Hey all, hope that you are all doing well with the re-openings of your communities. I know for us here its been a delight to be able to go out to eat again and experience craft breweries again.
With the added down time due to COVID19, I began looking into brewing a beer as easily as one can brew a batch of mead ie: mix everything, stir, ferment, drink. No cooking or boiling or long complex hop additions etc.
I think I have found the Holy Grail – No Boil/ Raw beer.
Now stay with me here… Nordic farmers have been brewing beer like this for centuries but only recently has this style come to light. Though I have never had these beers, the idea behind them of just getting water hot enough to pasteurize the ingredients so you don’t get sick and get hop/spice flavor and bitterness is what I am talking about. I am also talking about never having a boil over again with beer caramel all over the stove ( leads to less angry wives too.. I hear). Well I took it a step further and said, why even heat the water up – if you can sanitize everything, and you use boiled down LME or DME ( Malt Extract) you should be able to brew just like a hopped mead…. and so my quest for a recipe began.
I found one on homebrewtalk.com – an NEIPA recipe that looked simple enough, but it required a heating element and a 20 minute hop whirlpool – think stirring for 20 minutes the hot wort plus hops. Nah, thanks, I am OUT.
However I thought – why even do the cook and whirlpool, just mix your DME and water, then dry hop at high krausen?
I gave it a shot.
It worked.
The result was a Tangerine forward juicy, hazy NEIPA. 3 days to ferment, 24 hour burst carb in keg, drinking 5 days after “brewing”. It only got better as it aged over the next week.
The recipe: 2.5 gallon batch – scale accordingly
3 lbs Briess Bavarian Wheat DME, 1 oz CTZ hops, 1oz Idaho 7 Hops, 1 oz El Dorado hops. 1 packet of S-04 Safale Ale yeast.
The process:
Mix DME in warm clean water in sterilized fermenter. Pitch dry yeast. After 24 hours add you hops in a dry hopping bag or tube infuser during high krausen. High Krausen is peak ferment where you have a big foamy head on the now fermenting beer. Let sit till fermentation stops (3-5 days). Cold crash for 24-48 hours. Transfer to a clean keg and burst carb at 40 psi for 24 hours then drop to serving pressure (10-15 psi). Serve.
You can bottle condition this beer as well but you will be looking at weeks of time vs a week in time total. Follow standard Racking to secondary and bottle conditioning protocols if you choose to go this route, but be cautious of bottle bombs.
My next brew day will be a no-boil Hefeweizen and my own ideas around a Helles Lager.
Stay safe
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The Versatile Dad 
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