More Brewing

BEER:

More brewing. It is amazing how arduous and lengthy the process is.
Steps in brief and as best as I can remember:

1. Boil your water. Five gallons of water take a heck of a long time to boil.
2. Cool your water and steep your grains. This gives the beer its color and unique taste. The grains have to be soaked at a specific temperature. It take a bugger maintaining that temperature. Hint: (move the pot on the heat vs adjusting the temp)
3. Add your malt. This is the base sugar and flavor mix that defines your type, taste, texture, flavor and aroma of your beer.
4. Boil to its flash point. The flash point is the point where the malt undergoes a chemical reaction. Basicly the molecules of the malts bond with oxegen and turn a large portion of the liquid into a foam. It tends to jump and requires 100% attention, vigorous stirring and temperature mainenance to keep the flash from jumping out of the pot. Oh...and yes it does stink a bit.
5. Add your hops. This is a timed boiling process. The more complex the beer, the greater variety and annoying the "hopping" process is.
6. Cool to the pre-determined temperature. This requires a heck of a lot of cold water baths. Huge water waste.
7. Move to bottle or bucket. Add yeast, shake to oxegenate.
8. Store in a cool dark location and wait two weeks to ferment. This is your first Rack

Then you wait, praying that your yeast takes and you get a good ferment. From there its to the second rack, more fermenting, sugaring, bottling, storing, and drinking. Figure $25 to $30 for 52 bottles of home brewed beer. Good stuff. (You hope). Otherwise you have 52 bottles of pig swill. Stick with whats good, follow the directions, don't experiment and stay with the tried and true ingredients.

Me, patiently waiting, researching beer and job hunting.

Kevin. Adding the remainder of the malt to the vat.

Stirring. The goal is to keep the boil hard and hot, stir like crazy to prevent the flash from jumping out of the pot and letting the foam boil away.

Shake Rattle and Roll. Get that yeast active! At nearly 50lbs, this is something that I probably couldn't hack

Fermenting. This is boring, but fun to watch. The yeast goes crazy in the first couple of days. The liquid is constantly turning itself over through the fermenting process. This batch actually isn't very active. I hope the yeast took. Otherwise its 52 bottles of brown, dirty, nasty water and fit only for the drain.

More to come as the process continues.