Frog and Goat

Last night we decided to go ahead and bottle our beer. It was pretty exciting to take the lid off our fermentation bucket.

Looks like an open septic tank, don’t you think? But, the smell was pure heaven which is the complete opposite of a septic tank.

We siphoned the beer out of the bucket into our bottling bucket taking care not to get too much of that sediment.

We now have a tube for our hydrometer so we could actually take a measurement of final gravity, but since we have no clue about our original gravity, we’re not exactly sure how much alcohol is in our beer. We were shooting for 4.6% so it shouldn’t be too far off that. I’m sorry this picture is for crap. There was so much junk on the counter (tubing, brushes, who knows what) and the better-half was doing something with the siphon so he was in the way too. I just hopped around hoping for a shot.

Our dishwasher has a sanitizing function so I sent 24 bottles through a cycle. Here are some cooling a bit before we bottled:

Then we bottled. I was in charge of filling the bottles–I kneeled on the kitchen floor for so long it was like Grandma getting up when we were done. The better-half used the capper and I think our bottles look pretty darn good. Notice our supervisor:

In everything I’ve read, you are supposed to taste your beer at this point so we took some out of the bottom of our bucket and drank some of what we put in our hydrometer flask. It had no carbonation, but it tasted pretty damn good. The carbonation will happen as the bottles sit for two more weeks. We made up a batch of priming sugar using this tool for guidance.

We’ve heard horror stories of bottles exploding during this portion of the process so the case of beer is sitting in the guest bathtub with a towel over the top. I’m sure we’ll be fine as I left a good amount of headroom in each bottle. But it’s our first time so we’re being cautious.

We’re going to duplicate this beer tomorrow afternoon and use our new glass carboy for fermentation. We’ll get to see what the beer is doing this time. The better-half will get bragging rights as brewer of that batch. We are very curious to taste the differences in the batches. The new batch will not have frozen yeast and we’ll be able to measure our gravities this time. We’ll see what a difference those two things make.

We’re a week out from our brewing session and I’m finally resting easy. You see we got home from the homebrew store and I threw the hops and the yeast into the freezer. Yes, I threw the yeast package into the freezer. I was sure I had killed the yeast (the hops were supposed to go in there). The better-half said the overall cost of all the ingredients was negligible so why not try making the beer anyway. The voice of reason.

So, we heated up some water and steeped the grains:

It’s basically like letting a tea bag steep. See how dark the water got from having the grains in there:

You add a bunch more water and then reheat to a specific temperature. After the magic temperature is reached, you add the malt which is the syrup that adds some flavor and gives your yeast something to eat:

And, what would beer be without hops? Gross. That’s what. We used two different hops that went into the brew at different times. And, by the way, these are hop pellets.

We cooled the wort (pronounced wert) so that the poor yeast could go in and not die (for sure) in a fiery bath. The blue bucket had some bricks in the bottom so the cook pot had something to sit on and let water get underneath it and then we threw in a bag of ice and some water. When the pot melted the ice, we added the gazillion ice packs we have in the freezer.

We waited less than an hour to get to the appropriate temperature. And then I pitched the yeast:

She who pitches the yeast is the brewer. I am a brewer of beer!

We strained out all the spent hops and whatever other stuff that didn’t need to be in the beer:

Looks tasty, doesn’t it? It smelled good.

The strained beer went into a brewing bucket and we attached the airlock. We moved the bucket into the house because the ideal temperature for fermentation is in the upper 60s. Since Mother Nature refuses to believe that it is May and we should have consistent temperatures in the 70s by now, we knew leaving the bucket in the garage wasn’t a good idea (Mother Nature you are a cruel mistress this spring). All week I have talked to my beer and the yeast specifically. Who freezes yeast?

Our batch of beer was 2.5 gallons. Our bucket is 6.5 gallons. Basically most people brew 5 gallon batches, but we wanted to start off small and end up with 24 bottles of beer for our first batch. What I’m saying is we have a lot of headroom in our bucket for CO₂ to build up. Last night we got home from dinner with friends and sat down near the bucket. The airlock was burping. Halleluiah I did not kill the yeast.

airlock burp video

We are going to brew our first beer tomorrow. Shooting for a summer ale. Details to follow.