Beer! Part 1

Hey everyone, welcome to the first spinoff episode of Vermillion Home Adventures, brought to you by Dear Husband (DH). For my birthday this year, the wife got me a beginner’s homebrew kit. Anyone who knows my family knows that homebrewing is in my blood (sometimes literally, hey-ooh), and I’ve been curious about trying it out for a while now. I made my first batch a few weeks ago, a pretty tasty oatmeal stout. I’m ready to start my second batch, and thought it would make for a good blog entry.

First step -- sanitize! Yeah this isn’t the fun part, but it’s pretty important. Soak all your equipment in a solution of 1 shot bleach per 3 gallons of water for about 20 minutes, and then let them air dry. There’s a lot of equipment to sanitize, so Dear Wife (DW) pointed out that it may be easiest to soak everything in the kitchen sink, but that I should probably scrub it out first. I mean, I love you and agree with you, honey, but don’t think you snuck that one past me.

Make Some Beer!

Now that you’re ready to start cooking, you’re going to add the beer-making mix (a magical bag of beer stuff -- all the grains you’re going to extract sugars from) to 2 quarts of heated water and keep it at 150 degrees for 60 minutes. This oatmeal-looking-stuff is the mash. You need to keep it at a steady temperature, so you need to occupy the time somehow without wandering too far off. I decided to pass the time by using a little toy we picked up recently:

Blue shells, I swear...

Once the 60 minutes is up, you’re going to heat everything to 170 degrees and move it to a strainer, collecting the wort (future-beer-liquid) in a big pot. The next step is to pour 4 quarts of 170-degree water over the mash to give you more wort. Put the wort through the strainer once more to collect more sugars from the mash. You’ll end up with more than a gallon of wort, but some of it will evaporate in the next step.

You’re going to heat the wort to a low boil to start off the next step. The liquid needs to boil for 60 minutes. For this particular recipe, you need to add half of your palisade hops right away, half of the remaining hops 45 minutes into the boil, and the remaining hops go in at the end of the boil. Some recipes will call for different hops to be added at different times, but this one only calls for one variety.

The wort looks a little different when it cools down

After the boil, you need to cool the wort down to 70 degrees, so fill up your nice clean sink with ice water and set the pot inside. The cooled wort then needs to be added to a one-gallon jug, which is where it will be spending the next two weeks. It’s important to pour the wort through a strainer. Yeast needs oxygen, and the strainer will help aerate the liquid.

Spare bathroom - the perfect place to keep the light away

Time to add the last ingredient, the yeast. If you taste the wort at this point, it won’t taste like beer, but it will instead be surprisingly sweet. Yeast reacts with the sugars to create alcohol, that’s what happens during the fermentation process. So add the yeast, shake the jug a bit to “wake up” the yeast, and add the screw cap. The byproduct of the fermentation process is carbon dioxide, so you’re going to connect one end of the tubing to the jug, and set the other end in a bowl of sanitized water.

The fermentation process will last two weeks, and there’s only two things to do in the meantime:

1) The beer will bubble quite a bit during the first couple days, but once it settles down you need to replace the tube with the airlock.

A watched beer batch never ferments, puppy

2) Collect empty bottles that you can use in two weeks when you’re ready to bottle the beer. I find that full bottles are a lot easier to come by than empty bottles, but emptying them can take some effort.

Better start prepping the empty bottles right away. Cheers.