Jeff's Den

So, I setup a new blog for my DIY projects. I think what I’d like to do is use that for ongoing updates of the project but maybe post the process/end result/recap type thing here. Does this make sense? probably not. 

So, I brewed my own beer. I bought a kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop located out of New York. I’ve had positive experience with them from the very get go when a mix up resulted in my wife’s billing address on her card (which hasn’t been updated since we’ve moved) being saved as the shipping address. I figured this out at the very last minute just as the product was rolling out of Memphis. A quick e-mail and they were able to contact UPS to make the change of address for delivery and I didn’t lose my kit. You can check them out here. 

So the kit is for making 1 gallon of beer. I’ve read some people talk about this being a waste of time because 1 gallon of beer or the standard 5 gallon of beer take the same amount of time to cook up. To me this worked out as a great first experience since even at that size I barely had large enough pots or strainer to handle no more beer than I had. 

Right now I’ve got it all bottled and just have to wait two weeks to have a drink while the yeast eats up the extra bit of sugar added to carbonate my brew. So here’s some pics from the process:

1) Here’s my mash doing it’s thing. This part takes about an hour of keeping the grains and water combo at a warm but low temp to extract sugars from the grain.

2) After sparging the mash (draining the water off the grain and running hot water though the grain to extract more sugar) I have my wort (pronounce like wert) boiling for another hour. See, these first two steps will take two hours no matter how much you are brewing. 

3) After boiling and adding yeast my wort was put away to ferment.

4) Here’s a shot of the brew after about a week.

5) My bottle caps and Grolsh bottle lids.

6) Brew in the pot about to be bottled. Bottling sugar (in this case honey) is added so the yeast can carbonate the brew.

7) I was working by myself so the stack of paper plates worked well for tilting the pot so I could get as much of the beer back out as possible. You can also see my bottles are filled just not capped. Now this step is where the only brewing one gallon is nice. I used some Grolsh beer bottles and a couple of pint bottles I saved over from some Newcastle so there was very little work to be done with the bottling. On the other hand, if this had been a 5 gallon brew then I’d have been at it for a lot longer. 

8) And the near final product. Just two more weeks and this will hopefully be good drinkable beer.