SO, Cory has decided to jump on the homebrew train and try his hand at making beer. We bought all the necessary ingredients for a nice Amber Bock that we got to try a homebrew of in the store before we bought the stuff, so hopefully we can live up to that example. The first step is (of course) to thoroughly sanitize everything, because yeast and the stuff that goes into beer would totally eat up any bacterias from the air or equipment, making a weird, off-tasting beer. AKA not what we want. Also, I am going to definitely copy this information from our handy brew procedure sheet, just because I don’t remember a lot of technical names for things.

After everything is sanitized, you need to boil 2.5 gallons of water in a huge pot.

Then, you take the grains you will be using (crushed) and put them in a grain bag or something (we forgot to buy one, so we doubled up a random mesh bag thing for soups and used it -worked well!).

These grains will need to go into the water at a very specific temperature range, for about 20 minutes. The optimum steeping temps are from 150-165 F. We measured this by my very MacGuyver-ey temperature control monitoring system (see below):

...A probe thermometer set to the temp, wrapped around the spoon for leverage, through the microwave handle, and then in the water just away from the side of the pot.. You may bow down to me now as the lazy god of thermometers?

After 20 minutes, remove the bag withOUT squeezing it, and allow the excess liquid to drain back into the pot before removing the bag completely from this area of the kitchen (it’s pretty heavy at this point). This water and grain steep mixture is called wort! Congrats (also it’s pronounced WERT, not WART, which is gross..not that beer is delicious at this point, by any means).

THEN, you have to bring it up to a boil – gentle and rolling is the preferred kind. At this point you add all of your Liquid Malt Extract (LME), Dried Malt Extract (DME), and Maltodextrin to the pot.

Continuously stir this mixture as it returns to a boil…. It gets thick and really hard to stir But, if you don’t do this, the stuff might stick to the bottom of the pan and burn and make weird flavors you don’t want (yet again–it’s very precise to make nice-tasting beer apparently?)

At this point, you add some bittering hops (which smell horrible) to the boiling mixture.

Boil 40 more minutes, then Add the aroma hops for another 15 minute boil

and THEN finally you need to STOP the boil from continuing. Again, this has to do with flavor things that could be bad if you let the stuff boil too long. The best way to cool this huge pot of liquid down is to have a big sink or something similar handy and filled with LOTS and LOTS of ice and cold cold water. Add more ice and cooled water as needed until the mixture is about 60 degrees.

The last thing you need to do is siphon this mixture into your sanitized big 5 gallon plastic bucket that is airtight and too expensive to be a plastic bucket (I am being bitter, like the hops:( ), and then you add water until the mixture is at 5 gallons. You then measure your original gravity (which we can explore later, when we record the final gravity in order to figure out the ABV%), and sprinkle some yeast into the mixture. Stir, Close, Move to a cool place, and let sit for 10-14 days. Thus ends the whole of the first part’s active stuff. Looking forward to letting you know more as it happens

ALSO my favorite part of the whole experiment was creating this:

I AM AWESOME is what this face says. Also me, I say this.

Which I made from the leftover dust-sediment from pouring the grains into the mesh bags originally. Cory was amused but very distracted by beer stuff, so I took like ten pictures just so posterity would benefit from my art.