Friday, November 27, 2009

BEER.

56 beers, 4 people 4 days.


wall of beer.

We had a wonderful family vacation in the mountains of North Carolina. Between the birthday parties, and thanksgiving we enjoyed a bit of beer and partying.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Second fermentation & Beer label/ logo

We drained the beer from the first fermentation bucket to the second, and made a logo and label for the Beer.

Again it's Rumble Fish Winter Ale, and here is the design:

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Beer wert tasting.

After boiling the beer, and then cooling it to 80 degrees in a sink of ice, you can then taste what you are making.

Kind of like a hot beer tea.

This is called wert, at this point, the hard part is done, and you can seal it, and wait.

Beer making leftovers.

Our brew is a winter ale, with two types of hops, two types of malt, and some nice spices. The smell while brewing was very nice, like a dank earthy tea.

The beer boiled for an hour, steeping the grains, and stirring occasionally.
This is a shot of the bottom of the pot, of our last chunks after the pour off into fermentation bucket.

Cooking the Beer, boiling ingredients.


We heated the nearly 5 gallons of water until a hard boil. Then we took it off the heat, and added the two malts.

Again we then boiled for one hour. At the ten minutes left mark of this second boil, I added the last spices. Finally with two minutes left of the second boil, I added the cascade hops.

Photo of Beer making ingredients outside.

Our winter ale kit had a dark liquid malt extract, and an amber. This added to it's style and it's colors and flavors.

It featured really nice cascade & vanguard hops as well as cinamon nutmeg n ginger to top off the beer with a nice spice.

This is my friend Will.

He is a web designer at our company. He has mad CSS skills.

Here he is enjoying the robust smell of the vanguard pellet hops, "mmm-azing".

This flower is a crucial element in a quality American style Ale beer.

The pellets of hops looked like rabbit food, but smelled really amazing.


Main ingredient, Beer making grains.

Here we are steeping a muslin sack tied, and full of Beers main ingredient- grains.

Our mix of barley malt grains, freshly pre cracked by our supplier.

I dunked the sack of grains, for awhile, and then stirred it on occasion while boiling.

This process went on for some time.

This is a real good time to be drinking other beer. If you have mad skills, you can even grill simultaneously!

That's right we made our beer in a 5 gallon pot on top of the side burner, of our heavy duty gas grill.



Beer Cooking pot, and thermometer.



Step one- bring 2.5 or more gallons of water to a boil or about 155 degrees.

This is our cleaned pot. We chose to do this on the outdoor grill, it can get smelly, but if that's ok with you, feel free to do this indoors.

Beer making ingredient list.



This is the ingredient list for our Winter Ale, Beer.

It was listed as a Happy Holiday Ale.

Sounded nice to me.

Ingredients for Beer.



The happy holiday ale at midwest brewers.

I opened up the pack earlier to check for everything and chill the yeast activation pack.

Here is a pic of all the ingredients.

Will the brew master/ web master holds up the Beer Kit.


Will the Web/ Brew Master holds up the

botteler, siphon & thief.

Primary and Secondary fermenters.

The beer making kits primary and secondary fermenter.

Make sure they are cleaned and sanitized.

Store them in a clean sealed container
when not in use.

Beer kits are cheap, buy one today!

Beer making kit- in a box!

This is the brewers best deluxe equipment kit. Other then the fresh ingredients, this is all you need to make beer at home! Do try this at home!