Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Adventures in Brewing

First of all, let me apologize, I've left this blog lay fallow for awhile despite my resolution not to do so. I've been pretty busy with fencing this year, and haven't budgeted out a lot of time for this blog.

Myself and several friends have been batting around the idea of brewing some beer for a while now, and we finally got around to buying all the equipment yesterday, at our local homebrew mart, which may now be my favorite retail location ever. After several weeks of hard research, we decided to go with a red ale, because, well, red ales are pretty awesome.

So we went out and got the kit, which consisted of a large stock pot, a six gallon glass carboy to serve as a fermenter, a plastic bucket for use in bottling, an iodine based disinfectant, and all the ingredients we'd require (yeast, malt, sugar and hops).

We schlepped it all over to Dave Eltgroth's place to begin our day of brewing fun. We started by disinfecting everything that might come in contact with the beer.


We then boiled up two gallons of water. It turns out that a lot of brewing is boiling stuff, so there's a lot of time to spend doing other things. Namely drinking beer and playing video games.

After we'd gotten those out of the way, the pot had boiled and it was time for adding ingredients! We poured in the two bags of malt and 1.5 ounces of hops, which had been turned into pellets and looked vaguely like rabbit food, yet smelled amazing.


After that, it was time for more boiling. At the aforementioned homebrew mart, a very helpful guy had mentioned that one thing we wanted to avoid was a boil over, and so when we started the second boil, we made sure to continuously monitor and stir it, keeping the lid off. We kept it boiling for another hour (which translated to a few levels of The Force Unleashed, which is AMAZING), and then poured it into the carboy for fermenting.


Then followed the phase of waiting for it to cool down so we could add the yeast and begin the fermentation process. Let me tell you, waiting for five gallons of hot beer to cool down takes a long time. Which translates to a lot of video games, a visit to best buy, dinner, some more video games, a pretty significant amount of youtube, and then just waiting around. But lo, beer with yeast!


Then we just had to wait around for two weeks for it to ferment! More later!