Starting the brew!

The kit

So, who knows how to brew beer at home?  Not me, that's for sure.  Still, we gave it a shot on Monday this week and here's how we went about it!

Firstly, it's worth mentioning what we used.  As I may have mentioned before, my dad used to brew at home many years ago, always using kits containing liquid malt extract which I remember being a thick, gloopy mixture which would then be diluted in water.

This time round he did some reading and thought it would be worth trying a dry kit which seems to be powdered malt extract.  Apparently it makes for a more flavoursome beer - we'll see in a while, I guess!  Anyhoo, the beer of choice this time is a Hambleton Bard 'Old English' kit.  Next time round I think we may try brewing straight from the malt grains but it involves a lot more work so this seemed like a good way to give it a try in the first instance.

Nice and clean!

So step one - get everything clean and sterilised.  We used VWD steriliser, and thoroughly cleaned and rinsed every piece of equipment we were going to use - fermentation bin, hose, funnel, spoon, thermometer, hydrometer and anything else that might come into contact with the mixture.

That being done, we added the dry malt extract to the bin along with 3kg of sugar.  We bought special brewing sugar for this purpose; forgive my lack of knowledge, but it's apparently dextrose (or glucose) rather than sucrose which is supposed to be easier for the yeast to break down.  Seems it's meant to make the fermentation shorter and the beer tastier, so who am I to argue!

In goes the water

Next we added a couple of kettles of water just off the boil and stirred, stirred, stirred and then stirred some more to try to get all of the malt extract and sugar dissolved.  Let me tell you, that took a LOT of stirring!  Thankfully we got there in the end.

With all the malt and sugar in solution, it was time to top up with cold water.  Thankfully we'd had the foresight to procure a funnel and a length of hose so this wasn't too onerous a task!  Filling a 25 litre bin by hand with a jug would have been a bit of a slow job...

A sprinkling of yeast...

We wanted to make sure that the solution ended up at around 25 degrees for the yeast to do its stuff, so as the mixture in the fermentation bin approached capacity we checked the temperature and ended up adding a bit more hot water to keep the temperature up.

So let's review: we have water, sugar, and malt - only two ingredients to go.  Firstly, some hop extract - as with the malt, we fully intend to try boiling up our own hops in future but for a first attempt we just used the extract which came with the kit.  Finally, a sachet of yeast was added and we gave the mixture (I guess I can legitimately call it wort at this stage) a good vigorous stir to try to get some oxygen into the wort to help the fermentation.

What weird science is this?!

At this point we could have happily put the lid and heater on and left it to get on with the fermentation.  However, my dad had found his old brewing hydrometer so we took a measurement of the specific gravity of the wort.  Now, my school chemistry/biology is long behind me so please forgive the layman's explanation for this - if you taking a measurement of the specific gravity (similar to density, I think) of the wort at the start of the fermentation process and then another measurement at the end of the fermentation process you can use the difference between the readings to work out the alcohol content of your beer.  There was also a handy ready-reckoner in the hydrometer instructions and using that we reckon that we'll end up with a nice strong 5.8% bitter.  Lovely!

Let the fermentation begin!

And that, as they say, is that - we put the lid on the bin, leaving the immersion heater dangling in the wort to keep it up to temperature, and popped it through out of the way to get on with the fermentation.

In the few days since we've checked on progress a couple of times, and the fermentation has progressed nicely.  Yesterday the specific gravity was 1.010; we can barrel it once it reaches 1.006, which we reckon will be by tomorrow.

Can't wait!