to sanitized bottles and cap them.

The inventor of this recipe either does not know much about brewing beer or the directions are from 1981. Modern techniques have superseded this "old school" method of brewing.

You are on the right track and I congratulate you on being suspicious of the quality of those instructions.



So my next question is: can anyone make any improvements on this? Would malt extract be a good substitute for the grain barley?

That recipe is, as the individual on the other forum said, either very old or written by someone who knows very little about brewing. I'm not sure that there's anything simple that can be done to "improve" it. I really think it would be easier to find a more recent and proven recipe.

To get an idea of the more modern techniques and methods of extract brewing, I would start with John Palmer's "How to Brew." An older edition is available online at howtobrew.com. If I were you, I'd start by reading this entire chapter:

http://howtobrew.com/section1/index.html

That should give you an idea as to the best way to start brewing with extract. Good luck!

After some tweaking, and comparing to other similar recipes, I am considering doing an 10 liter batch (2.5 gallons) of something like:

-make a mash of malted barley (1 kilo) and yellow corn (250 grams, flaked and boiled already) in about 2 liters of water, cooking at 65ºC for an hour.

-move the mash to a larger stainless steal pot, filtering out the grains with a grain bag, add the rest of the water (8 liters thereabouts), dip the bag a couple of times, bring the mix to a boil.

-add the hops (45 grams) and 600 grams of brown sugar gradually while boiling during the course of an hour.

-cool the pot until it reaches room temperature

-move the contents of the pot to a fermenting container adding 15 grams of diluted yeast.

-let sit for 2 weeks

-siphon the contents to the bottling container, mixing in 100 grams of brown sugar which had been boiled/dissolved in water.

-bottle and wait for 6 days.


This leaves out the sanitation method, and some other details (which I really don't feel like typing out), but does this sound like an acceptable mix?

sentfromspain wrote:After some tweaking, and comparing to other similar recipes, I am considering doing an 10 liter batch (2.5 gallons) of something like:
-make a mash of malted barley (1 kilo) and yellow corn (250 grams, flaked and boiled already) in about 2 liters of water, cooking at 65ºC for an hour.
-move the mash to a larger stainless steal pot, filtering out the grains with a grain bag, add the rest of the water (8 liters thereabouts), dip the bag a couple of times, bring the mix to a boil.
-add the hops (45 grams) and 600 grams of brown sugar gradually while boiling during the course of an hour.
-cool the pot until it reaches room temperature
-move the contents of the pot to a fermenting container adding 15 grams of diluted yeast.
-let sit for 2 weeks
-siphon the contents to the bottling container, mixing in 100 grams of brown sugar which had been boiled/dissolved in water.
-bottle and wait for 6 days.

This leaves out the sanitation method, and some other details (which I really don't feel like typing out), but does this sound like an acceptable mix?

It all depends on what you consider acceptable. Will it be good beer? NO. Will it have alcohol and get you drunk? YES. I must reiterate cdburg's suggestion that you check out howtobrew.com. Even if you don't have a good source in Spain for supplies, I'm sure it wouldn't be too expensive to have something shipped from England.

I would have to agree with the above comment. Scrap it. Read "How to Brew", by Mr. John Palmer, and go from there. Also, there was no mention of sanitation at all. That is probably the most important thing to be considered if you want to make a beer that you will enjoy. I would think that there has to be some sort of home brew shop somewhere near you. If you got malted barley and hops, you definitely have access to everything else that you would need.
Once you get into the book a bit, you will have the knowledge that you need to make good beer properly.
There is also a section in the beginning of the book for brewing right away. John goes step by step and it is super simple to follow along with. I just have to figure out where he picked up that Binford chiller.
Good luck in your brewing venture. Let us know what happens.

I agree with all who have suggested you read Palmer's "How To Brew". It's really great that he has the first edition published online for free viewing. As for recipe comparisons and advice, "Brewing Classic Styles" by Palmer and Jamil Zainasheff is a GREAT book. It quickly became a must-have item in homebrewers libraries. I also learned a lot about ingredients and recipe formulation from hopville.com. There are tons of people's recipes on there, and gives you a lot of different recipes of every style so you can get a general idea of ingredients that go into each type of beer. Be aware, however, that not everyone who puts recipes on the site is an expert-so don't treat any one recipe on there like it's the gospel. But by comparing a bunch of recipes of a particular style of beer you can see what they have in common. It also has a recipe calculator that you can just plug in whatever ingredients and amounts you want to use and it will give estimates of your expected alcohol content, bitterness, etc. You can then adjust the amounts of each ingredient, the boiling time, and boiling volume to see the effects of each aspect of your process on the estimates for the finished brew. Good luck in your brewing. If your first beer turns out great, you will want to do it again as soon as possible. If your first brew turns out terrible, you will still want to brew again as soon as possible to figure out what you did wrong and do it better. Either way, be careful, it can be highly addictive!

-Adam

I wouldn't drink it.