Se Noyer Brewing Home Page

How we make beer

1. Gather the ingredients (see recipes below). We purchase ours at a shop called Oak Barrel, in Berkeley. Our main ingredients typically include:
   • malt extract, a syrup or powder extracted from malted barley, wheat, or other grains. This provides the sugars for the yeast to convert to alcohol, as well as the sweetness of the beer
   • specialty malts, roasted grains which provide stronger flavor or color to the beer
   • hops, a dried flower which provides the bitterness of the beer, as well as a distinctive taste and aroma.
   • yeast, a microorganism which eats sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide - so it both ferments the beer, and carbonates it. We use dry yeast, because it's easy to work with; others may use liquid yeast cultures.
   • water. Because we have an electric stove, it's difficult to get all 5 gallons boiling, so we usually brew with 1.5 gallons of water, and add the result to 3.5 gallons of chilled Arrowhead. If you can, though, it's better to use as much water as possible in the brewing.
2. Sanitize everything. Maintaining cleanliness is crucial to making good homebrew. Anything that's going to come into contact with beer after the boiling process should be sanitized. We often pre-clean glass with a dilute bleach solution, but for actual santizing, we tend to prefer iodophor solutions.
3. We begin by cracking the hulls of the specialty malts, with a rolling pin, and then putting them and the brewing water into our brewpot. We bring the mixture to a rolling boil, and then strain out the grains, which otherwise become bitter.
4. Then we add the malt extract and the first batch of hops, the bittering hops, which will provide the bitterness of the brew, and boil for 45 minutes or so. Stir like crazy, so the extract doesn't burn on the bottom of the pot, and watch for boilovers!
5. Then we add the second batch of hops, the flavor hops which provide the hoppy taste, along with 1/4 teaspoon of irish moss, a seaweed which promotes beer clarity, and continue boiling for 15 minutes.
6. Finally, we turn off the heat and add the last batch of hops, the aroma hops, which provide the hoppy smell of the beer. They steep for 2 minutes.
7. We take the brewpot off the stove and cool it as quickly as possible, usually in our ice-water-filled bathtub for 15 minutes. The prefermented beer is called wort, by the way.
8. Meanwhile, we prepare the yeast by adding it to some sterilized hot water (150 F) and letting it sit for 15 minutes.
9. We pour the wort through a strainer into our carboy (a fancy name for a 5-gallon glass Sparklett's bottle) along with the chilled Arrowhead, until we reach 5 gallons, and a temperature of 65-75 F.
10. Then we dump in the yeast, and attach an airtight cover to the carboy, with a blow-off tube with its end in a jar of clean water. This is an air lock - the carbon dioxide given off by the yeast can escape safely, but outside air (with all its wild yeast and bacteria contaminants) can't get in. We cover the carboy with a towel, because sunlight spoils beer. We also usually measure the specific gravity of the wort, which indicates how much sugar is dissolved in the wort, using a hydrometer, which looks like a floating thermometer. By comparing this measurement to a measurement at the end of the fermentation, we can calculate how much alcohol is in the beer.
11. Now we wait for 4-7 days while fermentation takes place. You can watch foam form on the surface of the beer as it ferments, and hear the air lock bubble as it releases carbon dioxide. When the foam falls and the beer clears, fermentation is complete.
12. We then add 3/4 cup of corn sugar to prime the beer for bottling. The yeast will eat this sugar while in the bottle, and the trapped carbon dioxide will be forced into the beer, carbonating it.
13. Finally, we transfer the beer into bottles (5 gallons is about 48 bottles of beer) and cap them. Wait a couple weeks, and they're ready to drink (though they often improve over the next month as they age).

Se Noyer Recipes

• Maligaya Nut Brown Ale (this was made from a kit that was given to us, so we can't tell you what was in it!)
• Hopful Romantic I.P.A.
• Paruparo Chocolate Porter
• Hundred-Acre Sparkling Mead
• Iduali Dry Pale Ale
• Philippine Independence Ale
• Castaway Ginger I.P.A.
• Apple-Apricot Mead
• Godfather Porter
• Russell's Mead