ROWETOPIA: Beer, Wonderful Beer!

Ok... I'm being sucked into this blogging thing. My first blog will be about a subject near and dear to my heart, BEER. I like beer. I like all kinds of beer. I especially like home-brewed beer. I'm making a batch right now. Making beer is surprisingly easy and very enjoyable. Rule #1 is if you get stuck have a beer and relax... it's actually hard to mess it up.

So about this brew... this is the easiest of all brews as it is made from extracts only. (Basically all from cans!)

I combined one 3.3 lb. can of Muntons Amber malt extract and one can of Muntons Extralight malt extract. these extracts are unhopped.

The malt extracts are added to about 2.5 gallons of H2O and brought to a boil.

To this boiling "Wort" I added 2 oz. of Mt. Hood pellet hops

it is these hops that will give the beer its bitterness.

Let this boil about 45 min.

for the last 15min. of the boil i added 1 oz. of cascade hops. This is what will give the beer it's flowery aroma.

So now we have a complete "wort" that has been boiling about an hour.

Now it's time to cool the wort down as quickly as possible so we can add the yeast. We do this to prevent the yeast from being cooked alive in hot wort! Dead yeast can't work their wonderful magic of turning sugars into our little friend alcohol! We want to do it quickly because the longer your beer sits before fermentation starts the greater the chance it will get contaminated and turn "skunky". Once the fermentation starts, the alcohol created will help the beer protect itself from contaminates.

I have a little mechanism that aids this process called a wort cooler. It's basically a coil of copper tubing that you submerge in the hot wort and run cold water through to cool it. I also sit the brew kettle in a sink full of cold water to help speed this process.

Once I have drawn most of the heat out of the wort i add the wort to a 6 gallon Carboy containing about 3 gallons of cool water. putting the cool water in first prevents the carboy from being possibly cracked from adding the warm wort to a cool bottle. So now we can add the yeast.

nice carboy cozy my wife made me.

The yeast is very important... there are lots of types of yeast and they can all be dead when you buy them. Unfortunately, there is no way to know until you dump them into your beer and nothing happens. It can take 2-3 days for some yeasts to activate and start working. So by the time you realize you got bad yeast, your beer is likely started to turn skunky. 8^(

To prevent this scenario I incorporate a yeast starter into our process. A day or two before i brew i make the starter... boil a pint or so of water and sugar. I used "golden syrup" as my sugar. after it cools down to around 75 degrees add your yeast. cover it to keep out any airborne contaminates. in a day or so you should see some activity... bubbling, churning etc. If you dont, you got bad yeast. but if its moving around as expected its time to get brewing!

So now i add my pre-prepared yeast starter to the cooled wort. Then i cap the carboy (usually with my palm) and shake the carboy to aerate the mixture. Yeast need sugar and oxygen to do their magic trick.

Next i install a plug with a 3ft tube into the carboy and put the other end of the tube in a pitcher with clean water in it. this will keep anything from getting into the beer as it ferments and will allow the "Krausen" to blow off the beer and into the pitcher. Krausen is the foamy, hoppy, yeasty spooge that is created during the initial, most active stage of fermentation. (It smells great, looks gross)