unsystematic

02 Jul 2009

Our first home brew

For those of you who don’t yet know, my boss and I have decided to take on home brewing. He’s done it before, but this was my first time. Being a lover of beer, it’s definitely something I’d like to make a permanent hobby. It’s really not expensive. The only hard part is waiting for it to be ready.

Our first brew, we decided to make an Arrogant Bastard Ale clone. Stone Brewing company is one of my favorite craft breweries and always produces very nicely done beers, and the recipe we found really wasn’t that difficult so we decided to start there.

The whole process takes about 4 weeks. That’s from start to pop the cap and enjoy.

Begin with boiling the malt and water for a total of 90 minutes. Throw in hops at 30 minutes in, then again at 90 minutes in.

Much of the water will evaporate leaving a semi-thick sugary molasses behind.

At 90 minutes turn off the heat and toss in the remaining hops. Let sit and cool for about 30 minutes.

Once the mixture cools down enough to handle, you want to transfer it to the fermentation tank. In doing so, you must strain out the loose grains, hops and other impurities.

Once you get it into the fermentation tank and it cools to room temperature, you add the yeast. Yeast is temperature sensitive so it needs to be room temperature. The yeast will literally eat the sugars producing alcohol. This, along with the type of hops you choose and grains are what give the beer its flavor.

Let the yeast do it’s thing for about 14 days. You’ll know when it’s done because there’ll be all the sludge at the bottom of the tank and no more bubbling.

Two weeks later, fermentation has stopped and we’re left with our beer minus carbonation. We need to transfer the beer to another tank. In our case we had to syphon it to get the pour started.

Transferring beer to new tank.

Before the new tank of beer gets too full, you need to boil another cup of malt and add it to the new tank. These sugars will eventually carbonate the beer once bottled.

As the 5 gallons of beer is transferring we decided to rinse out the bottles which were sitting in sanitizing solution for an hour. We also sanitized the caps.

Our cleaned and empty bottles. We had collected about 70 of them.

Of course we had to sample it, even without carbonation. We got the color pretty good. We’re excited to taste the final product in about a week.

This was our inspiration. We bought a bottle to compare.

The final product!

This was a great experience and something I definitely enjoy doing and wish to continue. There’s definitely an art to it and it’s nice to be able to taste the fruits of your labor, even if it does take a month. The wait, I’m sure, will be worth it.

We’d be happy to ship bottles if you want to try it. We’ll be brewing once a month with new beers. Next up is a traditional German wheat similar to Paulaner.

More to come!