Brewing NEIPA with Easy Brew 50L Automatic Brewing System
It’s time to brew beer again, together with my cousin Enrico. In this video we are going to use his Easy Brew 50L all-in-one automatic brewing system to brew a fantastic New England IPA. It is a programmable RIMS system which makes this homebrew adventure a breeze. For this New England style IPA (NEIPA) we will use a ton of the following hops – Cascade, Mosaic, Citra and Galena. I am going to show you the entire beer brewing process: crushing the grains, mashing, filtering, boiling with hops, cooling, fermenting, bottling and not skipping the most important step: tasting the freshest beer I have ever tasted. The recipe is based on the book DIY Dog from the world famous Scottish brewery BrewDog. It is an improved version of the recipe that we brewed in the previous beer brewing video. See links below for more info about the beer.
Video transcript:
Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony and in this video I am going to brew another beer together with my cousin Enrico on his brand new all-in-one brewing kettle. But before we can do that I have to drive from my hometown, the city of Eindhoven, to a small town called Woerden where my cousin Enrico lives. It’s a beautiful day according Dutch standards, so it will be a wonderful drive before we can brew some amazing beer.
My name is Enrico and as you can see, we’re not at my place to brew beer, but we’re at my place to brew beer in my all-in-one brewing kettle. Have fun watching!
Last time we brewed beer, it was in my cooler. Today we are going to try out this brewing system for all grain brewing. The beer will be a New England style IPA with some things tuned with respect to the previous brew. I’ll put a link to this recipe and the old recipe in the description below.
First step is preparing the grains. For a 30 liter or 8 gallon batch the recipe we made asks for 7.5 kilograms of Pilsner malt and 1 kilogram Munich malt. It also requires 750 grams of flaked wheat and 500 grams of flaked oats. Pilsner malt is lighter in color than the pale ale malt used before and one thing we want to improve is the color. The flaked grains will not be crushed using the malt mill but the malted barley obviously will go through the mill before we can start the mashing process.
The Munich malt gives the beer some, but not too much complexity, so overall the beer showcases the hops. The flaked wheat and oats provide the mouthfeel and pale color and improve the body without making the beer much sweeter.
1/4 of a teaspoon of calcium sulfate and 3/4 of a teaspoon of calcium chloride are added to the 25 liters of water to change the water chemistry. The mashing water is pre-heated to 63 degrees Celsius so once we have added all the grains it hits the targeted temperature of 56 degrees Celsius for the protein rest step. After a good stir, this perforated plate covers the grain basket and the lid is placed on top. Then the pump is switched on, turning this into a RIMS: a Recirculating Infusion Mash System. The system will maintain the temperature that we tell it to keep.
We have three steps in the mashing schedule:
- A protein rest at 56 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes
- The saccharification rest at 68 degrees for an hour
- And the mash out at 77 degrees Celsius for 5 minutes
While the system goes through these steps it is time for us to enjoy the fine Dutch spring weather while drinking the previously brewed New England IPA.
But all good things come to an end, and it is time to go back to work. The next step in the brewing process is filtering and sparging. Filtering is done by letting gravity do its job. The grain basket has a perforated bottom and since the system has pumped the wort through the grain bed, it is compressed and acts as a filter. We used roughly 20 liters heated water to get to a pre-boil volume of 35 liters.
Filtering is going a little bit slower than expected, so let’s kill some time by drinking a home brewed dubbel.
After removing the grain basket, it is boiling time! While the temperature is rising we will weigh the hops. For bittering 80 grams of cascade hops are boiled for 75 minutes. The next hop addition will be done at flame out so we have plenty of time to weigh the other hops: 80 grams of cascade, 60 grams of mosaic and 50 grams of both citra and galena. With this combination we are aiming for a citrusy and tropical aroma. The same amounts of these hops will be used for dry hopping during the fermentation. The hops for flame out addition will be added in hop socks so that they can easily be removed once the wort is cooled down with the spiral shaped wort chiller.
The system has a built in filter and to make sure no particles are transferred into the fermenting vessel we use a hop spider as additional filter. The wort is split up in two parts so I can take my part home with me.
Now that the wort is chilled down, it is susceptible to infections so it is really important to add active yeast as soon as possible. I made a Wyeast 1318 London Ale III yeast starter a week ago and after a night in de fridge and decanting, the yeast slurry will be pitched. It is important to do this in a clean and sanitized environment and to sanitize everything that comes into contact with the wort and the yeast. I do this with Star San. One third of the yeast is pitched into my small fermenter, the remaining part into Enrico’s one.
The beer is fermenting, so I am going to drive home. Thank you for your hospitality, Enrico. You’re welcome, Tony! And we’ll see you in two weeks. Bye, bye!
We are back in my home town and it is two weeks later now. Four days into fermentation I added the hops for dry hopping and it’s one and a half week later now so it is time for bottling. So that’s what I am going to do next.
Bottling day is mainly a cleaning day. On my previous bottle day I already cleaned a lot of bottles so today I only have to sanitize them in Star San, rinse the exterior and let them drip dry. In the meantime I dissolve 53 grams of table sugar in a small quantity of water and let it boil for a minute. This is 6.5 grams per liter and will be added as priming sugar right before bottling.
While that is cooling down, I sanitize all the equipment and transfer the young beer through a hop spider into my bottling bucket using an automatic siphon and add the priming sugar solution so it is stirred in by the spiraling motion of the beer. The original gravity of the wort was 1.070. I forgot to measure the final gravity before adding the priming sugar but now it is 1.016. I corrected this to a final gravity of 1.014 before priming. The estimated alcohol content is 7.5 percent by volume.
Then finish it all by doing what this day is about: filling the bottles with beer and closing them off with a crown cap. I use a bottle filling tube and a manual bottle capper to achieve this. Now put the beer away for a week for bottle conditioning and then it’s ready to be enjoyed!
I showed you all the steps for brewing beer, but there is one really important step left. That is to enjoy the freshest beer one can get. Beautiful and delicious! And with that I would like to conclude this video. I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please let me know by hitting the like button. Please also consider subscribing to the channel for more content like this in the future. That’s it for now. I would like to thank you for watching. Bye, bye!
