It's #BeerSaturday Time Again!
I mentioned quite some time ago that I was brewing another batch of home-brew, an American Pale Ale. This is my second attempt at home-brewing. And I was eager to try my hand at making my new favourite beer - the American Pale Ale.
Well, it was with some trepidation that I sampled my first beer from this batch last night. Why trepidation you ask? I may have had a little mishap during the brewing process and, as a result, modified the recipe a little.
I'll give you a brief run through the current brewing process that I follow. It's very simple compared to some of the home-brewers that we have here on Steemit. But what is fantastic, is that even with my little set-up, you can still make a very drinkable beer (most of the time at least).
The Simplest Way to Brew Your Own Beer
My brew kit is very basic. All that I use is the following:
- A 25 litre fermentor with air lock, tap and bottle filling tool.
- 2 large stainless steel pots (4 - 6 litre pots are ideal).
- A large strainer.
- A large plastic spoon.
- A hydrometer for measuring specific gravity and a thermometer for measuring temperature.
- A large test tube type thing for using when measuring specific gravity.
- A 9 litre bucket for cleaning bottles and equipment in.
- Lots of sanitising products.
- Lots of clean glass bottles and a tonne of metal bottle caps.
- A bench bottle capper.
And then all you need are your ingredients which are, in themselves, fairly simple as well. The ingredients for my American Pale Ale were:
- 1.7kg Black Rock Pale Ale (liquid malt)
- 1.7kg Black Rock Light Liquid Malt
- 500g Light Dry Malt
- 25g Perle Hop pellets
- 25g Willamette Hop pellets
- Mangrove Jacks M44 Yeast
Brewing Your Own Beer
Virtually every home-brewer in the world has a more complex set-up than me (apart from my parents who'd brew beer in large plastic bins and didn't even bother to make them air-tight or take an interest in good hygiene practices).
The process of brewing is generally quite simple with the kit that I am currently using. Many others will have a more sophisticated process however I have detailed my process here.
Preparation
The most important part of brewing is making sure everything you are touching and using in the brewing process is properly sterilised. Having a contaminant in your brew could very easily ruin everything. So, the first thing you do is clean everything.
Brewing the Wort
The next step is to boil some water, generally about 4 litres. Once this water is boiling you add in a portion of your malts (for the Pale Ale I just brewed, it was all of my light malts). Once your malts are at the boil, add your hops. From here you simmer the hops for a short period of time. And if I understand the brewing process correctly, the longer you simmer for, the less bitter your hops become.
Preparing for First Ferment
Once you've simmered the hops for long enough, you steep your brew (or wort as it is called) for a period of time (generally 15 - 20 minutes) and strain this liquid into your fermentor. It is at this stage that I added the Pale Ale malts to my brew.
The fermentor is then topped up with enough water to bring the volume to 21 litres. Once the liquid drops below 26 degrees the yeast is added.
Bottling
Generally, it takes a few days to a week for fermentation to complete. The first sign that fermentation is complete is when the airlock becomes de-pressurised and when your specific gravity measurement doesn't give a different reading over a 24 hour period.
Once you've confirmed that fermentation is no longer active, YOU CAN TRANSFER TO BOTTLE!
Bottling is easy, the only thing to be conscious of is adding a glucose tablet to the bottles to trigger secondary fermentation in the bottle and to ensure your caps are put on as securely as possible.
From there, the bottles are stored in a nice dark place for a few weeks.
Once they have aged sufficiently, you can throw a few in the fridge and start drinking!
My Little Error
One lesson that I learned with this brew was that you should always maintain your concentration while brewing. During this brew, I got chatting with the wife. And while topping the fermentor up to 21 litres I failed to read the side correctly and ended up topping it up to 24 litres.
This is a bit of a shoddy situation to be in but it presented a couple of options. I could go ahead and leave it as is, and end up with a weaker tasting beer.
Or I could have a play with the recipe to see what I could create.
I decided to alter the recipe to see if I could bring it back to the required strength, and add some different flavours to the brew.
I added a further 500g of light malt and about 7g of Citra hops. I only recently discovered Citra hops. It is an American hop, which fits with the type of beer that I am brewing, and has a strong citrus aroma and flavours. It's a fantastic strain of hop, and a current favourite.
So Did My Fix Work?
It's early days, so the beer hasn't had enough time to age sufficiently yet. But I was eager to see how the beer was coming along so popped a couple this week to try them out.
But so far, I'm actually pleasantly surprised. This is definitely a heavy pale. And, if I knew enough about brewing, I'd love to test the alcohol content as I suspect that this beer is quite potent judging from the first tasting.
The Citra hops are definitely coming through in the aroma which is mostly malty. There isn't a lot of hops in the aroma other than the mild citrus notes.
The first sip is quite malty, with some mild citrus notes. The bitterness is very low, and there isn't a strong flavour of hops on the palate as well. The beer is quite carbonated. Almost a little too much. So I'll need to work out how to moderate the carbonation.
My only real criticism with the beer at this stage is that there is a big difference between the aroma and the flavour of the beer at this stage. We'll see how this changes as the beer ages some more. I think I'll need to give it a few more weeks in storage before I open the next one.
It's a pleasant beer, but just not there yet. And, yes, it is a little strange critiquing my own beer.
