Brew Day

First off I would like to apologize for the lack of reviews in the past couple of weeks.  My computer's video card has died and so right now I have limited access until I can get it repaired.  However, it's been a busy time on the beer front.  Friday of this past week was Brew Day.  Dan and I split the cost of a home brewing kit, and spent this weekend making our first batch of beer.  As such I thought I would talk a little about the brewing process.

We bought an extract kit, which is pretty much the simplest way to brew beer short of the kits where you drop in a carbonation tablet or a Mr. Beer kit.  We wanted to actually experience the process, and have good tasting results, so we went with something a little closer to the full brewing experience.  The kit contained dry malt extract (DME), a can of liquid malt extract (LME), ale yeast, bittering and finishing hops, steeping grains, and priming sugar.  The generic process consisted of cleaning and sanitizing the equipment, boiling 3 gallons of water and setting it aside to cool, rehydrating the yeast, bringing another 3 gallons to 170 degrees and steeping the grains for 20 minutes, bringing the pot to a boil, adding the malt extract, bringing to a boil again, boiling the bittering hops for 60 minutes, adding the finishing hops for the last 10 minutes, cooling the liquid to 80ish degrees, straining into the fermenter, pouring in the yeast, and adding our boiled water until we hit our target gravity for the beer.  All in all, it doesn't sound all that complicated.  Without knowing how it's going to turn out, I'd say almost anyone could handle going through the process.  It gets more complicated as you start developing your own recipes, or move into making the malt from grain yourself rather than using malt extract.

The hard part for us now is the waiting.  The beer is going to spend at least a week in the primary fermenter, then we will transfer it over to the glass carboy for another 2 weeks to settle.  Finally we will mix our priming sugar with the beer in a bottling bucket, and bottle it to sit for 3 weeks while carbonation builds up in the bottles.  In total it will be 6 weeks from the day we brewed our beer until it's finally ready to drink.  We might sneak a taste along the way between now and then, but chances are it will be a little nasty at any point before the time is up.

I'll continue to update on the brewing process as we continue our journey into home brewing, as well as posting reviews of what we try.  I still have quite a list of beers to get through!

- Adam