Making Beer: Take Two

After many weeks of beer equipment hunting and gathering, we finally had it all, and were ready to go ahead. Chris thought long and hard about the recipe and the process. We made another stout (like the first time). We think we’ll call is Solo Stout, since this was the first time we did it on our own.

We invited Johannes over to help, and Chris M. stopped by to supervise for a while (he’s our resident expert). Lauren and Karl Anders also hung out for a while to see the beer-making action.

Chris is checking the recipe and calibrating the measuring instruments.

We got a new expansion set for the trains, and it has risers to put under the tracks so you can make extended raised sections of track. It’s lots of fun, and some adults seem to enjoy it as much as C does.

That’s a 30 liter pot. Chris very carefully measured 27 liters into it. It was pretty full!

Spray malt goes in first. We used two bags.

It was a little lumpy at first, and it dissolved better as the water got warmer.

Check out the size of that spoon! And we cut about 4 inches off the handle hoping to make it not-ridiculously-huge. We failed.

First we warmed the cans of malt in a bath of warm water. Then we had to remove the pot from the water so the malt wouldn’t burn when it hit the bottom of the pot. Chris stirred and stirred to get it mixed in before we returned it to the heat.

And then we had to wait for the pot to boil. C and Johannes are reading Katy and The Big Snow!

It had some pretty swirls in the foam after we gave it a stir.

That’s the “hot break”. You skim it off. It’s an important point in the process; this is when you add the first hops.

And then we waited a long time. We made some pop-up pancakes, sterilized different items and added hops two more times.

The cooling device is a long aluminum tube spiraled in an oblong shape. You attach hoses to each end. Then you run cold water through it, and it cools the wort (first-stage beer) down relatively quickly. You have to boil the cooler in the wort for ½ hour before using it, to sterilize it. I have no idea why the burner is glowing purple — that’s so weird.

The beer making was reaching a critical stage, so we couldn’t really take breaks for snacks now. Ruby knows where the cornflakes are, and she goes and grabs some whenever she’s feeling a bit hungry.

At this point we had sterilized all of the remaining equipment, and were being really careful not to contaminate anything. The yeast was rehydrating in a closed jar.

This is it! The big moment! Moving 27 liters of boiling hot wort. Yikes. Thank goodnes Johannes was helping us. We had to move it over next to the sink to run water through the wort-cooler.

It’s important to get the wort cooled as fast as possible. So you run cold water through an aluminum coil sitting in the wort and the heat-transferring properties of the metal cool it down very quickly.

The wort-cooler is attached to the faucet, but we didn’t do it very tightly so it sprayed a bit. We used the towel wrapped around it to catch the spray.

So, it acutally took about a ½ hour to cool the wort this way. Faster than if we’d just left it, but slower than Chris M.’s copper wort cooler. The price of copper is going up these days, though, and the copper one was ridiculously expensive.

The transfer was a three-person job, so no pictures. We strained it to get all the hops out, to avoid it becoming too bitter. It’s good to splash it a lot and get it all foamy, hence all the head.

The yeast is done rehydrating. I gave it a stir, and we poured it in.

Because it’s good to aerate the wort now, we gave it a good stirring to get as much air in there as we could.

Because our carboy (that’s the big glass jug we planned to use for the second fermantation stage) was about 27 liters, and our bucket was only a little larger than that, we wanted to get as much water in there as we could to compensate for what’s lost in the first fermentation stage and during transfer to the carboy. We filled it to just under 30 liters. This spelled foamy disaster later, though.

Chris demonstrates how we will clean the carboy with the big big bottle brush.