Goal Met – Brew my Own Beer

OK – I cheated a little with this and bought a kit that had all the ingredients and equipment I’d need. I figured the whole point was to learn the process and being stepped through it and handed all the ingredients measured out still accomplished that! Besides – it was less expensive to just buy the kit than purchase everything else I needed.

I originally wanted the chocolate stout but they didn’t have that in stock – so I opted for the orange golden which sounded pretty tasty. The kit came with all the brewing stuff I’d need (bottles sold separately) and some pretty straightforward instructions.

I did do a bunch of research on YouTube to get some hints and things to watch out for and they all seemed to agree with the instructions provided so I set to work making some beer.

The first step was steeping the grains, then adding the malt and bitters and boiling for 60 minutes (creating the wort) adding the aromatics and orange peels right at the end. Then I had to rapidly cool the pot to cool off the wort – easily done with a big steel pot full of ice and water. Once cooled, I filled the brewing carboy and setup the off-gassing system (a tube going from the stopper on the carboy to a glass half filled with water).

Then came the waiting part – somewhere around three days the bubbling in the water will stop and you can switch to the interlock cap and then let the beer hang out in a dark place for about two weeks. There’s a complex siphoning kit that lets you fill the bottles with beer while avoiding the sediment on the bottom of the carboy – mix it with the priming sugar and you’ve got a yeast feast!

Once the bottles are filled they hang out for another two weeks while the carbonation starts happening – after two weeks they need to go to the fridge to slow down the carbonation or you’re going to have bottle bombs.

Overall not too complicated a process and I learned a lot about what it takes to make beer – why each step of the process is important and that the process is easy, you just need a couple of hours of actual work then let time and nature do its thing!