The Basic Four: Water, Malt, Hops, and Yeast

Alright, beer experiment #1 is complete. To sum it up, it was a learning experience. I think I will call it “Bad Student Wheat”, because I learned a lot but I still got an “F”. Two primarily Bud Light drinkers like it (or were kind) so it can’t be considered a complete lost. It has a sweet malty taste to it that I wasn’t expecting I think the yeast were lazy and didn’t do their job completely. We will have an official tasting after it is finished a little more, and then we can find out where we should make improvements.
As for the “Snowy River Nut Brown” we bottled it today and it taste great pre-bottle finished and flat. It is real smooth with hints of nuts and chocolate, can’t wait to see how it taste in 2 weeks. I think we made some exponential improvements between the two batches. Batch number 3 starts this weekend.

As promised here is a detailed breakdown:

With the first batch we just boiled the pre-hopped malt extract, added that and yeast in a carboy, let ferment (or half ferment) for two weeks, bottled, and let finish for another two weeks. A real no frills beer.

This is our cooking apparatus.
A propane turkey fryer, 38 quart aluminum pot, and a porch.

Here is one of me adding the hopped malt extract (it’s a syrup mix) to the boiling pot of water.

AG is stirring here; we boiled and stirred for 20 minutes to get the sugars dissolved into solution. (At this point it is called wort)

Adding the hot wort to cold water that is in the carboy (fermenter).

This is the carboy in the extra shower

This is a picture of the second batch bubbling off CO2, dead yeast, and proteins. (This is only about 5 hours since we put the yeast in there!)

After the primary blow-off, I moved the carboy to a warmer part of the house. (Notice the top has a bubble lock on it)

Once the bubble lock pushes a bubble out every 90 to 180 seconds it time to bottle. Clean Bottles are a must.

This is the bottling station.

This is my attempt to be a hand model. We racked the carboy into the bottling bucket, added a little more sugars for carbonation, being careful of contaminates at this point, and then we filled the bottles.

AG did most the capping with this fun little toy.

It’s impossible to bottle homebrewed beer without having some.

And this is AG lovingly embracing batch number two; we have high hopes for these little guys.

I’ll keep you posted on our works of art as they develop.


Side note:
As you may or may not know, the east coast has been slammed with a snowy winter. Here in SWVA the snow hasn’t been all that bad, but we have had a fare share thus far. The problem is that a lot of the counties around here are poor (more so than those in NOVA and DC) and I guess they have run out of road salt or money for road salt. The county that I live in is a white collar county with higher taxes and the one I work in is below blue collar… whatever color that is and probably only gets a five dollars for the whole county budget. My guess is they cannot afford road salt and it is making my commute really interesting and fun. Right at the county line you can tell who doesn’t have road salt, its blacktop and then white on I-81. The wrecks start just north of mile marker 35 and continue right into my parking lot at work.

When the older generations talk about how bad the winters were back when they were little I now believe that is because road salt wasn’t invented yet. Because without the salt the roads just stay bad when all they are getting is a scraping. Here are some pics from my commute, notice the jackknifed truck. If I’m quick enough with my camera phone I’m going to try to get pictures of all the wreckage I see every morning on my way to work. The truck still runs great in the snow, even at 75 mph, I really do enjoy driving in this stuff. It’s an adrenaline rush.