Brewing Update

Just to keep you in the loop with the recent brew activity, here is what is going on:


Bryan's Irish Red Ale:

• This was transfered today to bottles. Bryan leaves tomorrow for his honeymoon, so when he returns in a few weeks we will crack a few of these and let you know how they turned out.

Autumn Amber Ale:

• This is currently in the secondary. It has about another week left until transfering to bottles.

Dark Stout:

• I am in the process of getting a starter going for this batch. Later in the week I will brew the stout and post something about the process. This will be my first batch without using a kit from Midwest or any other supplier.
  

Making a Yeast Starter

I should have posted this a few weeks ago, but here are directions for creating a yeast starter. This particular starter was used for an Autumn Amber Ale.

First things first, you need to get your yeast going. Here I used a Wyeast Propigator (smack pack). Smack the pack to break the inner 'bubble'. Once the bubble is popped, shake the yeast package to mix the nutrients with the yeast in the package.

After a few hours, in this particular case roughly 16, the pack will swell to about the size of a Capre Sun juice box. This is how you will know when your yeast is ready to be put into a starter. Now we can start making the starter.

In a sanitized pot, bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, take the water off the burner and add two cups of DME. It is important to use the same style DME for the starter that you will be using for the brew you plan on making, otherwise you run the risk of introducing off flavors.



Mix in the DME and once it is completely dissolved, put the wort back on the burner and boil for 10 minutes. BE CAREFUL - You are just as likely to get a boilover when making a starter as you are when brewing. Keep a constant eye on your wort, stir and adjust heat to avoid boilovers.

Next the wort needs to be transported to a sterilized vessel. I use a half gallon glass jug for this. With the wort in the sterilized jug cool the wort to 70 degrees. Once at 7o degrees, aerate the work by shaking it vigorously.



Once to wort is aerated and cooled you are free to pitch the yeast. Open the yeast package with a pair of sanitized scissors. Once the yeast is added, put an airlock in the top of the jug holding you starter and let it begin fermenting for 24 - 48 hours. After, or during fermentation, the starter may be pitched to the wort for the batch you are brewing.

Autumn Amber Ale In The Primary

This week I decided to throw together a batch of brew on my own. I ordered the Autumn Amber Ale from Midwest Supplies and brewed some up. OG = 1.045 (right on target). I opened up the primary (I don't endorse it) and boy was it looking good! I can't wait to transfer to the secondary next week!

Update: I just spoke with Bryan and he took a hydrometer reading of his Irish Red Ale today and its at roughly 1.020. Almost down to his FG, but not quite. This is a good sign. He was pretty worried that he wasn't getting much action in the primary. He plans to transfer to his secondary in a few days.

In other news, I took some pictures of the steps involved in making a yeast starter when I brewed my Autumn Amber. I will be posting these later this week with step by step instructions. Hopefully this is useful to someone out there.

Irish Red Ale Brew Day

A couple weeks back I decided to pass on the gift of homebrewing to a good friend of mine. My friend Bryan is getting married in a few weeks so I thought a good way to keep him out of his wife's hair and allow him to keep some sanity would be to get him a brew kit and hope the hobby sticks. Well, last week he received the brew kit and we decided to kick off his first batch. Thats right, even you can brew!


I hooked Bryan up with an Irish Red Ale kit from Midwest Supply. I had made this before and Bryan liked it so I thought it was a guaranteed winner. After unloading everything from the brew kit it was time for the painstaking task of cleaning and sanitizing the equipment. When I had done previous batches by myself this seemed like an endless task. However, working with someone else to get this necessary step out of the way dramatically decreases the time needed. Here you can see Bryan cleaning the Ale Pale (primary fermenter).
Next we had to steep our specialty grains. To do this, we brought 3 gallons of H2O up to 155 degrees F (for a 5 gallon batch). Once the water reached 155, we steeped our specialty grains. The grains steeped in the 3 gallons of water for 30 minutes. Below is a shot of the steeping grains.
WIth the grains steeped, we pulled the wort off the bruner and added the LME. It is important here to take the wort off the burner when adding the malt extract. This helps reduce scorching inside the brew pot. Another important note is to make sure that you completely mix in all the LME. This doesn't take much work, but you should make sure that you completly mix the LME into the wort at this time. Next, add the wort back to the burner and bring it up to a rolling boil.

When the wort is boiling again, its time to add the first addition of hops. For this recipe we used Cascade pellets. Once the hops are added its time to time the boil. Set your timer to 60 mins and keep a constant eye on the boil. With the addition of the hops to the wort there is a good chance the boil will get higher in the brewpot and might even boil over if you don't stir and monitor the heat of the wort.
While the boil is going, we hydrated the yeast. For this kit we used a dry yeast. As you gain more experience and want to brew more consistent beers you should move to a liquid yeast or smack pack. For our purposes we really only needed a dry yeast so we went with it. To hydrate dry yeast consult the instructions on the back of the yeast packet.

Now that the boil has been going for 58 minuets, its time to add our finishing hops. This recipe calls for Tradition hops, so we added them with 2 mins left. With the boil complete it was now time to cool the wort as quickly as possibly. Luckily I had just recieved a wort chiller from Midwest so we gave it a shot. In about 10 minutes we were able to get the wort down to a pitchible temperature at 70 degrees F. With the wort cooled, we added it to 2 gallons of room temperature H2O in the primary. Bryan loves the wort chiller, as you can tell.

Now all that was left was to add the yeast to the primary and let it do its thing. Our OG reading was 1.043 which was right on target. I'll post an update once Bryan transfers to the secondary.