Biology can taste good...

Ingrediants, hops, malt, yeast and Irsih moss

A long time ago I made beer. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s I brewed my own beer. This was before the micro-brew fad and the brew pubs of today. When I started, most people had never had Ale. Dark beer was something most people didn’t drink, Bud and Coors were the big brands people drank.

My brother started making beer while he was at cooking school in San Francisco, it was a class assignment, but he found a store that sold ingredients. He made a batch and I tried one bottle and thought I could do it too.

I bought the equipment, a plastic bucket, some plastic tubes, thermometer and hydrometer, and some ingredients. Armed with this limited set of tools and a recipe, I brewed my first batch. A standard Pale Ale, it had a medium body and taste, a nice brown color and a hoppy aroma. Well… I was reluctant to drink it. When I saw it fermenting I thought, ‘Am I going to actually drink that?’ Fermenting beer is not a pretty sight, looks more like sewage than beer. But it turned out OK and I went on to brew a lot more in the years to come.

The grain in the pot

I brewed for about ten years, a couple of batches a year on average. So now after many years, I decided to brew again. I found a store that sells all the needed materials and I did still have a few of the old tools so it was easy to put a brew kit together. Of course today there is so much more equipment and ingredients, but it is still the same process. A medium Ale is what I will make and the recipe is something I threw together, just my own mix of stuff.

For this batch I used 5 pounds of light malt extract, 3 ½ pounds of a mix of malted barley (crystal #20 and crystal #50 this is darker than the extract and a little chocolate malt which is very dark), 1 ½ ounces of Willamette hops (5.9 acid) and 1 ounce of Hallertauer hops (6.2 acid), some Irish Moss to help clarify the beer and Ale yeast. This will make a darker and fuller beer with a nice bite from the hops, but it will not be too over powering (I hope).

 

Cooling the breer

So the basic process is to slowly stew the grain at low temperature for about one hour (125 degrees for 20 minutes, 145 degrees for 20 minutes and 155 degrees for 20 minutes) so that the sugars and flavor is pulled from the barely. The grain is removed and more water added to get 4 gallons of liquid. Then the malt extract is added and the proto-beer (wort) is brought to the boil. Hops are added after 30 minutes (half the Willamette), after 45 minutes the other half of the Willamette and the Hallertauer hops are added and at 55 minutes the Irish Moss is added. One hour of boil, temp off and beer out of the pot and strained into the bucket. I add water to bring the level up to 5 gallons.

 

In the fermenter

Now the cooling. The beer has to be at about 75 degrees so I can add the yeast, the best way to do this is with a coil of copper tubing with cold water running through it. I run the water for about 15 minutes and the temp is down to the level I want. Move the beer into the fermenter and add the yeast, stir it up and off to the races. The fermentation will take about 4 days to complete, then bottling. Two to three weeks later drink time.

The yeast is doing their thing, not pretty.....