Get spicey!

The spiced winter ale we made during Teach a Friend to Brew day is finally ready. I like it. It is very subtle, more subtle than hops, but a great flavor all the same. The spice smell is there too, though less than just after the boil when it filled the room.

This beer clearly showed me that serving temperature impacts the taste and smell a great deal. If you drink the beer when it first comes out of the fridge, there is no spice taste and smell. But, if you let it warm up a bit, maybe 50 degrees F, the taste and smell are great. I gave a couple of bottles away to friends and told them to drink it a bit warmer and they looked at me strange. However, they later thanked me and said it made a big difference.

Cheers to all who helped brew this great winter beer!

Maui Madness -- What a cool head!

Well, the coffee stout is ready and it came out very tasty. Most surprising of all was the foam of the head -- it is the color of chocolate milk. Very cool. I have never had the foam on my beer appear anything but light tan, but this looks great. Also, surprisingly, the beer tastes of dark unsweetened chocolate. The coffee flavor is there, but very balanced. I was not expecting the chocolate and dark fruit flavor at all. I am very happy with it.

The beer was definitely worth going to Hawaii to get the raw ingredients! Now, how to get my wife to agree to go back to get more . . .

Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day

Well, this past Saturday (November 3), was the American Homebrewers Association's Teach a Friend to Homebrew day. I invited a number of friends over and registered our house as Site #82 on the AHA site. The day was absolutely beautiful, a nice crisp fall day with temperatures in the mid 60s. It proved an excellent opportunity to break the deck in with its first "multi-person" brew day. As a side note, the deck is not complete yet and people had to get on it by using a chair, but it looks nice and is already very functional.

Three friends of mine were able to make it out (Sid, Bryan, and John), along with my In-laws, wife, son, and daughter. My In-laws were in town for a completely unrelated reason and my son and daughter always help out in a matter of course (or as much as a 4 year old and a 2 year old can). So, we can count the number of brewers as 8, WOOT!

We brewed a spiced winter ale as our collective brew. One of the tasks the participants were charged with was coming up with a name for the beer. I, of course, reserved the right to veto any names that were deemed unoriginal enough (such as "Bryan, Sid, and John Ale," which actually was suggested). The winning name was "Slap the Bag Ale," named after a rather amusing drinking story shared by Bryan. I shall not recite it here, so I do not embarrass Bryan further, but it was rather funny.

The brew day ended with a cook out of sausages and grilled eggplant. You can see the fixin's behind John as he pitches the yeast into the cooled wort. I hope everyone had a good time and learned something.

Now, hopefully the beer is as good as the story behind its name . . .

Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day - Nov 3

Well, it looks like I will have a couple people out to the house on Saturday for Teach a Friend to Homebrew day. The weather looks like it will be a nice crisp Fall day, perfect to make some beer with friends. I decided on a Spiced Winter Ale to make, because winter is coming fast and I just listened to a Jamil Show podcast about that style. So, here is the recipe, which was taken from Jamil's show.

Spiced Winter Ale

Ingredients:
- 13 lbs British Pale Ale Malt (original recipe calls for 19.5 lbs)
- 0.75 lbs Crystal 80 Malt
- 0.25 lbs Black Patent Malt
- 1 oz Horizon hop pellets (ended up using Progress hop pellets due to hop shortages)
- 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp Ginger
- 1/8 tsp Nutmeg
- 1/8 tsp All Spice
- London Ale Yeast
- Bottling Sugar

Stats:
- O.G. - Unknown (original was 1.090)
- F.G. - 1.022
- IBU - 45
- Color
- 19 SRM (approximate because I changed the amount of Pale Malt)
- Alcohol - 6.5% (original was 9%)

Instructions:
- Mash at 152 F for an hour using 1 quart per lb of grain.
- Sparge at 170 F until you have 6.5 gallons of wort.
- Boil for 90 min.
- Add hops 60 min from flame out.
- Add spices 1 min before flame out.
- Ferment at 68 F in primary and rack to secondary when mostly complete.
- Taste beer when racking from primary to secondary and adjust spice flavor if necessary with appropriate spice slurry.
- Add bottling sugar and bottle.
- Wait three weeks for bottle conditioning and enjoy.

Maui Madness

I bottled my espresso stout this past weekend and it is shaping up to be a really nice beer. I am calling it Maui Madness, as the coffee beans are from my wife and my anniversary trip to Hawaii. The stout has a nice coffee flavor and well rounded bitterness from the unmalted barley. The coffee should be prevalent, as there are 10 shots of espresso that were added to the secondary fermenter. It almost has a dark chocolate flavor that I hope will carry over to the finished beer. I will try to take a picture of a glass of it, once it is ready, and post it. The color was really nice and I hope the head carries some of the rich brown of the beer.

It should be ready in about two to three weeks . . . I can't wait!

Change is in the air . . .

I am taking a new job, one that does not involve travel! Yay for me!

I hope this opportunity will allow me to spend more time with my family and my hobbies . . . namely making fermentable beverages. I have neglected this blog for too long, and I hope to keep up with it more in the coming months.

Things of note I hope to post on in the near future:
- Update on the blackberry mead (racked it on 10-6-07 and it is looking good)
- Latest brew - Maui Madness Espresso Stout (brewed on 10-6-07)
- Teach a Friend How to Homebrew Day plans - 11-3-07
- Update on CRABS

Blackberry Mead . . . The Madness Has Begun

I started the blackberry mead two days ago. In the process of making it, I think I forgot just about everything I have learned in 7 years of making beer and wine. The following are the key things I foolishly forgot:

• Time. For some silly reason, I forgot that brewing always takes a LOT longer than you think it does. The mead recipe I was using was pretty simple. Boil 20 pounds of honey for 15 minutes, then pull off the burner. Toss in the blackberries for 15 minutes to pasteurize them. Add to the primary fermenter, cool, and pitch your yeast. I allotted 90 minutes for this process and had something to do at the end of that period. Boy, I was wrong. It took a LOT longer and I ended up trying to rush things, which is never good.


• Follow the recipe. The recipe called for boiling one gallon of water with the 20 pounds of honey. I thought, that is too little, so I made it two gallons. This meant that things took longer to boil. It also meant that my brewpot was overflowing when all the honey was added to the pot and I had a boil over. It also meant that I had to pasteurize the blackberries in the primary fermenter because there was no more room in the brew pot. Thus, I had to pour boiling hot honey-water through a funnel . . . more on that later.


• Test your equipment, FIRST. This was the first time I used a new large funnel I purchased while visiting my brother. The funnel is supposed to prevent splashing, but I did not test it. Well, the funnel actually splashes more, it seems, especially with HOT liquids. My wife was holding the funnel when it "burped" and honey water splashed all over her arm and burned her. I felt really bad about that. Plus, it spilled onto the floor and honey water is incredibly sticky. What a mess . . .


• Cool Concentrated Liquids. Given that I could not pasteurize the blackberries in the brew pot because I added too much water, I could not cool the brew pot before putting in the glass fermenter. This meant that even after topping off the carboy with cold water, the honey water was much to hot to pitch the yeast. In fact, I ended up having to let the mead sit over night before adding my yeast, as it would not cool down. I pitched the first thing the next morning, and now it is bubbling away happily, but I obviously wanted to pitch sooner.

With all the crazy things that happened during the brew day, I am tempted to name this one "Black Madness." However, the mead is fermenting fine now and has a beautiful color. We will see how it turns out, as this mead will need to age for nine months to a year before drinking. Hopefully, I will be out of the dog house by then, having burned my wife's arm while she was trying to help.

But then again, as often as I put myself in the dog house, I doubt it . . .

"HI," How are you?

My wife and I are going to be headed to Hawaii soon for our 10 year wedding anniversary. We will be spending time both on Maui and near Honolulu. Besides using this trip to relax, re-energize, and spend quality time with my wife, I hope to find GREAT Hawaiian beer! I will be sure to report any findings on this subject for the benefit of the rest of you.

Hopefully, I can sample some beer and come up with a homebrewing method to reproduce it. If not, perhaps some stranger ideas may ferment in my head. I am already coming up with some homebrewing ideas on the subject, such as a nice espresso porter, brewed with kona coffee beans. Or perhaps a pineapple wheat wine. We shall see . . .

I may have CRABS . . .

Well, we are trying to organize. The beer establishment has got us down and we want our voices heard! We want quality beer, decent prices, good advice, and good wages . . . well, who does not want good wages. So, it is time to organize a local homebrewing club.

My friend Jamey and I have been talking about starting a homebrewing club in the Charlottesville area for a while now. The last time I went digging for one, I found some references to a club called "The Back Door Brewers" on several homebrewing sites. I sent an email to the address listed and got a quick response back saying the club was no longer meeting. Basically, they wished they had not been listed on the brewing sites because the organizer still gets emails about it years after the club disbanded.

This gives me hope . . . as there may be other people interested in homebrewing in Charlottesville and we just have to find them. I am hopeful that with a simple website and some meetings at local pubs, we might find a cool group of people that like to make beer, have fun, and exchange ideas. Thus, the Charlottesville Radical Ale Brewing Society (CRABS) will soon be born.

So, I fired the idea off to my art-talented brother, who, while pursuing a career in engineering, is still an awesome artist. I was expecting some general ideas, but he sent back several draft designs within an hour. I have included a couple of them here. I thought he just modified some things he found on the web, but no, he just free-hand designed them using Illustrator. Simply amazing!

The overall winner of the logos was this one. It is my favorite and is based off of one of my brother's hobbies, geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com/). He had a travel bug called Steamey the Crab and liked how it looked. Thus, the CRABS mascot will be "Steamey" as well. He even drew an anchor tattoo on Steamey's claw. Simply great.

I hope to have more information about CRABS soon, as several of us are meeting next week to start the group off. What better way to do it than meeting at a local brewpub to sample cask-conditioned ales . . . Yum!

7th of July Party

My friend hosts an annual crab and clam party every year on the first Saturday after the 4th of July. I have attended several events and it is always a good time. Then, starting in 2006, my friend found an old coke dispensing fountain in a friend's attic and was surprised to find it still worked. The machine takes room temperature liquid (think old-fashioned kegged soda) and quickly super-chills it and dispenses it from one of five taps. My friend's immediate thought, now I can request some Wallace homebrew to serve at the party.

So, in 2006 we tried the system out. My friend found some 5-gallon corny kegs on sale cheap on eBay and together we brewed a red ale and an English pale ale. Both recipes were extract-based. Then we hooked them up to the coke machine and started fiddling with carbonation. Several problems became evident. Unlike bars and most homebrew kegging systems which keep their kegs at serving temperature, the coke machine takes room temperature beer and super-chills it. Given that gases dissolve in liquid at different rates for different temperatures, this proved to be problematic. We eventually got it right, after drinking half a keg of beer over a month or so, and things were great. The party went off well and people liked the beer, especially the English pale ale.

So, 2007 rolls around and my friend wants to up the ante. This year we made four kegs of beer (that's right, 20 gallons). We kept the English pale ale from last year, and added a West Coast pale ale for comparison. I also suggested two of my favorite recipes, a clone of Samuel Smith's oatmeal stout and a smoke amber ale. Again, we had the same problems of adjusting the CO2, or that was my friend excuse for drinking a third of the smoke amber (I am pretty sure that was his favorite, so I don't buy the excuse for a second). An impromptu survey conducted of party beer drinkers revealed the following facts/opinions:

1) The oatmeal stout was great, which surprised many people because it is a dark beer on a hot day. This was my favorite of the bunch, and the first keg to be drained completely.

2) People thought the smoked amber was very different, but really liked it, and several were surprised at how quickly the keg drained (it was finished second, most likely due to my friends CO2 "tests").

3) People rated the West Coast pale ale much higher than I thought they would. The beer, while clean tasting, seemed a bit plain to me. But, several people said the hops cut through the Old Bay seasoning on the crabs very well, which made it an ideal complement to the meal.

4) The English pale ale was enjoyed too, but it seemed the least favorite of the homebrews.

In addition, my friend bought a bunch of bottles of Amstel Light and dumped them into a keg and pressurized it. This was the last tap of the coke machine. Not surprisingly, this was the only beer left at the end of the party, with the English pale ale keg draining just after the fireworks show. My friends comment, "Next year I will tell those light beer drinking friends to bring their own and WE will brew another beer; one that has TASTE."

I look forward to it . . .

Dark and Wheaty with a Nutty Aftertaste . . .

I bottled the dunkleweizen last night, with the help of my lovely wife. It looks and tastes great, with a dark malty flavor and a nutty aftertaste (perhaps of almonds). I am very excited to see how it turns out. If it holds up to the carbonation process, the beer should be quite good.

Last night marked the first time we used my new "auto siphon." This is a neat device that is basically two racking tubes inside each other. The inner one is fitted with a gasket and you and pull it in and out like a syringe. You submerse the whole siphon in water then draw the inner tube up and out. Then you push the inner tube down and the pressure from this action pushes the liquid up and out the middle racking tube and, PRESTO, you have a siphon (works very similar to a syringe). It as the easiest thing in the world and I did not have to try to start the siphon by mouth, which is always dicey and may not be totally "germ-free" (though I have heard of some who "rinse" their mouths with scotch or vodka before starting the siphon. If that is not an excuse to drink booze, I have never heard one). You can find out more about the auto siphon here on the Northern Brewer site (http://www.northernbrewer.com/siphon.html). Just scroll part way down to the Fermatech Auto Siphon entry.

Grow Your Own Hops

This year I took advantage of the Northern Brewer sale on hop rhizomes and planted some hops. Northern Brewer had a nice selection of hop roots (rhizomes) and the only requirement was that you had to buy at least two. I ordered a cascade rhizome and a fuggle rhizome. Cascade is one of my favorite all-purpose bittering and flavoring hops and fuggle was, well . . . something else. Fuggle is an English flavoring hop and I make English ales from time to time, plus I needed to order a second rhizome and voila, I picked fuggle. Yes, the silly name had something to do with it . . .

So, the rhizomes are shipped to your mailing address about the time your area gets its last frost. Once the last frost is gone, you are supposed to dig two to three foot holes and fill them with a good mixture of well drained soil (I used equal parts top soil, potting soil, and peat moss). You then put the root stock in the ground, vertically, about two inches below the top of the soil. I planted mine in early May and hoped for the best.

Both hop plants have come up fairly well, with the cascade doing a little better than the fuggle (cascade is on the left, fuggle on the right). The first year the plants don't grow to full size or at full speed, as they are establishing their root system. But because they are sending out shoots, I decided to put up my hop trellis last weekend. Hop plants are vines and will grow up to 20 feet up a structure (trellis, tree, house, pole, etc.) in a season, if they are able to. So, you need to create some kind of structure to hold them, or else they don't go anywhere. The higher the better, in general, but the structure has to be able to hold a fair amount of weight, as the hops vines get fairly heavy before they produce their flower cones. You also need to be able to get the hop vines down to the ground in order to pick the flowers, so most designs use string that you can replace every year (the hop plant dies back to its roots every winter).

My trellis is based on my friend Jamie's "ghetto" design. It is not pretty, nor is it extremely tall, but it works well for him and can be easily constructed. The design is basically a 12 foot tall pressure treated 4x4 post, which is then crossed by a 2x4 board on top. I notched the top of my post to provide extra strength and then put screws to hold strings along the cross bar. I sank the post two feet into the ground for extra support and thus it is only 10 feet tall. But it should do for my needs and I can still reach the top on a normal sized ladder (very important because we live on a slope).

Only time will tell how well this experiment will work, but I am excited to potentially brew with my home-grown hops.

I racked the NoopleTucker into the secondary fermenter last night. I use a clean and sanitized 5 gallon glass carboy as my secondary fermentor. I try to do secondary fermentation on most of the beers I make. Secondary fermentation simply means that you siphon (or rack) the beer off of the lees (yeast sediment) at the bottom of the primary fermenter. This is an important step for two reasons:

• The first reason is that over time, the lees begin to decompose. This occurs because the lees consist mostly of dead yeast cells and cold break protein compounds. The decomposition can add to off-flavors in some beer styles. So, racking the beer into a secondary fermenter buys you time if you can't bottle your beer right away (you can leave your beer in secondary for a couple of weeks). As I often travel for work, I will take any time flexibility that I can get. Because of this extra time, most people recommend that you use a glass vessel as your secondary fermenter, as plastic allows some oxygen transfer over time and can oxidize your beer.
• The second reason is that it helps the beer to clear better. Basically, when you move the primary fermenter around, some of the lees gets stirred up into suspension. This gets transferred to your secondary fermenter, where it again has a chance to settle out. If you were to bottle straight from the primary fermenter, you would be more likely to pick up sediment that goes into your bottles.

The NoopleTucker tasted very good for this point in the fermentation. I could still taste some yeast, but because this is a wheat beer, that is almost a good thing. I detected no off-flavors (so far) and the beer had a nice smooth nuttiness to it. I was not expecting this last element at all, but it tastes great. The beer as a nice dark brown color to it, almost mahogany. I am very excited about this beer. I will keep you posted.

NoopleTucker Dunkelweizen

On Saturday 6/7/07, I started a batch of German dark wheat beer. The style is called a dunkleweizen and was my favorite German beer from my trip to Heidelburg a couple of years ago. I had no idea what went into the beer until I was reading through The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, by Charlie Papazian. This is book is the textbook of homebrewing, and if you have not read it, I suggest you pick up a copy. This is true regardless of your experience level. He explains things very well.

Here is the NoopleTucker Dunkelweizen recipe from the book (all grain), modified by me to fit the grain available from Northern Brewer, http://www.northernbrewer.com (my favorite web-brew store):

- 4 lbs Pale 2 row malt (#G001C)

- 3 lbs Durst Munich malt (#G303C)

- 3 lbs Weyer dark wheat malt (#G353C)

- 2 oz Weyer Carafa II malt, smallest you can order is a lb (G357C)

- 1 lb rice hulls (#G011)

- 1 oz hallertauer hop pellets (#HP07)

- 1 Whirlfloc tablet (Irish moss)

- 1 package Wyeast Bavarian Wheat Blend (#Y3056)

I always buy my grains crushed from Northern Brewer, as I don't have a grain mill. I also added the rice hulls to the recipe to help prevent a stuck sparge, which can happen with that much wheat malt.

Here is a list of steps that I took, and some pictures of the actual brew day:

1) I measured out 3 gallons of water to be used for the mash, then heated it in my brew pot. The standard ratio is 1 quart of water for 1 lb of grain, but I have found that is too little water for my system so I add a half a gallon to the calculation. I heated the water to 175 degrees F, which is my strike temperature. Strike temperature is simply the temperature that the water needs to be that when it is added to the room temperature grains, it results in your mash temperature. The recipe calls for a mash temperature of 152 degrees F, so I used a handy web calculator http://www.tastybrew.com/) that resulted in the 165 degrees, and I have found that I have to add 8 to 1o degrees to this because my system absorbs a fair amount of heat (trial and error, gotta love it).

2) I poured this water into my mash tun. Then, as I slowly added the grain to the water, my wife stirred it well. Once everything was added (including the 2 oz of carafa malt), we checked the temperature, which was 151.7 degrees F - close enough for government work. I then screwed on the top of the mash tun and waited for an hour. During this time, the enzymes in the malted grains convert the starches to sugars. In fact, at the end of this process, if you taste some of the water, it tastes really sweet. This still amazes me!

3) While we waited in an hour, I heated 5 gallons of water to 170 degrees F. This is my sparge water, that will run through the sparge arm gadget I have. I heat 5 gallons because that is all my water cooler will hold, and we don't always use it all (better to have more, than not enough). This was put in the sparge water tank, which is the highest of the three tiers (sits up on a stool, which is on top of a table - very safe, huh).

4) Once the hour has elapsed we begin to vaurloff. I am not even sure if that is how you spell it, but it is a German word that means the first runnings out of your mash tun will have a bunch of bits of grain hull and stuff it in. To digress for a bit, the husks and bits of grain in the mash tun are suspended in water. As that water drains out, they form a sort of natural filter bed, on top of the false bottom in my mash tun (the stainless steel screen). This in turn helps clarify the water as it flows through the grain bed. So, we collect the first couple of cups of liquid out of the mash tun and then pour them back on top of the grain bed. We do this until the liquid coming out is clear, which take about 4 to 8 cups or so. This is called vaurloffing.

5) Next, we begin to sparge. All this means is that we are washing the sticky sugars that formed during the mash off the bits of grain. We do this by adding 170 degree water very slowly to the grain bed. We use 170 degree water because you want it as hot as possible, but any hotter than that will extract bitter compounds from the grain husks. I use a neat gadget called a sparge arm for this process (it was described in the last post). Basically, we use the ball valves on the mash tun and the sparge water tank to control the flow in and out of the mash tun. We want the equilibrium between these amounts to keep about an inch of water on top of the grains. I do this by just adjusting each one a little bit until I like the how it works. The water coming out of the mash tun goes into the brew pot. We sparge until we have our 7 gallons of wort (sugar water that has not been fermented), or the specific gravity reading from the sparge water coming out of the mash tun falls below 1.010. When if falls below this point, the sparge water starts to pull out bitter off flavors from the grain. In this particular brew day, I got the full 7 gallons - YAY! This is not always the case.

6) I now began the boil. This recipe calls for a 60 min boil, with 3/4 oz of the hops being added at the beginning of the boil, and the rest added at 58 min to give the beer aroma (more on hop usage another time). I add my hops in small muslin grain bags, as this helps keep the pellets from going everywhere and makes clean up easier. I also added a whirlfloc tablet at 50 min, to help clarify the beer later. We have about 6 gallons of beer at this point, as a gallon of water evaporated during the boil.

7) I then took the boiled wart and put it in an ice bath and hooked up the non-contact cooler. The goal here is to bring the temperature of the wart down to 75 degrees as fast as possible. We put the pot in an ice water bath then use tap water flowing through the non-contact cooler to cool the center of the pot. In about 15 min we had the wart cooled down to 77 degrees, which is close enough.

8) I now pour the wart through a strainer into a sanitized bucket (more on sanitization another time). This strains out some cold break material and any loose hops. I stir the wart like crazy to add oxygen to the liquid. Yeast need oxygen at the beginning of their life cycle to reproduce. The more you oxygenate, to a point, the quicker fermentation starts and you avoid infections.

9) Finally, I siphoned (technically called racking) the wart into a sanitized 6.5 gallon carboy and pitched the yeast. I then attached an airlock and put the carboy into a cool closet in the basement. I also wrapped a towel around it so that it would stay absolutely dark (light = skunky beer).

In the next post, I will talk about how this beer fermented and the next steps towards creating excellent beer.

Brewery Equipment

I figured I would start off by providing a quick tour of my basic brewing equipment. These pictures were all taken before the start of my last brew day (6/7/07).


I use a basic three tier all grain setup. The three tiers include a sparge water tank, the mash tun, and the brew pot. The sparge water tank and the mash tun are converted 5 gallon rubbermaid water coolers. I replaced the plastic push valves on each with stainless steel ball valves. The mash tun also has a stainless steel false bottom, so it can also function as my lauter tun. The coolers are connected by thick heat-resistant tubing.


My brewpot is a 7.5 gallon stainless steel turkey-fryer pot. Basically, I bought an manufacturer-returned turkey fryer from ebay. The equipment had never been used, but it was returned because it was missing some accessories. This allowed me to get a nice 7.5 gallon stainless steel pot and accompanying propane burner and stand for less than a new 5 gallon brew pot would have cost me. I have been very happy with the set up and it allows my wife to help for the first time in my brewing career (the smell of cooking hops in the kitchen gives her a head-ache, but out on the front porch, the smell does not bother her. It is exciting, really, to have her excited about brew days!).

The sparge arm setup is something I bought at a homebrew shop. It is a neat little gizmo that consists of a copper "T" suspended from a PVC tripod. The water comes down the the main section and out the arms of the "T." Because the drilled holes in the arms of the "T" radiate in opposite directions, the arm spins around like a sprinkler. Really quite an neat invention.


I use a non-contract copper cooler, along with a water bath, to quickly cool the wort. Cooling it quickly helps ensure that cold break proteins form and fall out of the wort, in addition to shortening the amount of time required before pitching your yeast. This is a crucial stage, as before the yeast gets going, there is a strong potential to get an infection in your beer.

My typical brew day takes about 5 hours and consists of the following steps:

1. Heat the mash water outside in the brew kettle (typically around 3 gallons)
2. Mash the grain with the mash water in the mash tun
3. Heat the sparge water and put it in the sparge water tank (typically around 5 gallons)
4. Vaurloff the first 8 to 12 cups of drainage from the mash tun (you basically drain a couple of cups full of mash water into a measuring cup, then pour it back over the top of the grains. This allows you to clarify the grain bed.)
5. Sparge with the sparge arm, while draining the water through the grains (this yields a total of about 7 gallons of wort)
6. Boil the wort, adding hops and other additives as called for by the recipe
7. Chill the wort quickly using a water bath and a non-contact copper cooler
8. Pour the wort through a strainer into a large bucket
9. Stir heavily to introduce oxygen for the yeast and rack into a 6.5 glass carboy
10. Pitch the yeast and hide in a closet

So, why a blog . . .

A friend of mine asked me if I could provide him with some information about my homebrewery. So, on my last brew day (7/9/2007 - dunkleweizen), I snapped a bunch of pictures and began to draft an email response. Then suddenly I thought, "perhaps I could turn this into a blog." Well, to be honest, my wife planted the idea in my head. She already has a blog about our two kids and has a ton of fun with it. Like many of the things in my life, this idea was either conceived or heavily supported by my wife.

So, over the next several posts, I will try to show off my home brewery through the pictures and supporting text of my last brew day. Then, I will try to post every once in a while about the different things I am doing and maybe even some pictures of us enjoying the fruits of our labors. I hope you enjoy!