Steeping the Grains to Brew Beer for Home Brewing Beginners

Steeping the Grains to Brew Beer for Home Brewing Beginners
This section is going to be about steeping the grains. Within the recipe guide, it’s pretty much the first step. First, I’ve added the water into the brew kettle, and I brought it up to 150 degrees. Now, I’m going to steep the grains. Here we go. Now, in our equipment kit, you’ll actually get a nylon grain bag, which you can just rinse out and use over and over and over. I’m lazy today, so I’m going to use a disposable grain bag today, because I’m lazy. We’ll cut this guy open, and we’re going to get the grains into the bag, if I can pull this off without letting them fly all over the parking lot. Dump them into the bag. I get a face full of them because of the wind. Alright, now we just let the grains go into the water. We’re beginning the steeping process now. You want to go ahead and make sure that they get good and saturated. So just kind of work them around in the water like a giant thing of tea. We can see it already imparting a lot of color into the water. Now, it’s beginning to smell like a beer. I want to try to hold the temperature right at about 150 degrees. The thermal shock of the grains going into the water brought the temperature down just a little bit. Go ahead and fire the kettle back up. Also, I need to make sure that I time this, so I want about 15 minutes of steep time here. My heat is back on and I’m going to try to get that up to about 150 degrees again, and just hold it there. This is a short steep on the extract of brewing versus some of the other methods that we use. Some of the other ways you’ll do 45 minutes or even up to an hour of steep time, trying to control that temperature during that period of time, so 15 minutes of steep. That’s what we’re going to control right now. That pretty much does it for this section and we will get back with you here in a sec.