Brewing beer in Korea

It’s been quite a few times that I’ve been told by my long time readers that they’d love to brew their own in Korea. I’m sure that they already thought about it but gave up like castrated pussies when it became technical. Who can blame them?

So the goal of this article is to make brewing in Korea, possible and accessible to you all, my virtual friends. All the doubtful syntaxes, grammar mistakes, misspellings and strange expressions, are copyrighted by my European ass, and forbidden to be copied-pasted without my acceptance and/or a link on your blog. May that be clear.

For the starters, I want you to know that I won’t break your balls with history facts, complicated chemistry and other useless shit. The goal is to make better beer than the ones available in Korea, in your Korean kitchen. One historical fact to keep in mind, though: if the Egyptians and my Celts ancestors could brew drinkable beer thousands of years B.C., with only their dicks and their knives, you surely can do better with the few available stuff you have in your kitchens, anywhere in the world.

I’m not pretending to know what I’m doing nor to be spreading the holy word, but so far, my brews have been drinkable and my homebrewing style worked for me and my friends. It's a very basic "Homebrewing 101", and you'll of course need much more reading to understand what you're doing. This article is meant to make you understand the overall process of brewing.



Three choices are available to the basic homebrewers: “Liquid Malt Kits”, “Partial Mash (Dry malt extracts + specialty grain) and All-grain brewing. I will only fully cover the third one, as I’m not experienced in the second one; and that the first one doesn’t grant you the right to pretend to be a homebrewer. It’s like pretending to be a chef when you cooked a “ready to microwave” kinda dish.

The first type, involves a can of already hopped and bitter-ed LME (Liquid Malt Extract), a hermetic bucket, water and a ready to pitch sachet of yeast. Total length of the “brewing process”: 15mn. You basically open the can, mix the concentrate with water, pour the yeast, close the bucket and wait 2 weeks before you bottle. Miserable. You can’t call that brewing, but it’s a good first step in the world of brewing, in order to understand fermentation’s basics. That was my first batch, though. I started brewing all-grain from the second batch.

The second type, is a good compromise between a quick brewing process and an all-grain batch. For those of you, on the cheap, who don’t want to invest even a minimal amount of money in a couple of brew-stuff things, it’s the perfect brewing process. You basically use DME (Dried malt extract) as the malt base, and only a minor part of crushed grain as the specialty malt. As I said, I’ve only brewed all-grain, so I won’t be able to cover this category. IMHO, Most partial-mash carry the same similar “taste” which I’m not a big fan of.

Let’s speak about the third way of brewing.



How to brew All-grain beer at home

0-A. The stuff:

To brew all grain, you don’t need much stuff. You’ll need:
- 1 Brew-pot (regular fat-ass 40L marmite) [~40.000won]
- 1 cooler (big camping cooler from Emart 70L) [~60.000won?]
- 1 five gallons (25L) fermenter (food-grade from Korean homebrew supplies online store with its fermentation lock and such) [max 40.000won]

There’s a big debate among homebrewers going on since decades, about whether or not aluminum pots imparts off-tastes or damages the beer. This has never been proven, so I wouldn’t give a shit about that if I were you. A good half of the homebrewing community uses it with zero problems. Use aluminum if you wish, it’s no problem and it’s much cheaper than Stainless Steel. You’ll find your happiness for cheap, in any kitchenware market in Seoul or in a city nearby yours. To justify the expense, tell your wife/fiancée, that she’ll be able to use it for cooking, or whatever else she wants to hear.

You’ll find your cooler at E-Mart of Homeplus a couple of months before summer with good discounts. I used those Sinsaegae coupons my company gave me for Chuseok to buy mine. Plan 60.000won to 80.000won for a good 50~70L one. Make sure it has a “water exit” on the bottom. I tried Gmarket, navershop and other online stores but couldn’t find the one I wanted for a decent price. To justify the expense, say that you’ll be able to go on romantic camping trips with her during spring, summer and early autumn. (Don’t tell her that it’ll keep the beers cold while having a poker night with the mates. It doesn’t work well, I tried).

The perfect fermenter is the one from beerschool.co.kr. Tell the owner that you’re from “homebrewkorea.com” and get a -10% discount if you order by email and wire the money to his bank account. You, of course, have to join our community of foreign homebrewers in Korea at http://www.homebrewkorea.com/forums . It’s free, and everyone will do its best to help you getting started and to answer your questions. The fermenter at beerschool has a plastic tap on the bottom, which can be particularly convenient to bottle your beer after the fermentation. This is just my own opinion.

You’ll need odds and ends, like a laundry-machine shoebag, 1500won from emart (or one woman’s stocking, the ones you buy for 1000won at the convenient store) to use as a hop bag in your brewpot. You’ll need a hydrometer and a thermometer, and both can be found for pennies on the homebrew online stores. You’ll need sanitizer. I use regular oxiclean in order to clean my stuff (the one your wife uses), and iodine to sanitize (can be found for 8000won for a huge bottle at the pharmacy. This will last you a lifetime).

You’ll also need empty beer bottles to bottle your batch after fermentation. Just drink one bottle of Hite (64cl) every day for a month, and by the end of the month, you’ll have your 30 bottles, which is enough to bottle a 20L batch. Just clean the bottles well after you drank them, with oxiclean, and sanitize them prior to bottle.





0/B. The ingredients


Once you gathered all the stuffs with the meager allowance your wife/fiancée gives you every month, it’s time to care about the ingredients.

You’ll first need to come up with a recipe. Well before that, you’ll need to figure out what you want to drink in the end. Let’s pretend you’re a stout aficionado. You’ll search google, beertools.com, homebrewtalk.com in order to find a highly rated all-grain stout recipe. Once it’s done, post it on our forums (http://www.homebrewkorea.com/forums) and get it analyzed/corrected by one of our senior members, whom will adapt it to the limited ingredients we have here, in Korea. You’ll need different kinds of malts in different quantities, different kinds of hops in different quantities, and some strain of yeast. Let’s say you’re lucky and found a highly rated and reviewed stout recipe, and that all the malts and hops are available in Korea. I’m going to give you mine, coz I’m a nice guy and that we know each other virtually since a while, now. Keep it a secret.

Mister Baekseju’s stout recipe
20 liters batch
Based on 68% efficiency

Malts:
Pilsner Malt: 4kgs
Flaked Oat: 0.4kg (optional)
Caramunich: 0.3kg
Carahell: 0.3kg
Carafa: 0.5kg

Mash the grain at 65 degrees Celsius.

Hops: Hallertauer (8%AA): 1.2 ounces for @90mn (meaning boiling during 90 minutes)

Yeast: Irish Ale Yeast So, a recipe will usually come like that. The Grain bill, the hops schedules, the yeast strain to use and the mashing temp. The brewing process requires three simple steps.

First step: Extracting the maltose from the grain (Mashing)
Second step: Boiling the wort extracted from the grain and bittering/flavoring it (Boil)
Third step: Fermenting that wort to transform the maltose into alcohol (Fermentation)

Get into your heads that brewing doesn’t require much efforts, but it takes time. I usually brew on lazy Sundays. You’ll basically be watching movies while keeping an eye on what’s happening during the mash and the boil, and waiting for your alarms to ring. The biggest pain in the ass is cleaning and sanitizing your stuffs before and after.

1. The Mash

As said before, the mash step is in order to extract the fermentable sugars (maltose and all those stuffs) present in the malt. These fermentables will be transformed into alcohol at the end of the brewing process. Basically, in order to extract those fermentables, you need to let the grain soak in a “x” amount of water, at a “x” temperature for 90 minutes. The water will then absorb the flavors of the malt and the fermentables. Once done, you’ll drain the water from the grain, and boil what is now, the “wort”.

The Essential: This step is pretty simple, yet crucial. You need to heat your water at that “x” temperature, -in our case 65c- (plus approximately 6 degrees celcius), and pour it on the grain in your cooler. Then, close your cooler, and wait for 90mn. After 90 minutes, collect the wort in your brewpot and leave the grain behind in the cooler. You’re now ready for step 2.

More explanations for you curious readers: The cooler comes here very handy for this part, since you need to keep those mashing temps for a long time and since coolers keep the same temperature for 3 or 4 hours, it avoids you the burden of playing with the stove’s burners for 90 minutes in order to keep that temperature. Of course, there are temperature parameters (your cooler’s original temperature, the temperature of the grain, etc…) If you bought the stuff I advised you too, a rule of thumb is +6 degrees celcius to add to those 65 degrees celcius, so the cooler and grain parameters will bring it down to about 65 degrees. There are softwares calculating that for you (beertools, beersmith, etc…) but +6 degrees works okay. One it’s done, just drain the wort in your brewpot. For that, you’ll need to build some kind of filters on the water evacuation on the bottom of your cooler (post of the forums for advices and tips), so the grain stays in the cooler, and only the wort gets out. You can then, do a “sparge” at higher temperatures which helps to clean all the remaining sugars out from the grain. This is optional but often required to attain higher alcohol contents.

2. The Boil

The Boil is in order to bitter and flavor your wort with hops, and also to kill any wild stuffs present in the wort.

The Essential: Once you’ve got the amount of wort you need, you need to start the boil of your wort. Once it comes to a boil (100c), throw the hops in the hop bags, at the different required moments of the boil (based on your recipe). In this case, add the hops at the beginning of the boil, and set your alarm to 90 minutes later. Launch a movie and lizard on the sofa.

More explanations for you curious readers: The hop schedule is very important. Depending on what moment you add the hops to your boil, the final product will be affected by your choices. Just keep in mind that there are 3 kinds of steps in your hops schedule. The first step is the “bittering hops”, which you add in the beginning of the boil, and that will balance the alcohol and the bitterness of your beer. The second one is the “flavoring hops” which you add around 15 to 30 minutes before the end of the boil, and that will slightly impart their flavor to your final product. The third ones is the “aroma hops” which you add 5 to 0 minutes before the end of the boil, and which will consequently impart their flavor to the final product. In the case of our recipe, we don’t want the hops to impart their tastes to the final beer. Stouts are all about maltiness and bitterness. In the case of an Indian Pale Ale or an English Bitter, though, you’d have needed shitloads of flavoring and aroma hops, since they’re all about hops flavors. Hops come in different AA percentages. Basically, a high AA percentage (acid alpha) means a very bitter hop, and a low one, less bitter hops. High AA percentage hops are good to save money, since you need less of them to bitter your batch. Again, there are many softwares which calculate the hops requirements, equivalences, conversions and proportions for you (beertools, beersmith, …).

3. The Fermentation

Or when the wort becomes beer. The yeast will eat maltose and produce alcohol and Co2.

The Essential: Pour the wort in your fermenter, close the fermentation bucket hermetically with its fermentation lock (filled with a little water), and leave that on your balcony for the night. The cold and clement temperatures during spring, autumn and winter, will bring down the temperature of your wort easily. Once your wort is down to 18 to 25 degrees celcius, pitch your yeast vial (or sachet) in your wort, close the bucket and let the yeast do its thing for 1 to 2 weeks, sometimes more, until the fermentation lock doesn’t bubble away anymore. At the end of that time, bottle your beer with the required amount of sugar (usually 3g of bottling sugar per bottle in order to carbonate the beer), cap it, and wait 1 week more before to drink.

More explanations for you curious readers: Sometimes, the outside temperatures are high, and it’s difficult to chill your wort to pitchable temperatures. Lots of brewers build and use “counter-flow chillers”, which you can read or inquire about on our forums. If you pitch the ale yeast at higher than 25-29 degrees C, the yeast will probably die. If you pitch lower than 14-18 degrees C, the yeast will probably fall asleep and not do its job, until the temperature is a little higher. Lager yeast require very low temperatures, though (13~18 degrees C).

4. Get wasted on your brew

No need for an explanation, but letting age your brew for a couple of weeks and even more is a good thing to do. Unfiltered beer is alive and evolves with time. So if your beer is not that great, let it age more and it might turn into something fantastic in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks or even 4 months later. You’d be amazed to know that some of my brews were total crap when I poured the first pint and that it always turned into something pleasant and sometimes even fantastic (to my own tastes) a month or so later.

There’s one and only one thing to keep in mind in the homebrewing hobby: Relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew ! (by Charlie Papazian). That means everything, just relax, give stuffs times, don’t stress over a bad procedure. As I said, my celtic ancestors and the Egyptians brewed good stuffs with absolutely nothing, they neither had brewing nor chemical knowledge, and no hygiene control. With all the fucking technologies you have available in your kitchen, the books, the internet, the homebrewing forums, you can be sure you’ll make great stuff.

Also, it’s easy to make good beer, but it takes a lifetime to make the most perfect beer. That’s what make this hobby so interesting. It’s so simple, yet you always have room for improvement and to learn and read more about the different steps and aspects of homebrewing. I used to be a total dick in chemistry and biology at school, and never showed interest about it. This hobby just opened my eyes about how super interesting it is. If I had been homebrewing while a teenager, I probably would have pursued and obtained a double PhD in Brewing chemistry and micro-organisms biology by now. No shit.

5. Sources, links and tips.

Stuff that could come very handy:
- Beertools’ software. This thing is declined in 2 versions: Windows and Mac. This will save a considerable amount of time in your calculations, recipes editions, brewing process, and all those stuffs. I bought a life-long cd-key from their website for 15 dollars or so. It’s a must buy. http://www.beertools.com/ Their website contains a large amount of recipes.

I’d advise you to brew one batch first, before to bother reading. You need to dive in and pop your cherry first, so you won’t be anxious and stressed about technical stuffs. Two years ago, when I brewed my first all-grain batch, I really had absolutely no fucking idea what I was doing. If I bothered reading before to jump into all-grain brewing, I’d still be reading right now, and be anxious about every single little step. So just dive in and brew your first batch. Read and listen, after.


Stuff to read:


1. I’d advise you to read John Palmer’s website after your first or second batch. This guy is a great homebrewer and renowned in the business. He knows what he’s doing, he’s written countless books and provides the full content of his book “How to brew” on his website… for free ! This guy is not only talented, he’s also a nice guy who wants homebrewing to expand and to help his fellow newbies. I wouldn’t read it first, as it might scare you away with all its technical words and chemical words. You have to keep in mind that brewing is technical only if you want it to be. For that, I’d advise you to brew a batch first, so you’ll know that you shouldn’t be scared. http://www.howtobrew.com/


2. The complete joy of homebrewing from Charlie Papazian is a cool book to learn about homebrewing. Charlie is the guy who fought for homebrewing to become a legal hobby in the US. He’s the founder of the A.H.A. (American Homebrewing Association) and one of the oldest homebrewer in the business. I prefer John Palmer’s stuff, but it’s just my own opinion. Plus, John Palmer’s is free.


3. Brewing classic styles from Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer is the perfect book to learn more about designing your recipes. You’ll need a few batches under your belt. You can find their book on whatthebook.com (they deliver in Korea, possible to pay in KRW).



Stuffs to listen to:


Speaking about Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer, they’re animating podcasts a couple of times a week. One of their shows is “Brew Strong” which is very good to perfect your bases and techniques in the different aspects of homebrewing. I’d stuff that in your MP3 player for the subway/bus rides when you’re going to work. Plus they’re fun and don’t make the podcasts boring. http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/Brew-Strong


You can find several other podcasts on the net. One I like is “Taste Buds”, animated by two friends tasting and reviewing commercial beers and microbrews. It may be good for you to follow, so you can truly learn to appreciate a beer and widen your homebrewing vocab.


Where to speak about your new hobby, get help and ask questions:


http://www.homebrewkorea.com/forums This is your first and obliged stop in the world of homebrewing in Korea. The website is animated by Rob, a cool Canadian friend of mine. When I started homebrewing, I asked him numerous questions, and some other homebrewers did too. After a while, he decided to create a message board, so we could keep archives and all help each other. This quickly became a friendly community, which is growing bigger and bigger as the months go by. You’ll find tons of resources and tips to adapt your brewing style to Korea’s environment. When you introduce yourself, mention that you were referred to the forums by a blog article, so I’ll know who you are. Please do not link my blog, as I want to keep my privacy there too.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/ Nothing much to say, except that it’s the big daddy of all the international homebrewing boards. If homebrewkorea can’t answer your question, someone will be able to do so on homebrewtalk.

Where to buy stuffs in Korea:

http://www.beerschool.co.kr/ our community at Homebrew Korea developed a partnership with Beerschool’s owner, Youngjin, and we were granted a 10% discount for all of our member’s orders. You need to order by email, mentioning that you are a member of Homebrewkorea, and wire the money to his bank-account. You’ll find malts and hops there, even though the product range is laughable compared to homebrew supplies store from back home. You’ll have to do with what they have, which is why you’ll need to ask our helps and tips on homebrewkorea. After all, it’s Korea, and what is not popular in Korea is barely existent.

http://www.goodbeer.co.kr/ Not much stuffs there, but you could find some handy hardware.
http://www.winekit.co.kr/ same as previous.


Well, I hope I didn’t scare you with that article. I tried to make it as simple as I could, so you can understand the basics. I’d recommend reading other simple stuffs on the net before to brew your first batch. Don’t care too much about technical stuffs at first. If you live around the capital, there’ll always be a Homebrew Korea member to help you build or solder stuff for your brewing material (filter for your cooler, a faucet/tap on your brew pot, etc…), to show you how to brew, or even just gathering for a few beers. There a few members too near Busan, Jeollanam-do, Kyeongsannam-do, and other lost areas of Korea.


Now, ask.