From grain to golden — or pitch-dark — beer in the glass: brewing is a beautiful, precise craft. Below we walk you through the fixed steps every batch of D&D Craft Beer goes through in our home brewery.
Before we start, we crush the malt in the mill. This releases the starch so the sugars can later be extracted as efficiently as possible. The trick is to keep the husks intact — they later act as a natural filter bed during lautering.
We mix the crushed malt with hot water in our BrewZilla. By bringing this mixture — the mash — through specific temperature steps, we activate enzymes that convert the starch into fermentable and unfermentable sugars. This determines how full-bodied or dry the beer will end up.
After mashing we separate the sweet liquid — the wort — from the spent grain. We then rinse the grain bed with hot water to capture the remaining sugars, without extracting harsh tannins from the husks.
The clear wort is then brought to a vigorous boil, usually for 60 to 90 minutes. During the boil, we add hops at fixed moments: early on for bitterness, and late for aroma. Boiling also ensures the wort is fully sterile.
After boiling, the hot wort needs to cool down to the right fermentation temperature as fast as possible. The faster this happens, the smaller the risk of unwanted infections — and the clearer the final beer will be.
The cooled wort is pumped into our FermZilla and we pitch the yeast. Now the real work begins: the yeast converts the sugars into alcohol and CO2. You can follow this active process live at Live Fermentation.
Once fermentation is finished and the beer has clarified nicely, we fill our kegs or bottles. These days we always carbonate using a CO2 cylinder — this ensures a fast, clean, and reliable carbonation level every time.
The longest wait often makes for the best beer. Some beers are ready after a few weeks, others need months to really come into their own. Curious what we've brewed so far? Check out our brew log.