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Take your sanitised scissors and carefully cut off the corner of the small silver sachet of yeast. Sprinkle the
yeast evenly over the surface of the wort.
Give your fermenter’s lid one last sanitise (m
ake sure to get in around the seals) and screw firmly onto the
fermenter.
Now is a good time to take a ‘hydrometer sample’ to check how much
sugar is dissolved into the unfermented beer. This pre-fermentation
reading will help you calculate how much alcohol will be in your final
product. Simply take your hydrometer’s storage tube and fill that with
wort (don’t worry! It’s
only 100ml!), then float the hydrometer in the
tubes liquid and take your reading from the
‘meniscus line’ (see picture
right). This pre-fermentation gravity reading is known as your Original
Gravity (‘OG’).
Take your sanitised Air Lock and gently but firmly insert it into the lid’s
rubber grommet. The Air Lock should be half-filled with clean tap water
after the small clear plastic dome has been put inside. The little white
cap can be capped back on top after.
The Air Lock’s job is to allow the CO2 given off by the yeast during
fermentation without letting any dirty outside air in.
The leftover sanitiser can be stored in an air-tight bucket for re-use during bottling or disposed of
appropriately.
5.
The fermentation:
You need to find somewhere in your house to put the fermenter where it will remain undisturbed for the
next 3 weeks.
This spot should ideally be out of direct sunlight and consistently between 17c-20c at all hours of the day. If
the temperature gets over 20c, it won’t ruin your beer, but the chances of having off
-flavours in your beer
from the beer fermenting too fast increase sig
nificantly. These ‘hot’ and ‘fruity’ (in a bad way) flavours may
be more noticeable to some than others or hardly there at all.
Read our ‘
3 Golden Rules of brewing
’ above and our tips on ‘
Getting the Best Possible Beer
’ below for more
on the importance of temperature control and how to achieve it.
Now that the yeast is in and you’ve found your fermenter somewhere nice to live, the hard part begins:
waiting for it to be done!
6.
Bottling your finished brew:
Gently move your fermenter to a bench where you plan to bottle the beer from. It is best to put the
fermenter near the edge or somewhere else elevated so you can easily access the Bottling Wand that will be
coming down from the Fermenter Tap.
Make sure when you’re moving the fermenter that you do your best no
t to stir up the settled yeast and trub
(proteins and other solids that settle out of the beer) that’s settled at the bottom of the fermenter. You will
most likely be able to see through the hazy-white plastic a clear 1-3cm dense layer of cream goop at the
bottom. Stirring this up too much will mean it ends up in your bottled beer, making it much cloudier. Some
Correct installation of air lock
