Homebrew #2 - Brewday!

In goes the malt!

On Sunday, Brewday 2 finally arrived - our first attempt at brewing from grain rather than from a kit.  We fancied a pale ale, so since we're complete beginners at brewing from scratch we adapted a recipe from a book, using 6lbs of pale malt and 113g of 3 different hops - Target for bittering and Fuggles and Goldings for aroma.  A proper English-style IPA - or at least that was the plan!

Having thoroughly cleaned & sterilised everything we got the kettles on and put around 13 litres of water into the boiler (or mash tun, which sounds a bit fancy for what's essentially a plastic bucket with a heating element in the bottom!).  We got this up to 75 degrees C, then tipped in the malt, using a sparging bag to avoid the malt caking the heating element and burning, and gave it a stir.  Things seemed a bit too thick, so we stuck in a couple more litres of water and then stabilised the temperature at 70 degrees.

Oooh, hot...

After 45 minutes at 70 with regular stirring and temperature-checking, we upped the temperature to 75 for 15 mins before draining the wort off into the fermentation bin. We then boiled up a couple of kettles (around 3.5 litres or so) and used this to sparge the grain - not a word I was familiar with before now, but it seems to mean just pouring more water through the grain to get out as much of the sugars as possible.

At this point we had about 15 litres of wort which we returned to the boiler (freshly emptied of grain, of course!) and then began to boil.  Once it reached boiling point we tossed in the Target hops, which created the most amazing hoppy smell to infuse the kitchen.  Other family members may disagree about whether the smell was amazing or not, right enough!

Vacuum packed hops

After 45 mins boiling we added the Goldings, and 5 minutes later we dropped in half of the Fuggles - keeping the remainder for dry-hopping once the fermentation is complete.  A further 10 minutes of boiling finished this part of the job, so we drained off the boiled wort.  At this point we'd lost several litres of steam, so we topped up to 20 litres with cold water to start to bring the temperature down.  The aim was to get it to 18 degrees as quickly as possible - to stop whatever chemical reactions are happening, or so I'm led to believe.  So we broke out the cooling coil next, and at this point everything got a little silly...

The cooled wort!

The cooling coil is basically a copper coil with a length of hose on each end.  The premise is simple - sit it in the wort, run cold water through it and it'll reduce the temperature of the wort pretty quickly.  Problem was that we hadn't tried this in advance and it turned out that the hose attachment was quite short and wouldn't fit the tap on the kitchen sink so we had to ferry the full fermentation bin outside and connect the coil up to the outside tap while keeping a lid over the bin to try to avoid any contamination.  Thankfully it cooled down pretty quickly, but it's not an experience I'd like to try again so we'll be making some amendments to the cooling coil before our next brew!

In goes the yeast!

So at this point we were pretty much finished - it was just a case of adding the yeast, sticking the fermentation bin lid & heater in place, and putting it through out of the way to get on with the fermentation.  First, of course, we measured the specific gravity which came out around 1.045 - meaning a potential alcohol content of around 6%.  A good strength for an IPA, hopefully.

So that was that - several hours work condensed into a few short paragraphs.  No doubt we made plenty of mistakes and we've certainly learned a lot about how we can improve our process for next time.  The most important part, of course, will be the taste test which will hopefully come in a few days.  It's now been happily fermenting for 4 days or so, so we'll check the gravity every day and hopefully be able to put it into the pressure barrel in the early part of next week.  At that point we'll dry-hop it with the remaining hops, but we'll be able to have a taste first and see how it's turned out.

And I tell you, I can't wait!