She's Daddy's Little Girl

A couple of Friday's back, we were getting ready to bottle my first attempt at brewing my own beer. Somebody asked Andi if she was going to help, and she responded with an emphatic yes. She then proceeded to tell us how to do it...

"First you get the beer" she said, "then you get the bottle, you put the beer in the bottle, and then you put the cap on!"

Below is the beer making process for our first attempt. I'm using this blog since Andi played such a big role in this process!

-------------------

After an initial capital investment of about $175 for the equipment, I was ready to try a recipe kit for my first attempt (about $30). Recipe kits come with a large package of malt extract, saving you several hours of extracting the sugars from the malt yourself (usually 1 hour each at different temperatures to extract different sugars from the malt). I will probably do 1 or 2 more kits before I attempt to do the full mash myself.

This was a brown ale. I'm doing an IPA next...

The kit:


Poland Spring water and the grain bags:


The partial mash method, required for this kit, takes about a half hour. It involves steeping a pound of grains with 2 gallons of water in the brewpot at 140-150 degrees for a half hour:




This was essentially a giant pot of beer flavored tea.

Next step was to remove the grain bags and add the malt extract and the remaining water and bring to a boil for an hour:


With 15 minutes left in the boil, I added some flavoring hops and a clarifying tablet (vegan)

With 2 minutes left I added some finishing hops.

At the end of the boil, I needed to cool it off to 80 degrees as quickly as possible. Since I don't have a wort cooler, I opted for a sink filled with icewater:


This took forever and a ton of ice and water replacement. I even stole all of the ice out of Brain and Bree's freezer.

After the temp reached 80 degrees, I carried the huge, heavy pot down to our basement and transferred it to the primary fermenting bucket:


I took a specific gravity reading and recorded it in my notebook (this allows to me calculate the alcohol content later):


I added the yeast and sealed the bucket up. Since the first few days have some really active fermentation (a lot of CO2), I opted to use a hose into a bucket of water instead of the CO2 seal to keep the whole thing from exploding in case of foam clogging the CO2 seal.:


After 3 days, primary fermentation was nearly complete (about 1 bubble of CO2 coming out of the hose every 30 seconds), so I transferred the beer to the secondary fermenter:




Two weeks later, the beer was ready to bottle!

I added the priming sugar (to give the bottles natural carbonation since there is still some active yeast in the beer but no more sugar for them to eat) and siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket (it has a spiggot on the bottom):


And took another specific gravity reading (my calculations showed that this brew had an alcohol content of 4.5% by volume):


I carried the big, heavy bucket up stairs and tripped over the baby gate and fell hard onto my knee and elbow. I only lost about half a bottle's worth of beer, mostly onto my face (notice half broken baby gate in the background?):


We then started bottling. I had help:







After 1.5 weeks of additional settling and fermenting for carbonation, the beer was ready to be chilled and consumed:



It smelled good:


It tassted GREAT!


Everybody agreed, it was a success!






I LOVE MY NEW HOBBY!