Kelly the Culinarian: Adventures in Homebrewing

Friday, April 17, 2015

Adventures in Homebrewing

My love of beer is well-documented. I don't drink often, but when I do, it's hard-to-find, highly sought after craft beer. I've thought about trying homebrewing for a while but it looked so complicated and expensive to get into that I just never pursued it.

Until I found this clearance kit. Bed Bath and Beyond clearance gets me every time. I have no idea why this stuff was priced out, but I walked out with $80 of homebrewing gear for $13. For that price, might as well. It included the ingredients and bottling supplies. The worst that could happen is I waste an evening on this.

No one told me how long of a process this was. I should have done this during the weekend. Or at least read the directions first.

So it started with sanitizing all the stuff, very similar to how my homebrew kombucha works.
Then, boil water to a certain temp and add the mash, mixing until it's the consistency of oatmeal before maintaining a small temperature window for an hour.

This next part was pretty hard. At the end of the hour, the mash has to heat to 170 degrees, while another four quarts heats to 170. Then you drain the mash with a fine-mesh strainer, pour the hot water over the mash and then strain the remaining liquid (wort) through the mash again.  I need a bigger strainer.


Then the wort gets boiled to a certain temperature for an hour, adding in 1/3 of the hops every 15 minutes. Then, it was on to cooling, straining and putting it back into the fermenting container.

Two weeks from now, it gets bottled, then in another two weeks, I can tell you how successful this experiment was.

I can see how this would be a social activity because it really does take a couple of hands to make it work, and it's easy to enjoy a few beverages and conversation while doing this. However, I was wiped out by the time this was done. Apparently Napoleon was tired from just watching.

Now onto what to do with the spent grain ...

1 comment:

Losing Lindy said...

I have heard you can make dog treats with the grain