Traditional beer making is a lot more involved than simply using a beer can kit or malt and hops extracts. Unlike having all the malt and hops already prepared for you in a home brew can kit, the traditional way to make home brew beer, the way that brewers have done it for hundreds of years, is to soak roasted cracked grain in hot water in order to extract the sugars and the malty flavours. Likewise, hops are boiled in water to extract the flavours from hops. If you like a ‘drop’ of beer, this is how you can get your own personally designed malty hoppy drop.
If you like to get into the technicalities of the chemistry involved in extracting the malt sugars, you’ll love this part of home brew beer making. When you soak the malted grains in hot water at the right temperature between 63ºC and 70ºC for a couple of hours, enzymes in the malt are activated that convert the malted starches to soluble sugars. The two enzymes involved are known together as diastase and individually as alpha amylase and beta amylase. Alpha amylase is associated with unfermentable sugars called dextrins and beta amylase is involved in fermentable sugar called maltose. An average bodied good beer has a ratio of 25/75 % dextrins-to-maltose.
Maltose and Dextrins
The maltose gets converted to alcohol and the dextrins remain in solution as sugar to give the beer a degree of sweetness and ‘body’ that is felt in the mouth when you drink the delicious brew. With these characteristics in mind, you can choose between a ‘heavier’ beer with more unfermentable sugars i.e. dextrins, or a ‘lighter’ beer with a higher percentage of maltose. You can make your own ‘designer’ beer by adding other grains for special flavours and body.
Malt Mashing Process
The process of extracting these desirable malts from the grain is called ‘mashing’. First of all you will need a source of supply for the cracked roasted grain, e.g. barley, from a specialist home brew shop. Start with about 3 to 4 kg of grain and mix with 10 litres of hot water in what’s called a mash tun. You will need to use your beer thermometer here to ensure a 65ºC temperature for the infusion process to result in the 25/75 dextrins-to-maltose ratio. This means the hot water might need to be as high as 75ºC as this will fall when the grain is added; but be prepared to add some boiling water or cold water as required. The right temperature is important.
Infusion
This infusion process takes 1 to 2 hours. Two hours is recommended; but, this is your hobby and you can experiment with every process till you get your favourite malty hoppy drop. During this mashing period it is important to keep the temperature constant and this can be achieved by using a thermostat controlled heater vessel, or immersion heater; or to use a mash tun purchased from specialist suppliers. To begin with, you could use a homemade mash tun such as an insulated ice box made from food grade polystyrene that will hold the temperature constant for 1-2 hours.
Recovery or Sparging
The next step is to separate the liquid from the gain solids using a suitable strainer and further rinsing and/or spraying the ‘grist’ with hot water so as to recover as much malt and sugars as is desired. Commercial strainer tuns are available or make do with your home brewer’s ingenuity to devise a process yourself. That’s one of the fascinating aspects of making you own malty hoppy drop: you can choose to do it yourself. Learn how to brew your own homemade beer with this DIY Guide.
Making home brew with a can kit is easy compared with boiling up the malt and hops with traditional beer making. 
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