Gentlemen, start your engines: The First Brew
Last sunday, we broke out the brew kettle, the fermenter, and enough cleaning supplies to clean up even the dirtiest of CSI crime scenes. We ripped open the Midwest Supplies Autumn Amber Ale kit and watched a pretty corny DVD to try and get the gist of what we were supposed to be doing. While we felt like there were some things missing in the instructions we decided to go for it anyway.
The first part of the process was steeping the grains, or making a bean bag with little grain seeds and heating them up so that you can turn the starch of the grain into sugar. The reason for this is the grain imparts flavors in the beer and leaves behind sugars, which the yeast turns into CO2 and alcohol and we all know how much beer drinkers love alcohol.
Grains before they enter our makeshift mash.
And we wait...
After steeping the grain we added the malt extract. This isn't usually done in the normal brewing process but since this is a starter kit, they probably figured this would be able to cover up any mistakes we already made. For this step we pretty much poured a maple syrupy looking concotion into our kettle and stirred it in until it was completely dissolved.
So far so good.
We then added our hops, which in this case were small little pellets. Smelled about the same and couldn't tell you about taste quite yet. Before we added the hop pellets we had a sweet wort, once the hops are added the beer is called hopped wort. Wort is young beer or beer before fermentation, without alcohol or CO2. We didn't taste it out of fear but often times tasting the wort will give you a good indication of what your beer is going to taste like after fermentation.
Our hop pellets, looks like rabbit food.
After adding in the hops we had to cool down the wort and add the yeast. Once the components were all mixed together and the soon to be brew was cooled to the point where the yeast could start doing work and making some alcohol, we poured the beer into our very sanitized plastic bucket. This is going to act as our fermenter, where the beer hangs out while the yeast works. Unfortunately, we only have one fermenter so it may decrease the quality of beer by a little. Now that we have our beer in the fermenter, all we can do is wait. In 2 weeks we'll be bottling and a couple weeks after that we'll be enjoying the first brew. Still working on a name for it. Stay tuned...