Home Brewing!

So I have been homebrewing for over a year now, and I know some of y'all are interested in it as well. It has become my absolute favorite hobby, even though it can be time consuming and a pain in the ass. But even a shitty home brew is a thousand times better than a Budweiser.

Homebrewing itself is really simple - you need the right equipment and ingredients, but once you are set up, it takes about four hours to brew a 5 gallon batch.

Jessica bought me a pretty sweet set up last year for Christmas - two glass carboys, a bottling bucket, and all of the various bits you need:
I don't have the set up to do all-grain, so I use extract recipes - instead of getting the sugar from the grains by mashing, I dump in either dry or liquid malt extract.

The basic ingredients you need for any beer are crushed grains, malt extract, hops and yeast:


Starting by steeping some grains for color, you mix what is called the pre-boil tea with the extract into a giant kettle and bring to a boil. This is the wort:

Now you add the hops - each recipe comes with a "hopping schedule" which details at what time in the 60 minute boil you add the different kind of hops:


This looks gross but it smells amazing!!

Once you are done with the boil, you kill the heat. This is where you can add the fancy ingredients - my last batch was a kiwi wit, and at this point I dumped 4 pounds of kiwi in:


Once the boil is done, you need to cool down the wort as fast as possible to prevent spoiling and keep bacteria and stuff from growing in it. They sell fancy chillers and other things to drop the temperature, but I keep it old school (aka I'm poor) and give it a water bath in the tub:


Once the temperature is down to about 80 degrees, you can now move the wort to a carboy:

You fill the carboy with chilled water up to the 5 gallon mark, pitch the yeast into the carboy, and seal it up with an airlock, so the CO2 from fermentation can escape but nothing can go in:


And now you wait. Most beers take 2 weeks in the primary carboy, 2-3 weeks in a secondary carboy (you move the beer to to a clean carboy to clarify the taste) and then two weeks of bottle conditioning before it is ready to drink. When I keg a beer I can force carbonate and it is ready in about 4 days.

What I left out of this description is all of the sanitization you need to do - anything that touches the been after the boil needs to be sanitized - the carboy, spoon, funnel, anything. There is nothing like soaking and drying 50 bottles before you get started bottling and capping (a big reason I moved to kegging!).

YAY HOMEBREW!

(omg I look awful in this picture but it is the only one I have of my kegerator)