My first beer.

Everyone:

This is a shot of me drinking my first beer. The first beer I ever made on my own.

It tastes great:)

Beer brewing, first try: bottling day!

Well after two weeks of waiting and looking at the carboy and obsessing and having excited fantasies about sitting down on the couch with a cold home brewed beer and watching a full 1 hour television show, I bottled my beer.

This was a long process. Start to finish it took about 4 hours, partially because my sanitizer is the type that needs to be rinsed, a situation I will be remedying before my next batch.

I had to wash and sanitize about 60 bottles, which turned out to be more than I needed. Washing and sanitizing the bottles took about 2 hours. First I washed each bottle with a bottle brush and soapy water. I've been collecting these bottles for about a year, so as I cleaned the bottles, I spent my time reflecting on our old apartment, and the move over the summer, and the ways that my life has completely turned on its head since last February. One of the things I love about beer is the way that drinking different kinds of beers reminds me of the various times in my past when I have had said beers. Guinness, for example, is the first beer that I ever liked. When I drink Guinness, I remember the first Guinness I ever had. I remember the excited wow that popped into my head when I had that first sip.

Now these beer bottles remind me of the not-so-distant past, of our old kitchen, of our old loft where I stored the bottles. Sundays spent doing laundry and cooking. Carpeting and cathedral ceilings.

After washing and sanitizing all my bottles, I sanitized my fermenting bucket, siphon, hydrometer and bottle caps. I also sanitized a couple dishes where I could place tools and bottle caps that weren't being used. Then I used the racking cane to transfer the beer from the carboy into the fermenting bucket. I could have left the brew in the carboy but I thought the fermenting bucket would be easier to bottle from.

After I filled the fermenting bucket, I diverted a little of the brew into the plastic hydrometer tube. I don't have a wine thief (think of it as a turkey baster for brewers), which would have helped here, so I filled the hydrometer tube from the spigot in the bottom of the fermenting bucket. The hydrometer measures the density, or the gravity, of the brew. It's a buoyed glass tube with numbers up the side, and looks a bit like a thermometer.

Bearing in mind that I'm still a little fuzzy on details of brewing, I believe that the reason you must check the gravity of the brew is because you need to measure the sugars remaining in the mixture. As the yeasts eat up the sugars, the liquid becomes less dense. Once all the sugars are gone, this is called Final Gravity. When the brew reaches final gravity and the density stops dropping, that's when you're ready to bottle.

The wise people at the Beer Wine and Cheese store told me that I should hit final gravity after 7-10 days of the second stage of fermentation. I waited 14 days because I brew on the weekends, and I wanted to be sure I had given the brew enough time to reach final gravity. I asked the clerk at the store if there were negative consequences to going over the prescribed 7 to 10 days and he said no, within reason. He said not to wait 2 months after final gravity:)

I measured the gravity. Because this was a recipe that I obtained at the Beer Wine and Cheese shop, I knew beforehand that the final gravity was supposed to be 1.01 or 1.02. Had I been making up my own recipe, I would have needed to determine final gravity for myself.

The gravity was about 1.01. What are the consequences of bottling before reaching final gravity? Not sure.

So then, onto bottling. My priming sugars were powdered, so I boiled a cup of water and dissolved the sugars into the water, per the instructions from the guy at the Beer Wine and Cheese store. I poured the sugars into the brew and stirred them carefully with my racking cane.

I attached the plastic hose to the spigot on my fermenting bucket, then put the bottling attachment at the other end of the hose. The bottling attachment has a pressure sensitive tip that, when depressed into the bottom of the bottle, lets the beer through. I turned on the spigot and depressed the tip of the bottling attachment, and filled my bottles. In between bottles, I allowed the bottling attachment to rest in the top of the carboy.

The fuzzy picture below shows a bottle, the bottling attachment in the carboy, and the bottle capper. The bottle capper has a magnetic piece that holds onto the bottle cap. You tip the bottle capper over the top of the bottle, depress the handles all the way down, and then lift the handles back up. In most cases, when you pull the bottle capper off the bottle, the cap is solidly on the bottle. Probably 1 time in 6, the bottle cap goes on sideways or just doesn't go on at all. I wasted about 15 bottle caps in this process.

Wasted bottle caps:

A better shot of the bottle and bottle capper:

The finished bottles:

This yielded about 45ish bottles of beer. For the time being I stored them in a big plastic tub in the office. At the end of two weeks, when I can drink them, I'll move them into the garage.

I'm planning to start my second brew in March, when I get paid and can buy some more ingredients and Star San sanitizer.

Some things I have learned and wish to remember for the future:

1) Next time I do a boil, I can start boiling the water while I'm sanitizing the rest of my equipment. This will save a lot of time because boiling like 3 gallons of water took basically forever.

2) Need to put water in my airlock. Duh. This is very likely why I thought my yeast was dead--the airlock was being improperly used. Craig put a lengthy talk about airlocks online:

3) According to the guy at the Beer Wine and Cheese shop, putting double yeast into the fermenting bucket probably didn't hurt anything. It may even have helped.

4) while inefficient, transferring the brew from the carboy back into the fermenting bucket seems to have helped me ditch some of the sediment in the bottom of the brew after 2nd stage fermentation.

Beer brewing, first try: secondary fermentation

Last night I started my secondary fermentation. Recall that for one week the beer has been sitting in a giant fermenting bucket in the office of our house. During that time, some settling happened. Yeast and other things formed a layer on the bottom of the bucket. This layer is called "trub," pronounced "troob." So last night, I sanitized my big glass carboy. I also tried to sanitize my racking cane, but I have realized that I will need Star San for this in the future because my current sanitizer is not very good quality and the fact that it needs to be rinsed thoroughly after use is too cumbersome for good cleaning. After sanitizing the equipment, I siphoned the brew from the trub and into a glass carboy, so that the beer could begin its next stage of development, called secondary fermentation.

These pictures are all very dark and not such great quality but I just had to share this. My fermenting bucket:

Using a racking cane to transfer the brew from the bucket, into the carboy:

The racking cane is an old-fashioned tool for this purpose. Looking online, I see a lot of home brewers now use special siphons with air pumps for this job. The racking cane is cheaper, and it works just fine except for one problem: you have to suck on the end to get it started. Like, with your mouth. As one guy online put it, you're siphoning beer from the bucket like you might have siphoned gas from a friend's car in high school. So I brushed my teeth, took a shot of vodka and sucked the brew out of the bucket and into the carboy.

I think I made at least one mistake during this process. At this point, it's important for the brew to stay relatively still so it won't be exposed to any more air than necessary. During the transfer, I started with the pouring end of the racking cane resting at the top edge of the carboy, so that the brew dropped the height of the carboy down to the glass bottom. Obviously, this agitated the brew and created a lot of bubbles. I realized my mistake before too long but you can see by the froth on top of the brew that a considerable amount of mixing and sloshing happened before I realized the problem. I don't know what this will do to the brew.

When the transfer was complete, I put the stopper in the top of the carboy and stuck the airlock in the hole.

Now it's back in the office, in a carboy, in a big plastic tub, on top of some towels so I can easily slide it around if necessary:

The trub in the bottom of the fermenting bucket:

Now the brew will sit around for a few weeks before I bottle it.

I had a hard time figuring out this process. I bought the ingredients for this brew in a box at the Beer Wine and Cheese store near my home, and the instructions for this brew were included, but the instructions said nothing about secondary fermentation. Likewise, the racking cane came with no instructions. I looked online and found a few good instructions for using a racking cane. I found this one to be particularly helpful:

Only after I used the racking cane to get the brew out of the bucket did I realize that I probably could have attached the racking cane hose to the spigot at the bottom of the fermenting bucket, and that would have been more sanitary than sucking the brew out with my mouth--see this guy below. Oh well.

One more thing to share, this is an excellent, 8 minute video about the home brewing process:

Beer brewing, first try: update

Beer is leaking out of the fermenting bucket and into the tub. I think it is coming out of the spigot.

This whole thing is just going very wrong:)

beer brewing, first try: the mysterious failure of the yeast

As mentioned in a previous post, on Saturday night I gave my first shot at beer brewing. I chose a dry irish stout from a kit assembled at the Beer Wine and Cheese making store not far from my house. In the future I have plans to brew beer not from kits, but from my own assembled ingredients. But this was my first try.

Beer making is complex and it happens in different stages. First you boil the wort, then you let it ferment, then you bottle it. There are long stretches of time in between steps. I will probably post more on the specifics of beer making later, but what happened that night, in a nut shell:

1) I cleaned and sanitized the equipment

2) let the grains steep in a big pot on the stove for 45 minutes

3) strained out the grains and poured the liquid into a 5 gallon pot

4) poured more water over the grains to fill the 5 gallon pot about 3/4 of the way full

5) boiled the liquid in a 5 gallon pot for 1 hour, adding hops at the appropriate intervals

6) cooled the liquid (called wort) very quickly in an ice bath

7) dumped yeast into the wort

8) poured the cooled wort into the fermenting bucket

I'm a little fuzzy on the specific chemistry of beer making. This is something I'm still learning. What was supposed to happen next--my understanding of it anyway--is that the yeast was supposed to grow and do its thing in the bucket. Yeast releases all these gases; I know this from making sourdough. My sourdough starter, when healthy, will literally blow the lid off the tupperware container I keep it in after it's been fed. In the case of beer, the fermenting bucket has an airlock on the lid. The purpose of the airlock is to release the gas in the bucket but prevent air from coming in. This means you should see bubbles escaping from the airlock, but this is the problem: on Monday after 48 hours there were no bubbles coming out of my bucket.

There were two possible problems I could think of:

1) the yeast was dead. I killed it, or it was dead to begin with.

2) the lid wasn't tight on the fermenting bucket. I didn't think this was the case, but I supposed it could be possible that there was air escaping from the sides of the lid where I had to cut it. See, the lid was too tight before I started the boil, so I couldn't even get it to seal on the bucket. The bucket came with instructions that if this was the case, I needed to cut the side of the lid to make the fit less tight. All the same, if the yeast was healthy I still think I would see some activity. Even if gas was escaping from the tiny cracks in the sides, the fact remains that the airlock is a much better escape route and I should see most of the gas escaping that way.

Yesterday I ran back to the wine cheese and beer making store, and I picked up some new liquid yeast. The packet of yeast was kind of a double-layer thing, with a packet on the outside and a packet on the inside. The instructions said that 3 hours before pitching the yeast, I needed to blow open the interior packet by popping it with a good, swift smack. Then for 3 hours, the yeast gases expanded in the packet and the packet got big and hard. After 3 hours, I cracked open the bucket one more time and dumped the yeast in. The wort inside was bubbly and frothy, which indicates to me that the original yeast had been active, or at least some of it had. Then I was faced with the choice to put the new yeast in, given that there had been some previous yeast activity. I went ahead and dumped in the yeast, and the interior yeast packet fell into the wort. I'm posting a picture:

The thing that looks like an ice cube on the left hand side is the yeast packet that fell in. I had to fish it out with hastily sanitized tongs, and I don't think I sanitized the tongs well enough because I kind of panicked.

The guy at the store said the "odds are in my favor" for saving the batch, but we'll see. He said that before I dumped the yeast packet in the brew. See, keeping the wort sanitized during the fermenting process is like one of the most important things you can do. There should not be bacteria in the wort or the brew will be bad.

The biggest problem I face at this point is that if the brew fails, I won't have the slightest idea what caused the problem--there are so many potential causes. Bacterial contamination? If so, from where--the yeast packet? The hastily sanitized tongs? Cracking the lid on the fermenting bucket like 3 times? My sanitizing process before the boil? The cheap sanitizer I used?

And it seems pretty likely at this point that this brew is going to fail:) I just won't know why.

It took me a year to get the sourdough right, and sourdough is actually much less complicated than beer. The guy at the store just said it was important to enjoy myself. I realized, I am enjoying myself. It's ok if the beer is dead. I'll be disappointed, but I've been dropping in on my fermenting bucket every 2 hours. It's the first thing, literally, the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning.

where did I go?

It's been a year since I posted. A year!

What happened to me? Well, I bought a house, for one thing. A house!! Ahh!! My favorite feature of my 1954 house is my knotty-pine, 1954-esque kitchen with a vintage, O'Keefe and Merritt stove, pictured here.

Note the bungee cord holding the oven door closed. That's a real 1954 bungee cord.

Actually that's pretty unlikely.

Anyway, we fixed the oven door in November. No more bungee cord. The Other Adult in the house, my other boss, gave the decree that we had to have the oven fixed before Thanksgiving, and so it was.

Actually, there's just a slew of things going on in my life now, some good and bad. I'm not sure if I should go into all nitty gritty details of my life on this blog, as I think I intended to make this blog about food. But then, the food I make is shaped by my life, my life is shaped by the food I eat. My commute to our new home is longer than it used to be. My kitchen is larger but my available time has shrunk. Let's just say I'm baking a lot more convenience foods than I used to. No, not like boxed mac n cheese and vegetarian chicken nuggets. More like, tostadas (takes about 30 minutes), nachos (again, about 30 minutes), mini pizzas (45ish minutes), fajitas (30 minutes)--you get the picture. People in my family want dinner on the table by 5:30 or the world explodes. I do my best to accommodate.

The Other Adult purchased a chest freezer for our garage, and the house came with a Bonus fridge, which means I've got LOTS of cold-air storage. I've been experimenting with making food leftovers and freezing them in small portions for easy reheating. I'll tell you more about that as I get time.

Also, I started brewing beer. Beer! I'll be posting a lot more about this as the situation develops, but this is a new hobby for me. See here, a picture of my boil from this weekend.