Like a Doctor would, the first step when brewing any beer is to sanitize all your brewing equipment – which is basically anything that will come into contact with your beer. Failure to follow this critical step could introduce harmful bacteria that will ruin the end product.
Next, malted barley and hops are boiled down in water to make wort. Modern home brewing kits make preparing what is collectively called the “grain bill” for each type of beer very easy, but you can learn more about traditional methods for mashing here.
Yeast is added to the fermentation keg, along with additional hops to begin the fermentation process. Depending on what style of beer you are brewing, this may also be the time to add additional ingredients like oatmeal, brown sugar, molasses, etc. We used some locally grown hops from a co-worker’s neighbor, but also some pelletized hops (Palisade and Czech Saaz) from our friends at Northern Brewer.
Once all of your ingredients are combined in the fermentation keg, it needs to sit for a period of time to allow the enzymes in the wort and yeast to work their magic to start converting sugars to alcohol.
After a quick taste test to confirm the primary fermentation is complete, we selected brow and green bottles recycled from…um….various sources, and primed them with a dose of pure cane sugar to jump start the alcohol conversion process – yeast eat sugar and turn them to the good stuff!
Now we play the waiting game…. After a short secondary fermentation period, our brew will get put into cold storage for the clearing process. As this is naturally fermented beer, any sediment suspended in the beer will settle to the bottom as the full flavor profile is developed in the fridge. We’re still looking for names for these tasty brews, visit our Facebook page for contest rules! We’ll be having a tasting party towards the end of the month, hope you can make it!
As always, thanks for reading!
Mike