Amber Waves of Grain

This year’s wheat crop was great, so what better to do with all that abundance than to make beer!

I’ve never made beer starting with grain, and actually my only beer making experience has been helping my friend Dan Comparet make beer with malt extract. My local brewer’s supply store laughed at me when I told them what I was wanting to do. Undaunted, Dan and I pushed on.

Starting with some of the wheat we had saved and cleaned to use as seed this fall I soaked it in water, which floats the chaff to the surface where it can be skimmed off, and hydrates the wheat so it will germinate.

After soaking the wheat I spread it out on baking sheets and let the wheat germinate. After 4 or 5 days the wheat had sprouted. I dried it in the oven at about 100 degrees to stop it growing and to prevent it from spoiling.

This is ‘malted’ wheat. The next step is to crush the malted wheat to help in extracting the sugars from the grain.

Son Josh came home from Washington DC just to help brew (not really). Josh is running the wheat through my flour mill to crack the grain. You should run the grain through a crusher, but since I don’t have one of those we ran it through my flour mill with it set to grind very coarsely. The end result looked much like grain crushed by my local brew shop.

We used my 10 gallon picnic cooler as the ‘mash tun.’ I put the crushed grain in the cooler along with rice hulls to keep it from clumping and mashed it (let it steep in hot water).

After mashing I sparged it (poured hot water through it). The hot water picks up the starch from the grain and that is the wort you boil down to make beer.

We then put the wort on the stove to boil.

I didn’t have a pot big enough to hold the 7 gallons of wort, so we used 2 pots. We’ve added the boiling hops which accounts for the green color. And despite having 3 people participating in the brewing, we still managed to let it boil over.

Naturally while brewing wheat beer we had to have some commercial wheat beer to compare to our product.

On the left is a glass of Hoegaarden, a dry light Belgian wheat beer, the style we’re trying to recreate. On the right is our wort. The color is similar and our unhopped wort was sweet (of course it was, we hadn’t fermented it yet) and tasted wonderfully of wheat. We were greatly encouraged at this point in the brewing.

After boiling the beer goes into a glass carboy.

When the beer reached about 75 degrees I pitched in the yeast. When I got up the next morning it hadn’t started to ferment yet. I was starting to get worried, but then about 11 hours after I added the yeast it started bubbling.

All that brewing worked up a mighty appetite. I made pizzas 3 ways for supper.

	Fresh tomato, pepperoni, mushroom, and mozzarella
	Shrimp, red onion, feta cheese
	Roasted garlic, basil, parmesan

I’m being lulled now by the gentle sound of the airlock burbling about once every 2 seconds as the yeast works on the beer.