We have been making wine for several years, and have made two batches of beer from kits previously, with limited success. I wanted to learn to make beer with all grains,because you truly can control the ingredients, there is less chemical intervention than wine and, well, I love beer !
So I joined a women's brewing group called Bitches Brew Crew, and started to learn the art of all grain brewing. After the first meeting, I was hooked ! There is a signifcant investment in the equipment needed, but the good news was, some of the gear we had accumulated for wine making could be repurposed for beer.
In order to make sure I could get Ray as interested as I was, we used the equipment and brewed with one of my new brew gals to make our first batch of all grain beer. I selected an Imperial Double IPA, since I like a very hoppy beer. The process is very labor intensive up front, but the turnaround time for beer is much shorter than wine.
We heated up water to the proper temperature, then we basically steeped the grain for an amount of time, to get all of the flavor and sugars out of it. We boiled the grain "wort" then added a lot of different kinds of hops to this batch, and when you are done, you cool it down, add yeast, and put it in a bucket. Well, that's the condensed version.
It bubbles and ferments for a couple weeks, then you put it into secondary fermentation, which is a big carboy, or glass bottle, for another few weeks. Yesterday we bottled...
And now we have 58 bottles of beer, that need to sit another couple of weeks before we know if they are any good. But, I am confident they will be! And I am already looking for a recipe for the next batch! And thank you to Jennifer Proesel for being such a great mentor.
More to come when we get the rest of our gear...
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