Page 1 of 1

My hopless (and hopeless) beer.

PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2018 12:44 pm
by ampeyro
Even though I'm not very fond of it, I decided to try and make beer.

The idea was to make it with mixed corn and barley, but due to a mistake in translation I ended up buying oats and not barley, but it should still work...

Sprouting the grains was pretty straightforward, but there was a severe change in weather the same day I was supposed to sun-dry the grains, it's been raining since.
The grains took about a week to dry, some of them kept sprouting several days after they were supposed to dry.

I built a simple sous-vide style arduino powered contraption to mash my "malt". cracked the grains and mixed them with tap water to the texture of a porridge.
I set the device between 62 and 65ÂșC and let it "cook" for an hour.

The resulting liquid wasn't what I would call sweet and had a gravity of about 1.20

So far I've had it in heat for 3-4 hour and neither the gravity or the sweetness appear to increase.

Am I doing something incredibly wrong?

Re: My hopless (and hopeless) beer.

PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 3:49 am
by Peter Martin
One way of accelerating the drying process is a very old-school German method: smoke drying. The German Rauchbier (smoked beer) is a wonderful thing, especially when made in accordance with the Purity Law.

This will give a smoky flavour (which I love, but it takes a lot of care to balance the flavours.

Re: My hopless (and hopeless) beer.

PostPosted: Sat Nov 07, 2020 4:29 am
by lgbc
Oats aren't really used as a base malt in brewing as they don't have a good deal of sugars compared to barely. A few points:

When you milled the oats, how fine was the crush?

With your hydrometer reading, was it 1.200 or 1.020? The former is an incredibly strong beer whilst the latter is quite weak. And have you boiled the wort yet?

Thanks.