Been a while, but this one may be interesting. I used to live in Buenos Aires and was introduced to espresso there. As an engineer, I wanted to figure out why espresso was so different from regular American coffee. It was not just that the coffee was ground finer or that it was a much darker roast. It was more complicated than that. An interesting additional point is that a good friend of mine here built a machine to automatically make single serve coffee pods and is now in the business of selling pods. I got one of the pod brewing machines and liked the coffee much better than regular American coffee. The reason was the same as the espresso, "higher temperature water". If you ever tried to wash you hands in cold water, you know some thing about solvency of water and how it relates to temperature. It is the same with coffee. The punch line here is that it is also the same with homebrewing and extracting the flavor from hops. There is no way to increase the temperature of water by heat alone. You need pressure, like a pressure cooker. You can boil your wort all day in Denver and you will never get it upto 212f because of the lower air pressure at a mile high. I noticed this years ago when we went deer hunting in the mountains. Coffee was terrible. Now for homebrewing.
Here is what I did. I took my old aluminum espresso pot like many of you have and filled it about 3/4 full with hop pellets. On top of that, I put whole grains of malt until it was packed full. The way these pots are made, the bottom of the top part is a filter with very small holes that the espresso goes thru and leaves the ground behind. The malt grains were there to keep the holes from getting plugged up, like a lauder-tun. Next I filled up the bottom pot with water and put in on the stove, just like I was making espresso. In a few minutes, I had a pot of hop extract in the top pot.
The next step was to dump the extract into a keg of "cold" beer from my tapper. The idea was to get the extract cooled down a fast a possible. How could it have been faster? One of the reasons that you dump some of your hops in at the end of the boil and why you cool it down as fast as you can is to prevent the flavor of the hops from escaping. Now, I think you are starting to get the idea.
Few final points. The cheap espresso pot has a pressure relief valve to keep it from blowing up. If steam starts coming out of the valve, just turn down the heat. If steam does come out, you know that the water is well above 212f and doing its job of extracting the flavor from the hops. It may take a little experimentation to get every thing running right, but I think now you can start to make some real homebrew.
In a prior blog, I mentioned "blending" beer to get different flavors, now you have a way of adjusting the flavor of your beer after you have it cooled down in the tapper and have tasted tested it.
