Breaking in the Equipment

Hi there everyone!

So yesterday, for the FIRST time since we started putting together this little project, we made beer at home =) 

Here's what happened:

Just like at the 'Flying Barrel" we started by heating up a large amount of water.  Since the water would still be heating up as I type this on the electric stove top, we brought only 2.5 gallons (vs. 5 gallons) of water to a boil.  We added the remaining 2.5 gallons during the cool down phase.

This was our handy, dandy measuring cup.

The iodophor, waiting to be used to santize everything!  At least the kitchen is really, really clean now

The yeast, getting happy and doing its thing (more on this in a few...)

The sack of grains used for this holiday medley of deliciousness.  Basically a giant tea bag

And there it goes into the pot!

This move may look familiar from the Flying Barrel pictures (because you are all avid readers of this awesome blog and therefore you have seen this in an earlier post...right? right!)  For those of you who are catching up, this is called the SPARGE.  It's where you fish out that big ol' tea bag, and rinse it with your wort (or tea...to continue the analogy) in order to get the full amount of deliciousness (technical term) out of your grains.

At this point, we boiled our beer for about an hour.  During that time, we began to look at our "happy" yeast suspiciously...

It was taking on a life of its own...growing and growing like bread dough.  We aren't sure if we may have awoken our yeasty friend from its slumber a bit too early in this process, but a lack of bubbles in the fermenter this evening will be a pretty good indicator that we killed it.  For those of you who know me,  you also know that I have killed many a house plant, so the yeast murder should come as no surprise.

Bubbling away...

Reminder kids...that's a turkey fryer! 

Now that the boil is complete, its time to cool down the beer and add it to the fermenter.  It is important to do this in a somewhat quick manner, which is why the wort chiller was born.  To continue with our ad-hoc approach to making beer, we bring you our workshop...aka the bathroom.  

The wort chiller is a series of tubing/piping that water moves through.  As the water moves through the piping, the liquid surrounding the copper pipe cools down.  The picture above shows where the tap water goes in!  A "simple" bathroom sink adapter was all that was needed connect the sink to the hose.  I use the "" because that damn thing was a huge pain in the A$$ to make.  Moving on...

Here is our homemade wort chiller in action.  Just some refridgerator copper pipe wrapped around a paint can to create its shape.  The water from the sink is running through that pipe, cooling our beer down.

Our beer on the bathroom floor

The water moves from the sink, through the copper spiral and finally out another tube that conveiently ends in the shower

Remember all that tubing we bought from every hardware store in the DC/MD/VA area?  Well here it is!  Curving its way throughout the bathroom.

Taking the beer's temperature (and yes, we do feel cool using an infrared thermometer...ain't gonna lie).  We needed to get it down to 70 degrees before adding the yeast

MMM...delicious

After we cooled it down, we strained it into the fermenter and we will let it sit for a little less than a week.  Something new that we are going to try is a second phase ferment, which is where we will take the beer from the container pictured above and put into another container.  To continue with the tea analogy, if you let a tea bag sit in your mug for too long, it can get nasty tasting...and the same effect can happen from too much sediment hanging around in the beer.  So in order to eliminate some of those potentially pungent flavors, we are going to move it into a second container at the end of the week

Tune in next to find out: did Lo kill yeasty?  Will the smell of hops ever fade in the shower? And will we ever find a use for the other 45 feet of plastic tubing we having lying around?!