Farm beer

Hello all - I'm new here and fairly new to brewing in general. But I like what I've read of the forums, so thought I'd post a rather open ended question in the hopes of picking the brains of those with a little more experience than me -

I live on an acreage in Iowa, central USA. I grow food for a hobby. I've grown barley and wheat (though having trouble figuring out how to thresh it efficiently) and have hop vines growing. Also fruit of all sorts.

I would like to make a generic "farm beer" with my own barley, hops and yeast, but I'm a little concerned about taste. I have 5 hops vines that produce maybe 5, one-gallon freezer bags worth of hops every year. The problem is that I lost the tags that identify the variety long ago!

I "grow" yeast - collected from the bottoms of the fermentation pails and rinsed a bit. And as I said, grow wheat and barley (I use these as cover crops now, buy am working on harvesting them for bread and beer.)

I'm doing the brew in a bag technique but have only done it with specific ingredients specified by recipes. I would like to use my home ingredients now. And I'm not very careful with anything other than sanitation. I put 10-12 pounds of ground barley in a $1.00 nylon laundry bag from Walmart and boil it in 7-8 gallons of water in an old keg with the top cut out of it on an old propane camp stove. I put the grain in cold water then raise the temp to about 155F for about 90 minutes. Today I tried adding some fruit (mulberries froze last August).

After 90 minutes I lift the grain and fruit (if any) out and let it hang over the pot for 10-15 minutes while I'm heating the water up to a gentle boil. I add a handful of hops and another handful after an hour of very gentle boiling - simmering really.

After about 90 minutes of boiling/simmering I turn off the heat and put a lid on the keg and let it cool over night (I do all my brewing outside so it'll be cool to cold most nights.)

Next day I siphon into a 5 gallon fermenter for a couple weeks, then plan to siphon into my shiny new 5 gallon keg for carbonation, etc.

So my question: Is there a weak link in this process? What am I going to regret in this rather hap-hazard protocol? Is the beer going to suck? Or am I just going to have to live with some variation and lack of control? Are there fatal flaws in this sort of approach? Or is it just another viable alternative to beer making?

 

Oh, I may have mis-wrote - of course I would malt the barley first, and roast some in our wood oven too. I am only growing 1/4 acre of barley, but that seems to me a little too much to hand thresh with a flail. Some sort of mechanical thresher may be needed.

I do grow a good malting barley, not a grain barley.

I'm glad to hear there is no huge problem with my intended methodology - its a pretty lazy one.

Maybe I'll boost the boil and change when the fruit is added. I didn't know of the book Farm House Ale, but sounds like one I need to pick up!

Thanks all -

 

Amateur, but life-long herpetologist :-)

I understand the barley needs to be sprouted to a certain point - not more or less. I think it is a good idea to practice. I'll be buying my barley seed in the next week or so, so I'll keep some back to sprout, roast, grind and steep.

Figuring out how much hops to use is a challenge too - trial and error I suppose. The fresh hops smell wonderful so it may be easy to over do it.

Joe

 

I think thats a good idea MrOH. It'll be a while before hops and/or barley will be ready to harvest around here, so I'll use a bag of store bought barley and some store bought yeast and hops most times.

I was curious about when to add fruit. Someone upstream said during fermentation. But I put it on top of the steeping barley and the steam/heat seemed to "juice" it a bit. So is there something wrong with that approach?

Also, are temps really that critical? I can tell when the wort is roughly 160 because of the way the thick steam rolls off the surface, and I can obviously tell a simmer and boil. Isn't that good enough?

My goal is to make fairly good, or decent beer as simply as possible and for as little as possible. And not just because I'm cheap and lazy :-) I was making wine using all the detailed recipes wight heir special yeasts, acid blends, etc and etc. Then a friend from Georgia (the country, not the state) came over and we made one "the Georgian way", which, as he explained, has 2 ingredients: grapes and time.

We loaded up the plastic kiddie pool with grapes and had the wee ones go crazy for a while, then loaded the mash into 5 gallon primaries for a few weeks. The siphoned the juice off into carboys and let it set through the winter. Result was a very good wine, really delicious actually.

Anyway, that changed my approach to wine making and I'm interested if beer making can be similarly streamlined.

Joe

 

Fatc1ty - I'm probably at the other end of the OCD scale from you. I usually try to just do it first, then slowly learn to do it well with trial and error. I'm better at sorta feeling my way rather than figuring it all out ahead of time.

I've brewed a few kits and a couple brew in a bag type brews. It may help that we produce lots of food, so we're baking with yeast and fermenting food on a regular basis. I feel like there is some carry over to brewing there.

I hope to get to really good beer sooner rather than later, but there are many variables, threshing and sprouting the barley, for example, are issues that precede the brewing. Then there is the problem that if I do produce good beer my friends will be over here drinking my "free" beer all the time. :-)

I have to be OK with "pretty good" for a time or else I'll never get out of the starting blocks.

 

Well my first semi-farm beer is happily bubbling away this morning, so I'll let you all low how it goes. I used 10-11 pounds of a 50 pound bag of malted crushed barley, including 2 pounds of roasted, 7.5 gallons of water, a couple handfuls of fresh/frozen hops and a couple pounds of fresh/frozen mulberries.

Process: I put the grain in the cold water and brought it rather slowly up to 160F and kept it between that and 150F for 90 minutes. Then I raised the bag and tied it off on a beam to drain for 15-20 minutes while I brought he heat up to a simmer (190F). I added a handful of hops at that point, then kept the brew between 190F and 212F for 90 minutes, adding another handful of hops toward the end of the boil.

Put the lid on and let it cool over night in place. Then siphoned it into a 5 gallon fermenter and added a cup of proved (proofed) yeast - generic beer yeast the following morning.

Thanks to all for their input. I appreciate it.

Joe