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.
