Another brew: Krispy Golden Hoppy ale…

Well I thought I’d be able to squeeze one more brew in before Xmas.. and bizarrely, I thought I’d try a ‘summer ale’ – as I might as well try and nail a good session ale.. plus I’ve now got two very strong beers bottled and maturing, so I need a lighter session ale to wash em down with.

I’ve not boiled yet – just made up the yeast starter tonight.  My planned ingredients are;

• 1.5kg light malt extract (liquid)
• 1kg (2x 500g) light malt extract (dry)
• 500g wheat extract (dry – that’s a barley/wheat mix)
• 500g Carapils malt (very light grains)
• Wyeast American ale yeast
• Challenger and Cascade hops

I had in mind a hoppy and light gold ale such as Oakham Ales Bishops Farewell.  If anyone from Oakham ever reads this – please feel free to contact me and correct my mistake   (I live local, happy to accept some of your yeast )

I plan to dry hop some of the cascade – I’ve read that it’s a very distinctive and very strong aroma hop.. we shall see!  The recipe below is approx what I’ll try… (click on it to read.  Free web calculator I use found HERE)

krispy blond ale - extra hops

UPDATE 21/11/2009: Well I didn’t make the beer when I thought – as the yeast starter never really took off as I wanted – so I didn’t trust the beer to the yeast which looked possibly dead (I left the start 3 1/2 days.. and no real activty.. plus after 2-3 days you can usually smell the alcohol and yeast, but I had nothing other than malt).

So I ordered some cheaper dry yeast (American style) – and did my boil today, while listening to my local footy team lose yet again on the radio.

All in the fermenter now – I will dry hop (* see latest update about hop tea!) with 25 grams cascade once the main fermentation is through (3 days.. depending on how it goes).  I’ve read that you can add the hops to the fermenter straight away – but I thought I’d wait until there is alcohol in the mix to kill any stray germs – and also I’ve read that the heavy CO2 production etc can lose some of the hop oils and aroma’s if you add during primary fermentation.  So I’ll boil up a muslin bag and add my 25g hops to it, and get it in the fermenter on tues/weds night, and leave it there until I bottle.  What I might do is thread the bag with nylon thread, so I can pull it out just before I bottle, so it doesn’t disturb the yeast sediment (it will float, rather than sink).

The colour looks spot on – a nice golden colour, and the taste wasn’t bad – I can definitely taste a fair bit of hop, but still missing that aroma I’m looking for, so hoping the dry hopping does it.  Also about spot on OG too, about 1052, so I’ll probably get about 4.6-5% with the yeast I’m using.

Update 23/11/2009

The fermentation is going very nicely now 2 days in I have a 2-3 inch krausen formed, and the yeast is the usual very active swirly snowstorm (the best way I can describe it) – see through fermenters are great

I have decided to try a ‘hop tea’ for this beer, and if that works well, go with it every beer where I want strong hop flavour and aroma.  I will take a picture when I do it, but a hop tea is another way to add hop – I guess wet dry hopping (if that makes sense).  So instead of adding the hops to my fermenter (in a muslin bag), I may instead (or as well as…), take my 1-2 ounces of hops, add to recently boiled water, and steep for 10-15 mins.  Then take this tea and add to the fermenter (and the beer obviously!).  I’ll do this once it’s calmed down, as some of the oils and aroma will be driven off by the CO2 being expelled during the yeast’s busy period.

To help keep the hop leaf from the beer, I’m going to use a coffee cafetiere (American’s call them a ‘French Press’) – those glass jars with a fine metal mesh you push down on to strain coffee grounds from the water.  I can use the same idea to strain and squeeze the hops out of the ‘tea’, getting all the goodness and flavour without the bits.  That’s the theory.

Even using the hop tea method, I MIGHT add hops directly too – just to make fully sure

New brew: Belgium strong ale

Another brew for Xmas; “Krispy Belgium Strong Ale” is now in the fermenter, and is still bubbling strongly 3 days later.

I wanted to have a couple of strong (8-9%) ales for Xmas, all bottled in my new green 1 litre bottles – better than 2 litres I had been using, as a) you can control how much you drink easier – without having to leave half opened stuff), and b) less chance of yeast mixing, as you probably only pour twice, rather than 4 or 5 times with a two litre, each time mixing more and more yeast in.

Some of the ingredients in my 'brew box'

Ingredients for this brew were (as my previous 2 beers, no recipe – just my own decisions);

• 2 x 1.5kg of light malt extract
• 1.5kg of belgium candy sugar
• 300g of extra light dried malt
• 250g of Belgium ‘Special B’ malt grains
• 300g of light crystal malt grains
• 50g Brewers gold hops (fairly high acid bittering hops)
• 50g Saaz hops (famous continental ‘lager’ flavour/aroma hops)
• Wyeast Belgium Abbey ale liquid yeast (1214)
• 5g of irish moss (add last 15 mins boil to help clear proteins)

The candy sugar is in there to give the beer the strength, without making it too full bodied – belgium beer is often very strong but not over malty – they use sugar to add alcohol without dominating the beer with malt making it heavy).

Yeast Starter (brewing technique helper)

I have used another liquid yeast, as while they are expensive, they are meant to be very true to type giving better results than dried yeast.  They do recommend making a ‘yeast starter’ though – as the 25 billion yeast cells are not quite enough to really get your fermentation going quickly (for a standard UK 5 gallon batch).  To make a yeast starter, I did the following;

Yeast starter

• Prepare liquid yeast (smack the pack 3 hours before as instructed, to mix yeast with nutrients, and leave in warm (25c) place.
  • If doing this with dried yeast, rehydrate, add yeast to cooled boiled water and leave covered for 30 – 45 mins, stirring only after first 15 mins.
• sanitise a small container – I’m using a £5 glass jar which just about takes 2 litres of liquid.
• get a medium saucepan, and too it;
  • add 150-200g of dried malt extract (better than sugar as closer to what the yeast will be eating in your main brew)
  • add 1.5-2 litres of boiling water (I don’t want to completely fill my container!)
  • Boil for 10 minutes
• Pour the boiling liquid malt into the glass jar
• COOL!  (I carefully put the glass jar in a sink of cold water)
• Once down to between 21-25c;
  • Seal container, and SHAKE!  You want to get a lot of oxygen into it – but be careful not to make a mess!
  • add the yeast (from smack pack or rehydration container)
• Leave in a warm dark place for 2-3 days!
  • for my belgium yeast between 20-24c)

The yeast will ferment the mixture, eating up all the sugars in the malt, and multiplying out in the oxygen rich wort.  This will give you upto 2 litres of yeasty mixture!

For this brew I was using a new thermometer – as I managed to break my previous one!  This time it was a probe and electronic unit one from Lakeland – and it’s really the business.  The probe is on a fairly long wire to the unit, and the unit acts as a timer, and readout, and also you can set max / min temps in it to monitor for, and it will beep when they are reached.

Monitoring temperature with new gizmo

So during the making of the beer, after adding the water and grains to the boiler, I set the upper limit alarm to 65c, and turned the heater to full.  I went off to read, and when the ideal steeping temp is reached, the alarm went off, and I could then set the heater back down to 2-3, to just maintain that 65 temp.  I then set the timer to 20 mins, and left it like that… alarm told me it was time to remove the grains and turn up the heat!

I then added the 2 cans of malt extract (which i had in boiling water for 20 mins to soften up the mixture inside), the 1.5kg of candy sugar (bit by bit as the water kept heating, stiring it in to help it disolve!), and some dried malt extract too which I had left over.

Once the wort was reaching close too boiling, I added 50g of my bittering hop (brewers gold – a popular German lager hop), and boiled for 75 mins.  I then added my wort chiller to sanitise, and 5g (one teaspoon) of Irish moss.  After 5 mins, the first 40g of Saaz hops for flavour, and then 9 mins later 10g more Saaz for a bit of hop aroma.  Heat off 1 min later (for a total 90 min boil), and then cold water turned on to chill the wort down.  I could use my new temp probe to tell me when it had reached 25c – very handy.

So once chilled, my wort is ready.  I quickly took a hydrometer reading – doing it now as there isn’t any foam on the surface – 1080 original gravity – good strong stuff!  I used a new stainless steel funnel (with strainer inside, I think it’s for jam making) to help me transfer the wort from the boiler tap to my clear fermenter – allowing the beer to drop a good distance to help get as much oxygen into it at this stage as possible.  The only problem is it gets so much oxygen, it foams right up – so I have to keep mopping up during the transfer.  Half way through I add in the yeast, just pouring all 1.5 litres of yeast/wort starter in.  Then top up with the last of the wort, some 19-20 litres.  I capped it off with a blow off tube (some tubing which is fed into a container of water – in case the fermentation foams up so much it would blow through a normal airlock causing possible contamination.

All in fermenter, my stout in barrel to the side

Because it’s in a clear fermenter, I can see the yeast getting to work – and within 12 hours it’s really going mad!  84 hours later it’s calming a little, but still bubbling strongly.  I’d expect it to stop the main fermentation soon – 3-4 days later (as my yeast is so strong after using a starter).  I’ll probably bottle after 2 weeks – but if it’s clear sooner than that I’ll change my mind.

Yeast going mad - it's like a snowstorm

New brew – “Krispy Stout”

I’ve been busy and have brewed up another beer – Krispy Stout this time, and it’s in the fermenter bubbling away as we speak.

You can click on the image below to see the recipe – ignore the bitterness figure though – it seems not to be working correctly!  I used both pale chololate malt and roasted barley to get the flavours and colour of a stout – using a bit of spare crystal malt just to add to the layers of flavour.

My Krispy Stout recipe

I used a whyest liquid yeast this time – a ‘proper’ Irish ale yeast to try and get the beer as close to type as possible.  Unusually for me I’ve kept to ‘normal’ beer strength, rather than try and hit the more old school 8-9%’s of some of my IPA style beers.  I also added a couple of large spoons of black treacle, just to add a touch of ‘toffee’ to the mix – the wort pre yeast tasted really nice; big flavours of coffee, chocolate and malt.

I made sure the liquid yeast would do the job by adding it to a wort starter 3 days before I needed it – by boiling up 2 litres of water with 200g of dried pale malt extract for 10 mins, then letting it cool in a steralised glass jar, and adding the liquid yeast.  Cover with a foil ‘lid’, and leave in a warm n dark place.  3 days later the yeast is going mad, like it’s fermenting a beer (which it is in reality, just a small batch).  Then pour that 2 litres of starter into the cooled wort in the fermentor, and stand back

Update 11th October 2009
Well I’ve barrelled the Stout, as I decided because Stout doesn’t need to be to fizzy, or cold, that a barrel would be the better option for it (pressure barrels cannot actually handle the pressure needed for highly carbonated drinks).  So I mixed up about 120 grams of dry light malt extract, and about 30 grams of brewing sugar, with about 2/3rds of a pint of boiling water.  That was added to the freshly steralised barrel, and then the stout siphoned out carefully into it, mixing with the sugars.

One little tip – I put the lid on the barrel (not screwed on!) then use my soda stream CO2 (with brass adaptor) in the lid inlet to fire some CO2 as a blanket over the beer, before screwing the lid on properly.  That way I know I’ve pushed some of the oyxgen out, putting a carbon dioxide ‘cap’ onto the beer to help protect it from oxydising (not good at this point).  Then I’ve used the heat belt (you plug it into the mains, and it warms up to keep the ale warm) to keep the temp up for the first week (not leaving it on all that time, as I’d end up with hot soup) – just now and then when it felt a little cool.  So hopefully the yeast which is left in the beer will eat up the sugars and the gas will stay in the beer to carbonate it.  After a day I used the soda stream gas again in anger, to try and raise the pressure up in the barrel so to help keep the naturally fermented CO2 in the beer.

I did try the beer during the transfer (pop a bit in a clean glass) – it was very flat (more so than I’ve noticed before..) but did taste spot on – probably the best or most authentic flavour I’ve managed so far.  Let’s hope the barrel fermentation works well and I’ve not just ended up with sweet flat stout!  I’ll give it another two weeks before I tap a trial glass…

Brew day in pictures – brewing ‘how to’

Here’s the log of my most recent brew, my first of the autumn, and again it’s kinda my own recipe, for an IPA.  I bought the ingredients based on what I’d been reading, and then used an online calculator to just check my thoughts and timings.  Click on the image below to see what I’m pretty much aiming for – I’m using the traditional high quality fuggles and golding hops – for hopefully a quality ale.  (you can find the calculator here)

my IPA recipe.. strong an hoppy (I hope) - click image to view

So generally this is going to be a STRONG ale – I should think it will reach between 8-9% when done!  But that’s still within the range of a good old style IPA, so I’m not worried.  Plus it’s for Xmas, and brews need to keep you warm

The main ingredients - minus the water!

So going into my brew was the following;

* three 1.5kG tins of finest pale malt extract (so 4.5kg in total.. hence the strength!)
* 250g of pale malt grains (I wanted to add some fresh malt flavour and depth)
* 250g of crystal malt grains (for a bit of darker colouring and flavour)
* 100g of Kent Golding hops
* 100g of Fuggles
* 5g of irish moss (to help take out some of the protein during the boil)
* few g of yeast nutrition (can’t hurt)
* Nottingham dried yeast (yes I know liquid is prob better, but the beer was already costing me lots!)
* 22 litres of charcoal filtered tap water (just be patient with a normal water filter jug!)

The water I took time filtering and adding to a spare fermentation bucket (which I just use to store water etc now).  Once I had about 22 litres (I was only going for a 19 litre final brew size) I added 1/2 a camden tablet and left alone (the Camden tablets are meant to remove all the chlorates I believe).

My brew project plan - know what you're doing when!

I cleaned and soaked my fermenter and bits n bobs in cleaner overnight, and gave my boiler a bit of a clean up and quick sanitize.

I then drew up a bit of a simple project plan – well a timeline starting from ‘grain steeping’, through the 90 min boil, the cooling, and into the fermenter.  It makes sense to list what you’re going to do, and when – so you don’t mess up the brew with something simple missed (like adding hops at the ‘flavour stage’ – something important I messed up last time).

So I’ve got everything I’m going to use sterilized and clean, and all my ingredients to hand – ready to start!

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Brewing season on the way

Well it’s getting cooler outside (and inside my house) – so ‘brewing season’ is about here.  As yeast needs to be between 23-18 or so (depending on beer and yeast obviously) when fermenting,  I have not way to brew in the hotter summer months really.  Plus there’s a lot more airbound bacteria when it’s warmer, which makes getting a brew done even tougher!

I’ve already bought some supplies.. and I intend to try again at a very strong (to original type) IPA – my last one failed (although it is a nice ale.. just not hoppy at all!).

This time I’ll try and get the flavour hops in at the right time (I went too early last time and they would have lost all the flavour in boiling off).  Plus i’m going to boil for longer overall now – from 60 to 90 mins as per the books I’ve been reading.

I’ll take pics of the kit and ingrediants and as I brew again – I’m going for 4.5k of liquid pale malt, two types of grain (crystal and pale malt), two types of hop (fuggles and goldings for traditions sake), got my irish moss this time (didn’t realise I needed it previously!), and 20+ green litre bottles for bottling later on.  the 2 Litre pop bottles I had used aren’t a good idea, mainly because of how much beer you need to drink in one go, and also the amount of yeast that gets stirred up from pouring multiple times!

More to come!

Home brew shop

I’ve created a small home brew shop (in association with Amazon) to help you find those essentials – especially useful if you’re new to brewing. Just click on the link in the menu above (or here to save you time) and you will see I’ve collected together as much useful equipment and ingredients (and starter kits) as I think you might need.

If you are brand new to brewing, and want to try your hand without spending much, I’d recommend getting the minimal equipment for now, and a ‘off the shelf’ extract kit.  Some of the more modern kits give some surprisingly good results – and they are EASY to make.  Before you know it you’ll have 40 pints of your very own beer to drink, often at about 50-60 pence a pint! (ignoring initial set-up costs obviously).

What you need at a minimum…

• Cleaner/steraliser! (you must steralise everything!)
• Fermenting bucket (start with one .. go to secondary once you’re used it it!)
• Kit (contains hopped malt extract, instructions and yeast)
• 1kg of brewing sugar (most kits need a top up, but is needed for when you barrel the beer to add fizz)
• Barrel (OR bottles – better for ‘fizzy’ beers)
• Syphon (to get the beer out of fermenter to the barrel)

Or if you want a starter kit of equipment – go for something like this, and add a beer kit.

Once you’ve tried your first kit with that sort of equipment, you can try some other kits, and add to your gear.. until you’re ready to try your own recipes (I use cans of high quality malt extract, with speciality grains, and hops, and boil the lot up.. look at my posts which shows you how).

Cooling my wort – brewing tips

While I’ve stopped brewing for now as it’s the heat of summer and I’ve no way to keep temps down, I’ve noticed a few people coming to my site looking for tips/facts on home brewing.  While I don’t claim to be an expert at all!! (I’ve just ordered a couple of books from Amazon to help learn more), I’m happy to share anything I know/have found. [ book links; Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers
, Brew Your Own British Real Ale (Camra) ]

Copper wort chiller

I know that once I decided to make the move to my own extract brewing and using a boiler and such,  the one thing I was unsure of was how to chill the wort quickly once boiled, and if it was required when doing extract brew rather than full mash?  After doing a lot of reading, I thought that YES, you do need to cool the wort as quickly as possible – for two reasons; 1) you don’t want the wort hanging about while warm – it could get infected by airbourne bacteria, and the longer it takes, the longer it’s at risk!  I’m not sure how long 22 litres of very sugary water would take to cool from 100c to 23c – but I expect it would be several hours if left to natural cooling.

So I looked to by an immersion wort cooler, as the external fancy ones looked too expensive, and needed too much clever plumbing.  Just dunking the boiler in a cold bath of water and ice didn’t seem practical either (and dangerous!).

Attaching wort chiller to tap

So I purchased an immersion cooler – which is really a lot of copper pipe bent round and round in coil.  Just over £40 seems quite a lot, but then again copper is really expensive these days, so probably the going rate.  It comes with a couple of lengths of ‘plastic’ tubing, which fit over the in/out copper tubes.  What it doesn’t come with, is either clips to really attach the plastic tubing tightly – so go out and buy some 10-15mil hose clips (can be ones for home hosepipes or similar such clips – the ones you tighten with a screwdriver).  I then used those clips to really tighten the plastic hose onto the coppper chiller.  sorted.

Then the hard bit – what isn’t mentioned is that the wort chiller obviously needs a flow of good cold water, at pressure enough to keep the water flowing extracting the heat from the wort.  Tap water is fine – but how to attach the plastic tubing to the tap??  I went into Wilkinsons and bought a £9.99 hose pipe / tap adaptor – one which was suitable for a mixer tap (such as mine in the kitchen).  You can get cheaper ones – but I went for one which looked a bit more solid.

Now the tricky part was the plastic tube is slightly smaller bore than standard hosepipe – so it didn’t look like it would attach.  But remembering a hint I’d read somewhere else, I boiled some water, and held the tube in it for about 20 seconds, which did soften it up enough to kinda screw it onto the tap adaptor.  Tightening it all up, I tried it on my mixer tap – turned it on… and it worked like a dream.  No leaks AT ALL, and I was amazed to see condensation form on the copper tubing almost immediately – and it felt really cold to the touch.

Chilling the wort

The proof is in the pudding – while boiling your wort for the hour or so you area meant to, about 15 minutes from the end of the boil – carefully lower the copper wort chiller into the boiling mixture, until it is fully immersed.  The copper bends in a U at the top, which sits nicely over the top of the boiler bucket – all very snug and solid feeling.  That means the plastic tubing is kept safely away from the hot wort, outside the boiler.  By being in the boiling wort for 15 minutes, any germs/bacteria that may have been on the copper tubing is killed off  (100c is fine to kill all bacteria).

Once the boil is done, turn on the tap.. slowly at first checking for leaks, then onto FULL!  Obviously put the ‘out’ plastic tube from the chiller somewhere safe – I put mine back into the sink, making sure it wouldn’t flap around – the water comes out close to boiling for the first few seconds!  It actually steams – showing how much heat it extracts.

During the cool, which takes about 30-35 minutes, keep checking the temp with a thermometer (I bought a digital one with a metal probe – which is actualy a cooks one) – remembering that the colder wort will fall to the bottom, the hotter on top.  Be careful if you are tempted to stir it – don’t bring the stuff off the bottom of the boiler back up into the mix – you’re trying to get proteins to drop down out of the beer in this phase!

Only drain the wort from the boiler once it’s down to 25-20c – I put my fermenter underneath the tap, and just open it up – letting the wort fall naturally down the entire height of the fermenter – that way it gets LOTS of oxygen into it, which is what you need for the yeast to start its work.  If you do that when the wort his hotter, you’ll oxydyse it, which is not what you want – it makes the beer taste a bit cardboardy – which I think has been a problem of mine upto now (until I read about leaving the wort to cool!).

New brew – Krispy IPA

I’m in the process of brewing another ale, probably the last of this batch (due to it getting to warm to brew in my kitchen!).

It’s all my own recipe this time, so fingers crossed!  I’ve gone for an IPA style ale – and a proper one, rather than some of the beers which use IPA in the name and end up nothing like the style should be (Green King IPA for starters – what makes that an IPA?).

So into the boiler went;

• 90g of crystal malt grains (crushed) – steeped at 65c for 30 mins (for colour and body)
• 3 x 1.5 kg of light malt extract (to give the ale a good strength.. 6.5-7% probably)
• 80g of Northern Brewers hops, 60 min boil
• 20g of Northern Brewers hops, 40 min boil
• 50g of East Kent Goldings 5 min boil (for the hop aroma)

Once boiled and chilled down using my wort chilller, I transferred to my fermenter, with the air pump on getting loads of oxygen in (make sure the wort is 25-20c during this process).  The wort definitely had a much stronger hop smell than any ale I’ve made so far – it really did smell good (I LOVE hoppy beer).

Then pitched in two 11g packets of Nottingham yeast (double up to make sure.. as this is going to be an expensive beer to make.. nearly £40!).  From what I’ve read, the Danstar Nottingham yeast is a real beast – has a high attenuation (can turn more sugar to alcohol than a lot of other yeasts), and is very good at its job.  I’ve read it’s pretty neutral, and won’t add much personality of its own to the ale, but I’m not too worried at this stage in my brewing.  Anyway it’s fermenting fairly warm, which will add a little bit of a ‘fruity’ note, which might be welcome in such a strong and hoppy beer.

The first 24 hours saw an explosive ferment – I had to swap from normal airlock to a blow off tube (some tubing stuck in the rubber bung to a container of water) – as the head was blowing through the airlock, and it looked like a scene from a horror movie   Airlock re-fitted about 36 hours in.. and its calming down now, only 3 days in.  Seems a little early, for so much sugar to get through, but it might be ok, as this yeast does its thing pretty quick I’ve read.  I’ll take a gravity reading tonight, and if needed, stir up the yeast from the bottom to wake it up a bit.

I’m thinking about dry hopping the beer when I transfer to the secondary fermenter (adding a small bag of hops to the ale ‘dry’), to add even more hop aroma… but I’m worried I could introduce some external bacteria and spoil the beer.. tough call!

EDIT: Well I’ve transfered to the secondary fermenter.. I mis-calculated on the darkness (or lack of) of the crystal malt, so the beer is a lot lighter in colour than I expected, looks like it will be quite a golden IPA rather than a dark colour.  The beer transfered looking like toffee – which should change as the yeast falls out (it better!).  I did add a small bag of aroma hops to the fermenter.. so fingers crossed that goes well, and just adds a nice hop aroma to the beer, rather than a bucket load of bacteria! 

New brew – half mash

My special bitter in 2nd fermenter

Well I’ve just made my third home brew of year, and this time I’ve upped the level from ‘kit’ to ‘half mash’ (or extract brewing). While it’s still not ‘full mash’ brewing (which is buying the grains and doing pretty much everything except growing the ingredients yourself), it still feels much more like making beer than making up a basic kit.

I’ve started my new level of brewing buy trying to make a London style bitter (higher hopped than Yorkshire bitter style), which should reach about 4.2% alcohol (about 21-22 litres of). I’ll know how it’s gone in about 4-5 weeks or so. Here with pictures is how you go about extract brewing.

1) Choose your recipe (you can find recipe’s online, in books, or even the simple 60p leaflet I bought has some basic starter recipes in different styles).  Extract brewing involves buying malt extract (either in 1.5 / 1.8kg tins in liquid form, or as spray dried malt), which is where your sugars, colour, and malt taste come from, and then selecting speciality grains (to add more flavour), and hops (which adds bitterness, and the hoppy aroma).  You also need some yeast of course, and it’s worth getting a good quality one, which goes with your beer style and strength (Belgium high alchohol yeasts when you need to go past 7%).

Beer equipment: Boiler

2) Buy your equipment – as I had been brewing kits, I already had a couple of fermentors (clear plastic ‘water bottle’ style one for secondary fermentation, and a screw top sealed one for primary), I’ve also got an older ‘bucket’ which I have kept for preparing my brewing liquor (that’s treated water in laymans terms).  I also aready had a good syphon, cleaning / sterilising stuff, and other bits n pieces, including the very important thermometer (I’ve gone digital as the old glass n mercury one really doesn’t cut it these days).  To brew extract, I had to also buy a boiler (a stronger heat resistant bucket with attached heating element and tap), and a wort chiller (spiral of copper tubing which you flow cold tap water through to cool the boiled ‘wort’ quickly).  I also bought an aerator – which is a fishkeeping air pump and ceramic stone – which isn’t essential but I thought I’d get to really get a lot of oxygen into the wort for the yeast to use (and I really got a strong fermentation – which might be linked to its use).

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New beer in the fermenter

Well I couldn’t resist, and after bottling my Bavarian wheat, I’ve ordered another beer, and a 2nd vessel to move my beer to half way through fermentation (as it’s meant to improve the beer, getting it off the early waste products).   I’ve already mixed up the batch, filtering all the water, making sure the yeast is alive n kicking (warm 25c water, some brewing sugar, and add yeast, then bung (covered) in the airing cupboard for 45 mins), and mixed it all up.

beer making kit

This time I’ve learnt from before and not added much boiled water, as it’s always too warm, and i have to leave it, which isn’t good without the yeast.  So yeast went straight in this time, sorted!  This beer is a ‘best/extra special’ bitter style, OG about 1050, so if all goes to plan, it’ll be around the 5% mark, which is a strong bitter (hence the ‘best’ style).  I get my of my stuff from this shop;  http://www.hopshopuk.com/ – they are very helpful too, giving me some advice before purchasing.

The kit was another ‘brewers choice’, where you at least get to boil up some hops and crushed grains (in ‘tea bag’ style containers).  Lets you feel you’re doing a bit more when making the kit.

The previous brew is now about  5 days in the bottles now, pressure obviously there, so just got to let it rest now, before cooling and trying in a few weeks – so hopefully some nice cold wheat beer just as it gets warm!