Wait, let me back up a little.
4 years ago Stephen said that he can't understand why anyone would drink an alcoholic beverage and that he would be perfectly happy going through life having never tasted any.
3 years ago Stephen had his first taste of alcohol in the form of wine at age 24.
2 years ago we got a wine fridge and started going to wine tastings regularly.
2 years ago Stephen said that beer was just a means to get drunk and that he can't understand why anyone would drink it.
1 1/2 years ago Stephen had his first taste of a dark beer.
Yesterday, we brewed our own beer.
I made the mistake of telling Stephen about the home brewing shop in Hawaii that I had discovered.
I should have known that the instant he heard of it, he would begin to have grand thoughts of turning our garage into a brewery.
I'm surprised he was able to hold off the 3 weeks from when I told him about it to when we started brewing.
We already had some of the brewing equipment from when we tried making our own root beer (and failed miserably, I might add)
So we began by following this book,
and used an Irish Stout recipe from the home brewing store.
Prep: Put on an inspirational shirt.
Give proper titles (throughout the process we called each other "brew master" and "brew mistress")
Step 1: Boil water.
Step 2: Add barley grains and seep for 30 minutes.
Step 3: Remove barley.
Step 4: Add incredibly thick dark malt extract.
Perhaps the fumes from the brew were making us giddy, but we thought everything was pretty darn funny, including the thickness of the malt.
Step 5: Add hops and cook 60 minutes.
Step 6: Try to keep mixture from overflowing when the hops cause some weird reaction as the brew tries to hop out of the pot.
Fail.
Step 7: Syphon brew into jug.
Step 8: Add yeast.
Fail. We didn't have a funnel so when we poured the yeast in, some of it spilled. I am worried that this may in fact ruin the beer.
We'll see.
Step 9: Stop it up.
Step 10: Let sit in ice bath at 70 degrees for 14 days. (then we start the process to carbonate)
This should be interesting.
3 comments:
How do you keep the bath at 70 degrees when you live in 86ish degree Hawaii????
Ok...I'm sorry, but those hops look like something that gets picked up from the back yard after the dog....sorry! Hope it turns out great! Maybe you could call your beer the Wolfepack Sixpack.
one time when I was babysitting these kids over night there dad was brewing some beer and he left it right in the dinning room. So anyway, the kids took that little glass thing that is sticking out of the top of the bottle out several times. I always wondered if that had ruined his beer.
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