Update!

The IPA we brewed last week is now racked into the secondary fermentor.  We measured a finishing gravity of 1.014.  We tasted a sample of the beer before racking, and it was pretty good.  First try at siphoning was pretty rough – I hope our tap water doesn’t have any bugs in it. 

We also made a batch of Apfelwine, from 6 gallons of apple juice, 2 lb dextrose, and some Montrachet wine yeast.  It’s in the fermenter now, bubbling happily.  Buying all the juice was amusing – I looked like I had some kind of deficiency, buying twelve 3-qt jugs of apple juice.  Anyway, it’ll be done fermenting in about 3 weeks

Fermentors - Apfelwein on the left, IPA in secondary on the right

 I also built an immersion chiller to cool the boiling wort down to pitching temperature quickly.  For the IPA, we just put it in the fridge, and it took about 6 hours to cool to 80 degrees.  The chiller is built from 50 feet of copper tubing, two sections of vinyl tubing, and a couple of adapters and connectors.  It screws onto the sink and cold water runs through it, cooling the wort by heat transfer through the copper.  I tested the chiller yesterday and managed to get 6 gallons of boiling water down to 80 degrees in 25 minutes.  Score!

New wort chiller!

And now there’s a free fermentor for the next brew – an Altbier to be used as a substitute for an Oktoberfest Lager, since we don’t have the means to lager.   Technically, altbiers are supposed to be cold-conditioned, but we’re going to fake it, since we don’t have a separate fridge for that.  More word on that soon.

Fermenting…

The bier has been in the fermentor for about two days now.  There’s a thin layer of foam and the airlock is bubbling consistently.  It’s like Christmas.  Every time I hear it bubble I get a little giddy.  It’s seeming that India Pale Ale isn’t a good way to describe this one, though.  That ancient malt extract turned it pretty black.  Maybe IBA, India Brown Ale?  Black Ale?  Hope it tastes right.  More updates in a little over a week, when we’ll rack it into the secondary fermentor.

Brew Day

The first brew day was yesterday.  Everything went pretty smoothly, without any major problems.  The recipe:

1 lb Weyermann Cara Amber 25-35L, 30 min

2 x John Bull Home Brew “American Beer” 3.5 lb liquid extract kit

14 AAU Columbus 60 min
14 AAU Columbus 30 min
3 AAU Cascade 15 min
3 AAU Cascade 5 min

2 packs Safale US-05 Dry Ale Yeast

We used two extract kits and a ton of hops with the goal of achieving some kind of high-ish gravity IPA.  The hope was that the amount of hops would cover the potential staleness of the kits, which have a best-by date of 2000.  The only problem is that this stuff turned out dark.  Like brown close to black dark.  It doesn’t look like an IPA, but I’m hoping it’ll still taste alright.  The original gravity was measured to be 1.049 at 125 degrees, which translates to about 1.060 standardized and roughly 7% ABV, depending on how well the yeast does.

The apartment smells like cheez-its and hop-bombs.  Pictures:

 

So it begins…

We’re about to start home brewing.  I thought this would be a good way to chronicle the progress and share stories, assuming something interesting happens.  Cheers!