Making beer, choosing the grain

Right, this is our grain room, this is where we store our grain once it comes it, as you can see we order the grain in 25 kilo of 55 pound sacks. Our grain, we order from a malt house in Germany called Viramin. We usually order about four tons of grain at a time and we store it in here until we are ready to use it.

The other thing also that you can see is that we have different types of grain over here, basically the difference in the different types of grain for the most part is the temperature which the grain is kiln and dried at the malt house. So we already get it as malted barley, part of the process of turning raw barley into malt involves kiln drying the grain and the temperature at which the grain is kiln and dried will determine a lot of the character of the grain. The color of the grain, the texture of the grain and how much sugar we will get from the grain.

What we have already done is we have pulled out the grain that we are going to be using for our recipe today, the type of grain that we are going to be using today are Pale Ale malt. That is what we uses our base malt, which is to say that is the malt that we are relying on to give us most of the sugar for the fermentation. And we are using a special two malt called Cara hale malt which is a sweet, which is a malt that has already been partially processed and it provides some of the sweetness and a bit of the malt fill to our beer.

Now what we are going to is want to take this grain and we want to crush the husk around the grain so that the husk is open and the grain is exposed to the water that we are going to mix it with later on. This is our mill room, and this as you can see is our grain mill. The grain mill is attached to our Auger which automatically feeds the milled grain up through a pipe that transmits at over two hour brew house and Mike is going to basically get it started and terms of milling our grains so that we can get started with our brewed.

The first thing that we are doing is running the Augers that we can clear from of the Augers, some of the grain that might be left in there from the last time. Basically we load the grain in, as you can see that Mike is wearing a dust mask because there is a lot of dust that kicks up in here and we do not want to get sick.

You can hear the grain falling into the grist hopper, this big case here is called the grist hopper it comes through the pipe from the Auger and drops right into the grist hopper here. What we will do is we will pull out a little bit of the grain, what we have try to do is exactly what we said before, we want to all in the husk of the grain okay, and we want to maybe chop the kernel inside in half. So that more surface area for the water to mix with but we want it for the most part, keep the husk skin tact. As much intact as possible and that will become important later on in the process when we do what is called loitering and scourging.


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