Beer Two!

Once again here is a poor shot of my brew. The difference between this and the last one is pretty apparent. This one came out really pale and yellow, exactly what I was looking for in the style. It should be representative of an India Pale Ale. This brew is still sitting in the fermenter for another week or so and then I will bottle it. It is much stronger than the first brew coming in at 6.75% alcohol. That fits with the style. It is also a lot more heavily hopped. I used Northern Brewer and Cascade hops for bittering, flavour and armoma. Hopefully I got this balance correct! While there are a lot of receipes out there most of them are from an american audience and are geared towards the supplies that they can access. I am fairly restricted here in Germany as the home brewing culture hasn't taken off. Good beer here costs about 55c a bottle and so it is actually a lot more expensive to brew your own. There is one store that offers a decent selection or I could order from the UK. The postage costs from there are fairly high so only a bulk order is worth it. That means that for the time being I must be satisfied with a more alchemical approach to my brewing. I am approximating malts and hops to approach the receipe but I can't really claim to be following any.

This time I am really hoping that the yeast drops out so that I have a nice clear beer. Next weekend I also have the proper tasting of the first brew. Last night the Hobbybrau group got a taste and it went down fine. The true test is the less drinking cultured gaming friends. If they like it then it is a bigger success. I will take some decent photographs to show how it came out in the end. It is currently inhabiting most of my fridge cold crashing. The cold crashing is used to get all of the yeast to settle to the bottom of the bottle and it should clear the beer up within a few days. Hopefully it goes down well amongst my friends. I don't want to be left with two crates of beer I have to drink all by myself!

Success, Beer!

Here is a poor shot of my first beer. I will make sure to get a better one once it comes out of the bottles! It is still not finished yet but it is getting there. It tastes somewhat like beer, though it is still a little bitter for my taste. It is now sitting in the bottles conditioning. It needs to sit in the bottles to develop carbonation naturally and to settle out fully. It was still a little cloudy going into the bottles and I probably should have held off another week efore doing it. I think that would have helped a lot of the yeast to settle out. I guess we shall see what the result is and I will know for future brews what exactly to do!

Patience is one of the most difficult skills to learn when brewing I think. I started the whole process around the fifth of January. The beer then sat until the start of this week fermenting and maturing. Now it is in the bottles conditioning. I have set the 15th of this month as the first taste test. I am meeting up with the local Hamburg Hobbybrau group on the 16th and I want to know what to expect before I serve out my beer. The bitterness may have mellowed a little which would be good. I am not a fan of sweet beers at all, I love bitter bers. I did however accidently double the amount of bittering hops I was supposed to put into this brew. I am today setting up the next batch, a slightly more ambitious India Pale Ale. Fingers crosed all goes well!

It has alcohol

This wonderful fermenter has been sitting in my room for the last week bubbling away. I have to say it was pleasing to be greeted by this the morning after I had cooked it all up. By the end of the week it had quitened down a lot. As far as I understand at the moment the yeast produces a lot of carbon dioxide as a byproduct of converting the sugars in the wort to alcohol. I had expected the process to be a little stinky but the fermenter is well sealed it seems and nothing really escapes. In a tiny apartment it is a worry when something like this begins to reek. I also had to maintan it at a proper temperature which was actually easier than I though. The apartment is naturally about 19° which is perfect for ale yeast.

This picture shows the krausen remnants on the side of the fermenter. Basically when the yeasts start their work they are capable of churning the wort to such a degree that it forms a foamy head. This is often removed from the beer as it contains oils and such that contribute to off-flavours and a hangover. As I can't do this with a closed system I just had to leave it to eventually fall back into the beer. Its not too big a problem I am assured. The residue on the side of the fermenter is mainly remnants of the hops I used.

Yesterday I racked the beer, moving it from one fermenter to another to keep it away from the sediment now built up in the first one. As you can see it isn't very appetising stuff.The white layer is yeast while below it is mainly hops adding a wonderful brown green colour! It is especially lovely when you mix it all up during the cleaning process. The beer is now sitting in a second fermenter where it will stay for another week or two. Once fermentation has stopped completely I can then begin bottling it all up. Sadly it will have to stay in the bottles at least another three weeks before I can really enjoy it. I should though be able to start a second brew so at least I will be building up a stockpile.

Boiling Beer

So I made Wort yesterday. My beer kit arrived during the week and I was eager to use it. A little too eager it turned out. Having scrubbed everything down I started. Very quickly I realised that I was measuring in pints rather than litres. Everything had to stop then and I rushed out to the store to get a pot big enough for 12 litres. The confusion arose as our kettle is marked in pints which I assumed were litres. I also picked up Aalhambra while I was out as I noticed it on sale. It was on Tabletop just the night before and Wil Wheaton convinced me it was fun. Once I got back to the house I got everything in motion.

This is the wort just as it is getting to boiling. It looks very much like really putrid vomit. The previous picture shows the ingredients. The two cans in the pot at the back are malt extracts. I am warming them up so that they will be easier to get out of the can. Malt extract is a really sticky treacle when cold. The little glass jars are filled with Cascade hops for bittering and flavouring the beer. Once the water has boiled I popped the extract in, breaking the can opener somehow in the process. The hops went in immediately afterward. The smell this generated was interesting and while the rest of the apartment didn't stink to badly the entryway was quite bad. I liked the smell but nobody else did. I boiled everything up for forty five minutes. This breaks down the hop oils and complex sugars in the malt. Right at the end I added more hops for flavour. The hops added at the end like this give a flavour to the beer but none of the bittering oils. They really seem to be perfectly designed for beer. Boil 'em for bitterness and natural preservatives and soak 'em for flavour.

Once all this was done everything gets strained (sparged) into a fermenter. I bought two. These are basically big buckets with a tap at the bottom and a hole on the top for a fermentation lock. Once the wort had cooled to 24° I could add the yeast. I don't have a chiller for wort so this process took about five hours of waiting. Eventually the yeast went in and I could seal everything up to prevent contamination. Just before that I took a gravity reading of the beer. This is done with a Hydrometer and it measures the density of the liquid. Water has a density of 1 and I ended up with a gravity of 1.048. They .048 is mainly sugar that the yeast will convert into alcohol. I checked out some reviews of the kit I used online, a Muntons Continental Pilsener, and I achieved with a 45 minute boil nearly a third more sugar than if you don't boil. With these kists you can just mix everything cold and leave it to ferment. Boiling helps everything along as far as I am told.

Now I just need to wait until the fermentation kicks off which should be soon and I am well on my way to making beer!

I give in!

For many years I have been intrigued by Homebrewing. This year I am going to do it. I have some great friends brewing in Finland that are far more experienced than I and I also have found a great local brewing group to get help from. It seems that the hobby is quite a lot more widespread than I had thought at first, a little like wargaming. I am also suprised that it is far easier than I had at first imagined. Wwith some diligent cleaning and good quality ingredients you can't fail to make good beer. At least I have been so assured. I have no doubt I will fail somewhere along the way. I am currently awaiting the supplies which were suprisingly cheap. I suppose in a land where the beer is cheaper than water is in Ireland you reasonably can't charge too much. The crate below cost €9.49. In Dublin I would be afraid to estimate but at least double that would be a fair estimate. In the meantime however I have to get some bottles. Lucikly one of the local brews comes in these wonderful 'plop' bottles. They are fairly handy to use and don't need and special equipment or effort to seal. So my mission while I wait is to gather sixty of these.

That means I have three of these crates to consume in the near future. It seems like this new venture is off to a good start. Sadly I had a party at home before Christmas that would have provided ample bottle supplies except I didn't think about it until afterwards! At least this way I get to benefit twice. Dithmarscher is a brewery I like especially due to the history of the area. It is about sisxty kilometers from where I live and sadly I haven't visited it yet. The area declared itself a republic of peasants in the 15th century and managed despite some long odds to succesfully defend themselves a number of times. Their location in a marsh and some unique ideas helped them out. The beer is a lovely pilsener and I am going to enjoy it.