Home brew in Peru

I did my first brew on the weekend. It was almost a freaking disaster...

It's been a trail from day one. First I had my grain stolen by the cops at the border, so I had to get a second shipment smuggled in.

Next step was making my mash tun. Got hold of an old esky easy enough so I thought the rest should be easy too. It's been anything but. I decided to go with a slotted copper manifold in the mash tun, which I was able to make, although cutting 120 slots in the thing was a pain in the rear. Next step was to fit a tap to the esky, seemed easy enough. Take out the bung insert a 1/2inch brass thread and put the tap on one end and the manifold on the other. Well trying to find a brass thread was next to impossible. Couldn't get any kind of thread that would work, no where no how. In the end I found a little hardware place who had a brass tap with a thread about the size I wanted, and got him to cut it off for me. But then he had to spend half an hour filling the end of it so the nut could go on either end. It took me at least two weekends to get this far, I did waste a day with hangover so that was kind of my own fault. So got my thread home, fitted it all nice and tight into the mash tun, no leaks. Woo hoo.

Next step is crush my smuggled grain... Well as you know a two roller mill is going to give the best crush. But I haven't seen one of those around here, so I figured I would go with the Corona mill, from what I could find online it works ok, if you can set the gap between the plates large enough. Sounds easy enough. Well being a homebrewer I didn’t want to spend too much money so when the missus said her Mum had one we could borrow, I said “sweet”. So we got that sent up on the bus, I planned to do the crush on Saturday as I wanted to do it the day before as I had heard that these kind of mills left a lot of dust in the air and it didn’t want that to get into the brew. So down to the bus stop we go to pick it up, to find out they are closed. Have to come back tomorrow. By this stage I am starting to think that maybe it was never meant to be…

Brew Day. My attempt to get out of bed early and get things started didn’t go exactly to plan. But I was back down the bus station by 11am, got my mill and raced home to start my brew day. First problem for the day, I have 5kg bag of pilsen malt, the recipe calls for 4kg. I have no scales, I figure I just guess. Divide it into 5 equal looking piles and then mill 4 of them. Good enough. Lucky for me Milka had a better idea, we take the whole bag next door to the shops and ask the nice lady to weigh out 4kg worth, please. Then it’s back to the house and grind. By midday I had the mill all set up and operational, after a lot of tweaking with the space setting on the mill I got what I thought was a reasonable crush, probably a bit too fine, but not bad for a first effort.

Next step get it in the mash tun with the hot water and let it sit. Water. I figured the water in Cusco wasn’t the best so I would use bottled water. The plan was to buy a 20l bottle use the water then use the bottle for my fermenter. Perfect. In hindsight it would have been wise to order the water the day before. But I figured they deliver, so what the heck, do it on brew day, no worries. Well we (the missus) rang them, they said half an hour. This was about 1pm by 3:30pm I figured they weren’t coming and I was running out of time. So plan B, go down the shops and buy one there. Did that and an hour later I was heating up my mash water. At last things seemed to be going right. A bit late in the day to be starting the brew, but I wasn’t worried… I should have been. To speed things up I was heating my mash water in part on the stove and in part with the electric kettle. All good, chuck in my fancy new digital thermometer to check the temp and sweet it’s looking good. Then not so good, the thermometer is reading all over the place. I take it out of the water to check the temp of the room and apparently I am standing in a 60 degree kitchen (Celsius that is). Crap. I chuck it in the freezer to test it out, nope the freezer is reading 40 degrees, I am melting here!!! It’s dead. What to do. I need the water to be about 75 degrees, but I have no way of know what freaking temp it’s at. So I bung my hand in and go hmmm. Call the missus over for a second opinion, throw a little hissy fit “why is every thing so damn hard!?!?!”. And then decided bugger it, I either through the lot out and forget about it, or I chuck the water in with the grain and hope for the best. So in it goes, at god know what temp. I figured it was a bit cooler than it should be so I whack another jug of boiling water in for good measure.

So I spend the next hour tweaking with the thermometer, no joy, it is screwed. Hour is up, time to drain the wort from the mash tun. Now in a perfect world the wort should be sweet tasting. The soak in 66 degree water for an hour converts the starches in the grain to sugar, giving it the sweet taste, this is very important as it is the sugar that is converted to alcohol. No sugar = No beer. So the moment of truth will it be sweet or will I have to toss the lot… It’s sweet!!!! And the crowd goes wild!!! But how sweet? This is where normally you would use a hydrometer to check the sugar content of the wort. But I didn’t have one… I figured I could get by with out one, no worries. As there isn’t a home brew store in Peru, so it isn’t that easy to get one either, so this one isn’t entirely my fault.…

So on with the show. I batch sparge the grain in my mash tun. Basically dump in another 10l of water at 80 degrees (according to my trusty hand in the boiling pot technique) and let sit for another 15 mins, then drain. So at the end of this I have just under 20 liters of sweet wort. Time to boil. By now the time is somewhere after 7pm, but I can’t stop now, must keep going.

My boil pot is a 24 liter pot the mother in law bought us, Milka refused to let me drill a hole in the side and install a tap. Considering the problems I had installing one in the mash tun, that was probably a good idea. So on the stove it goes, it’s just big enough to cover two burners so I crank them both up and start cooking. It took another hour to bring it to the boil. Time to add my hops. Oh crap, still no scale, no way to weigh out 25 grams… No nice lady at the shop, it’s 8pm on a Sunday night, shop is closed. So it’s back to my piles method, I know I have 100 grams in the bag, just split it into 4 even piles and Bob’s your uncle, 25 grams. So into the boil goes my hops, an hour later it’s done. Now I need to cool it down. So I take the pot and stick it in the bath tub full of cold water for half an hour or so to cool it down. Then I need to drain it into my fermenter, problem now is I don’t have a tap in the brew pot, so it back to old fashion siphon method, with me sucking on the hose to get the flow started. After straining off all the gunk (hop crud), and swallowing about a liter (my siphoning technique needs some work) I end up with about 16 liters of wort, again with out the hydrometer I have no idea how strong this will be, but I decide to top it up with another 2 liters of water anyway. Bung in the yeast, shake like crazy and hope for the best.

The next day I wake up early and jump out of bed to check on my precious brew, there it is bubbling away nicely. It’s not the clearest looking beer I have ever made, in fact it is quite hazy due to the over fine crush, and I have no idea how strong or more to the point how weak it will be. But it’s bubbling, and I am happy. Next step bottling…

I have learned a few lesson from this experience. Number one, don’t start your brew day so late. By the time I finished it was 10pm and I still had to clean up the kitchen. Which I did do, well I gave it a go. And I forgot about the mill and all the dust that was in the other room… Luckily Milka cleaned all that up for me. Thanks Honey… Lesson two, order or buy you water the day before. Lesson three, find a hydrometer before I brew again. And lesson four, water proof the thermometer. Turns out from reading a few articles online that it doesn’t like being submerged in water, so I will have to waterproof the probe before the next brew day. I am sure there were a few other lessons in there as well, but I can’t remember them all…