Welcome to BJ Brewing!

It’s a pretty long driveway up to the house.  When I was a kid, I used to walk a driveway twice the length of that, in any condition, rain, snow, or hail to wait for the school bus.  We also used rocks for baseballs and our hands for gloves, and it hurt like hell, but we didn’t care.  Because we were tough.

The driveway; showing off the spooky pigeon filled barn.

We’ve got the luxury of parking our cars in a large steel building should weather ever turn truly foul.  To the north of that is an old barn, mostly empty save probably a thousand pigeons and one gigantic, alpha pigeon.  I don’t go in there very often, due to the floor being covered in a bath of white feathers and *ahem* other leavings of my feathery friends.

Casa de Brewing

The front porch is a gigantic cement slab (in a nutshell,) but it’s huge and will probably someday house a picnic table for future barbecues!  I’ve already spent several nights sitting out there in a chair, all house lights off, and just listening to the crickets and the wind through the corn while looking up at a clear night sky with little light pollution or distraction.

But enough about that, let’s get on to the GOOD stuff!

The new site for BJ Brewing!

Voila!  The future site of brewing!  Now I know it doesn’t look like much now, but I’m going to make work benches and tables along the walls; there’s a plethora of flooring options and cleaning options for the cement floor (filling a few cracks.)

I’m going to build a designated racking and bottling area, a mill for grains, and set up a few small fridges for trying out some lagers.

Convenient access! Cement floors! What more could you ask for?!

Having the garage door is a huge bonus for carrying stuff in and out, and will hopefully provide the better ventilation we’ll need to run some propane burners in the future.

There’s also several grounded outlets (with an actual ground lead haha) in there, which is a bonus, considering this house is over 100 years old and there are a few spots in the house with old 2-prong.  At least I have good clean power were I really need it!

I'll tell you what. Built in shelfing for storing brewing equipment. Zang.

Several cabinets already line the wall.  Perfect for storing brewing equipment and non-perishables, or temperature (in the winter) pending, conditioning beers!

What brewery would be complete without a tall unsafe metal structure to climb?

There are also some great amenities that come with the place.  Take this large, steel tower, which I would presume to once have been a wind mill.  Perfect for climbing when you need to take a survey of the land or just need to get away from it all 25 feet off the ground with a bottle of home brew.

In case brewing doesn't work out, this pen is where I'll keep my goats for my organic goat milk and repopulation ranch. Seeking potential investors.

Tire swing. Gravity. Nature's way of telling you it's not meant to be at age 25.

There is no greater joy than a tire swing in your backyard that you can swing on at your OWN leisure now that you’re a grown man.

There is no greater disappointment than a tire swing in your backyard that sags 3 inches off the ground because your grown man fat ass is too heavy for the length of rope attached to the tree.

I’m working on this one.

Why I moved to the country. Reason #1.

There are several reasons I wanted to move out into the country, aside from wanting a space to brew mass quantities of great tasting beer.  This is one of them!

Reason #2

Reason #3. And I don't even entirely know what that thing does. But I've got a good guess.

Reason #4. Sunsets.

Oh yeah. Life is good.

I’ve been out here not even two weeks, but the sense of peace and tranquility is immense.  I wanted to share the experience with my friends, so I invited out my best friend Byron and his wife Liv, and my other friend Holweger for a barbecue night and to celebrate trying out our American Honey Nut Brown Ale.

My best friend Byron and his wife Liv

Cheesin' it up!

Getting ready to pour some BJ Brewing American Honey Nut Brown Ale!

Pouring our first tasting of BJ Brewing conditioned American Honey Nut Brown Ale.

And it was very tasty!  Very sweet, and STRONG.  They didn’t have much carbonation or foamy head at all after 2 weeks of bottle condition, but about 3 1/2 weeks into bottle conditioning, they’ve now carbonated up a bit and actually retain some head.  And we’re all about getting head and keeping head when it comes to beer.

Jordan preparing the charcoal for some good grilling!

I set out to heat up the charcoal on the grill.  I did my standard “I have OCD so the briquettes have to be stacked EXACTLY this way” routine and dumped an unsafe amount of lighter fluid on the coals, and pyro lit my way into a good burning grill.

The menu for the evening consisted of ribeye steaks, sirloin steaks, beef ribs, and roasted sweet corn (roasted in the husk.)

Men talking about manly man things.

I honestly have no idea what we were talking about here, but I can only assume it involved manly things like lifting large boulders over our heads or growing facial hair.

Blowing on the coals. The drawback (or fun?) of charcoal.

I singed my hair several times doing this.

Flames licking, wet hickory smoked wood chips smoking, ready for AWESOMENESS.

That’s a good flame right there.  Before throwing the meat on, I soaked a bag of hickory wood chips in a kettle of water for about 20 minutes, and then put the wet wood chips on the hot coals.  A minute or two later, THICK hickory smoke pours from the coal bed, enveloping the meats and corn in a blanket of flavor.  Mmmm.

Here we go! Meat's on the grill ladies and gents!

Grilling is a close second to beer brewing for me.

It almost looks like I know what I’m doing here.  The roasted corn went on last.  When you soak the corn in water, the husks absorb a lot of the moisture, and so when it’s cooking on the grill (even the bottom rack,) it’s almost steaming it in the husk.  It’s so GOOD when it’s done and smothered in a little butter and salt!

I want to personally thank Byron’s wife Liv for taking some of the great photos that you see in this post (you can tell the ones I take compared to hers.)

Three half barrel kegs. Time to brew!

Ahh, well a good barbecue, a good night, and a good start of future things to come.  I have high hopes and great ideas that are starting to come together for the future of BJ Brewing.

A soon-to-be project is the removal of the tops of one or two half barrel kegs I purchased.  We’re brewing in a 7.5 gallon steel kettle right now, but the half barrel kegs hold 15 gallons, so we would be able to do much larger volume boils, and increase our brewing from 5 gallons batches to 10-15 gallon batches.

The two kegs will also help facilitate our gradual move towards all grain brewing; a more involved but more fulfilling form of brewing.

I’m in the process of putting a recipe list together for the BJ Brewing sampler pack of four beers

We’ve been modifying several recipes and succeeding and failing on several things, but every stumble is a push in the right direction because it helps us learn what to do and NOT to do.

I’ve enjoyed brewing incredibly much so, probably more than I legally should be allowed to, and I want everyone to ride the up’s and down’s with me (or just the up’s if you’re a wimp.)

Thanks for the read, and until next time!

~Jordan Harker

Jordan & Byron getting ready to brew the brew!

We were originally going to brew a delicious smoked porter with chocolate and coffee flavors.

But… we messed up (”we” is the royal “I”.)

I’m going to blame it on Hazed & Infused, a very hoppy pale ale brewed by Boulder Beer in Colorado.

To another good brew day! Hazed & Infused, Boulder Beer, Co.

With most of the important pre-brewing stuff now out of the way, we place our grains into the grain sack.

We add the grain sack to the warming water in the kettle.  The water is heating up to about 160 degrees F, well under boiling, where we will steep the bag for about an hour.  The bag must be moved around while the kettle is heating or it will burn (found that one out the hard way.)  We originally rolled it around with a big metal stirring spoon, but found that if you have a very long muslin bag (they cost 25 cents more than a shorty), you can swirl the bag around by the end of it.  Swirling it will very quickly rush the water through the grains and pull the oils and colors out.  You don’t want to crush or press on the grain bag, as the the pressure will release harsh tannins into the wort (things that will offset the flavors of your beer.)

Steeping our huge sack.

A minute or two into steeping. The color changes very rapidly.

Jordan swirling his sack. Nothing new here.

Several minutes steeping while bringing the temp up to 160 degrees F.

When the bag has steeped enough, we remove it from the wort and set it in a sanitized strainer.  Then we pour around 2 cups of boiling water over the bag (after it appears it has stopped dripping) to rinse the remaining sweet liquid out of it.

This is one of the few steaming sacks you'll want to see in your life.

Personal note here, your instructions/recipe isn’t waterproof.  Don’t set it near the sink.

This isn't waterproof paper.

Once the grain bag is sparged and removed, we bring the wort up to a rolling boil.  Then we add in the liquid and dry malt extracts, while stirring continuously to avoid burning anything on the bottom of the kettle.

When the liquid and dry malt extracts are added, the boil will go down quickly as the new ingredients hit the liquid. We bring it back up to a boil and add in our hops. The total length of the boil is 60 minutes for hopping, so we add in the bitter hops for the full 60 minutes. For the last 20 minutes, the finishing hops are added, and at 15 minutes left, aroma hops are thrown in.

Columbus Aroma Hops. 14.2% alpha acid! woah!

The style of beer is american nut brown ale, but we decided to add in an optional adjunct to add a little bit to the beer. Two pounds of clover honey (the stuff you find in a store) was added during the last 15 minutes of the boil. We set the bottles into a sink full of hot water to liquify the gooey honey, and poured it in while stirring.

When the honey hit the boiling wort, an incredible smell of sweet clover mixed with the grain smell as it’s released in the heat.

Here's a swipe through the wort with the spoon to show how creamy and milky that head on top is. It's such a rich brown swirl when it ripples!

Look at those dark eruptions in that swirling creamy brown haze of goodness!

Here’s a little clip of the fudge looking wort boiling away!

Look at how milky the top layer gets when you swipe the slotted spoon through it!

It looks like a Three Musketeers candy bar, separated and boiled out!

We prepare the cold water bath (or in this case, cold water bath/shower.)  The soap scum is very optional; it does virtually nothing for your beer, and quite honestly, does little to impress the ladies.

Prepping the cold water bath. Soap scum optional.

Once the wort is chilled down to about 65-70 degrees F, we slowly pour the contents of it down the side of the freshly sanitized fermentation bucket.  It’s very important to keep anything not sanitized out of the wort at this point, as the wort under 160 degrees F is very susceptible to contamination.

Mmmm honey nut cheer!

Here’s Byron getting ready to fill the bucket up to the 5 gallon mark with fresh spring water.  This is the only time you’ll ever want to water down your beer

Byron getting ready to add water to our thick cooled wort mixture.

Another fine brew, waiting to ferment and dry hop! We can’t wait to taste that honey!

Thanks for the read, and check pack for our future posts!  Our smoked porter has been brewed, so that post is in progress, we’ve got some great video of racking a primary fermentor to a secondary, and this weekend is calling either for a Wee Heavy Scotch Ale or another custom brewed IPA!

Here’s a short video clip of Byron removing the lid from the fermentation bucket for the first time since it’s been put on.  Let’s take a look!

Let’s take a closer look at that wort fresh in the fermentation bucket!

Schwarzbieresque after 8 days in the fermentation bucket!

Woah, that's dark! What should we call this?

With the lid off, we add 5 ounces of priming sugar to two cups of boiling pure water and boil for 5 minutes.  When the boil is done, we throw the mixture in our sanitized bottling bucket and start the siphon.

The racking cane sticking out of the fermentation bucket!

The destination for our Schwarzbieresque, the bottling bucket, leaving the sediment behind in the fermentation bucket.

We have a small clip of the siphoning in action, where you can see the beer shoot up through the cane into the bottling bucket, where it mixes with the priming sugar solution!

Once the wort is transferred to the bottling bucket, we begin to fill and cap our bottles.

We ran into some small snags with our hand held, twin lever bottle capper.  Unknown to us at the time, but the metal cup that holds the bottle cap while crimping it over the bottle was very loose, and the end result was this:

Oh way to go Byron. Way to break a filled bottle and waste a perfectly good beer!

I flipped Byron a lot of crap about breaking the bottle, teasing that he was wasting money and that he was pressing too hard on the capper.  So I would show him how it was done, since I’m such a professional.

“Watch this!” I thought.

Ah shit. I just did it too!

On the bright side, it's crimped in there REALLY good!

So much for that theory.  Later when I found out it was loose, we put the mystery to rest.  Not before searching for the culprit inside the bottles though!

Looking for brewing gremlins!

With the end of the wort nearing in the bottling bucket, we start to power cap all of the filled bottles.  We capped 53 twelve oz bottles in a ridiculously fast amount of time using some Dakota grown teamwork.  We were counting on having a half filled bottle to chill in the freezer and taste to have an idea of where we are at, even with the beer being flat and conditioned, but we filled almost all of the usable beer in those 53 bottles.  So we stuck a full 12 oz bottle in the freezer and started cleaning up while it chilled out.

You need to be prepared when you’re cleaning out your fermentation bucket.  It’s not really as big of shock after you’ve seen it for the first time, but it appears the consistency of the leftover mess of spent grains and hops varies per batch.  Without further adieu, I give you, “Le Sludge.”

You DON'T want this in your beer, unless you're the Swamp Thing.

A close up shot of the mucky muck.

After the bucket is sprayed out, it’s contents are dumped into the toilet and flushed.  I repeat.  The toilet.  Not the bathtub.  See, the hops and grains will clog the bathtub and leave 4 inches of shitty green beer smelling standing water for you to deal with.  And by you, I mean me.  And by me, I mean my friend, Mr. Drano.  And I will not mention who did this.  But I will give you a clue.  It wasn’t me.  And it was the other guy I’m brewing with.

Rub a dub dub, don't stick your trub in the tub.

Now that the cleaning is through, we pull the chilled flat beer out of the freezer and pour a bit into our glasses.  Our prequal video to the first impressions!

Well now that we’ve established a few things, let’s get on to that first impression of our first brewed flat Schwarzbieresque!

So that about wraps up our bottling of the Schwarzbieresque!  I REALLY enjoyed how the beer tasted and went down, even flat and unconditioned.  I didn’t feel like it was heavy or thick at all, and it has, what tastes like to me at least, some caramel undertones that linger on your taste buds after it’s down.  It will undoubtedly get better and better as it conditions in the bottle, and with 52 of them left, I feel confident we’ve brewed another great tasting beer!

Thanks for the read, and catch up with us when we talk about our first brewed American honey nut brown ale!  Coming soon!

Here’s tonights brew crew, Jordan and Byron!

Jordan

Byron

We start off by measuring out the weights of grains with an electronic scale.  We used crystal, chocolate, and black (patent) malts in our muslin bag.

Measuring out malts for our grain bag

Sometime you have a small muslin grain and a lot of grains.  Hold on to it with a Vulcan death grip.  Or else this will happen to you.

Whoops!

We found that filling the muslin bag with a strainer underneath yielded the safest results.

Smart filling and less spilling.

When it’s all said and done, BEHOLD!

I... I... I have the power!

It’s time to put the filled muslin bag into the 2 gallons of pure spring water we have heating on the stove.  We all the grain bag to steep in the water while bringing the temperature up to about 160 degrees F (not boiling.)  We steep the malts for about 60 minutes, as the oils come out into the water and an intense aroma begins to fill the house.

Grain bag fresh in the pot

Grain bag slowly steeping

I’m stirring the bag occasionally so it doesn’t burn on the bottom.

Stirring my grain filled sack

Sometimes creative differences can arise when you brew.  Problems are best squashed before they elevate, and brewing should be fun.  So we’ve adopted a technique from HBO’s series “Entourage,” titled “Hug It Out Bitch.”

Hug it out bitch! And don't spill my beer.

Once we steeped the grain bag for about an hour, we removed the bag from the water and let it drain out in a strainer.  We then sparged the bag with 2 cups of boiling water to get additional liquids inside the bag.

Draining our sack

We bring the water up to a full boil, and add in the liquid malt extract.

Liquid malt extract

Note that it’s kosher for all of you jews out there.  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!!

Jew friendly

Dry malt extract added to boil

Adding the liquid and dry malt extract will bring down the boil significantly.  Once the liquid start bubbling again, we add in our bittering hops.

Bittering and finishing hops

The introduction to hops in the boil brings on a small foam layer on the top of the liquid, and I have heard that this is where a lot of boilovers occur, but in our huge 7.5 gallon brewing kettle, we’ve never even come remotely close.  The total boil time is about 60 minutes.  The bittering hops are boiling for the full time, and 20 minutes before the boil ends, we add in the finishing hops.

The liquid mixture starts to thicken greatly compared to the start of the process, as is evident by the viscous nature of the boil and the residue left behind on our spoon.

Thick liquid as we stir in the extracts and hops

When the boil is up, we transfer the hot wort in the kettle to our cold water bath.  Previously we had dumped a 25 lb bag of ice into a tub of cold water to try to chill down the boil pot as quickly as possible.  The ice melted quickly, and it took probably 40+ minutes to chill it down.  This time around, we bought two 25 lb bags of ice, and instead half submerged the hot kettle into the cold water bath, and let the temperature fall around 20-30 degrees.  When the temp had dropped sufficiently and the movement seemed to slow on the guage, we added a 25 lb bag of ice.  The water quickly chilled back again, and we were able to QUICKLY drop another 20-30 degrees.  We added the last 25 lb bag and had chilled the wort down to nearly 65-70 degrees in probably under 20 minutes.  I would call it a vast improvement over the last go around!

Here is a tip for budding brewers.  When adding ice to your cold water bath, simply submerge the entire bag, plastic and all, into the water.  The water will fill the bag and the ice will flow out freely, and there is no splashing.  You can find out the hard way if you’d like about what happens to ice cubes as they hit the surface tension of the water from several feet up in the air, but let’s just say we unintentionally added a few cubes to our brew.  You live and you learn and you have a home brew!

After it’s chilled down, we slowly pour it down the inside of the bucket and add in around 3 gallons of pure spring water, or as much as it takes to bring the volume back up to 5 gallons.

Pouring cooled wort into primary fermentation bucket

Pouring in pure spring water to bring the volume of wort up to 5 gallons

We take an original gravity reading with the hydrometer and write down the OG reading and potential alcohol by volume percentage.

Taking a hydrometer reading

When we’ve got the data recorded, we slap on the lid, put on a sanitized airlock with a little bit of water in it, and it’s ready to ferment!

Airlock on the primary fermentation bucket releases CO2 gases building up inside the bucket while not allowing beer spoiling oxygen to get inside.

Before you know it, you’ve got multiple fermentation buckets building up and several cases of homebrew storing away!

10 gallons of IPA and Schwarzbier, side by side!

Well there you are, another home brew session with BJ Brewing!  We recently brewed an American nut brown ale and added 2 lbs of clover honey to it, so stay tuned for that post and some updated video!

5 Gallons of "Can You Keep a Secret? #001"

The bubbles in the airlock have ceased for several days now.

No bubbles in the airlock for several days.

We better start things off the right way!  Two pints of California India Pale Ale!

Two pints of California IPA

Let’s meet the bottlers, Byron and Jordan!

Byron and Jordan

We dive into the bottle cleaning action using an ancient two-man cleaning process called “teamwork.”

Rinse and scrub; scrub and rinse.

We saved over 60 bottles in preparation for bottling day.  We drink a variety in this household.

They know us by name at the store.

The whole process is started off by sanitizing everything, including the buckets, everything in contact with them, the tubing, racking cane, pretty much everything.

We then boiled 2 cups of pure water with 5 oz of priming sugar and boiling it for 5 minutes.  We add the mixture to the bottom of our bottling bucket, which is a 5 gallon bucket with a hole drilled in the bottom and a spigot inserted with rubber seals.  The priming sugar will produce carbonation in the beer as it conditions over time.  The beer is very flat tasting fresh out of the fermentation bucket.

We put the bottling bucket on the floor and the fermentation bucket on a bar stool in efforts of using gravity to help us with the siphoning.

Fermentation bucket on a barstool before racking

We pop off the lid and immediately find a green ring of hops above the top level of the beer line.  The beer smells GREAT though, and looks EVEN BETTER!

Our first IPA looking tasty!

Tan meets brown meets caramel meets peanut butter

Neither of us know how to siphon anything from anything, so I do a quick Google search and watch a video of a guy siphoning water through a house.  Our siphoning hose is attaching to the racking cane, so we filled up the hose and cane both full of a water and I put my thumb over the tube hole.  Byron put the cane into the fermentation bucket, and I released my thumb, and immediately the most beautiful peanut tan brown liquid rushed through the clear tubing into the bottling bucket.  Success on our first try!  Thank you Google!

Once the beer was transferred to the bottling bucket, we sanitized the spigot again, the tubing and the bottle filler.  We put our sanitized bottles into a cooler to keep the mess down while we filled (and some did overflow while we did it.)

Bottling in a cooler to contain the spillage.

Byron bottling our IPA. Notice that awesome shirt he's wearing!

We had some bottles that were larger than 12 ounces, so we ended up with a grand total of 43 beers (39 of them being 12 oz bottles.)  We decided to bottle condition the whole batch for at least 2 weeks, but our larger bottled beers would be in longer increments.  We have two larger bottles to open at Christmas time, one 24 oz bottle to open in 1 year, and possibly a few to intermingle in the middle.  The rest I wager we will drink up or hand them out for friends and strangers to try!

Here’s the trick to capping a bottle:

1. Place bottle cap on top of beer and place bottle capper over bottle cap.

2. Press down with equal pressure on bottle capper. Grunt if you must.

3. Put on a cheesey grin, because you just capped your first bottle baby!

Here is a picture of Byron holding the fermentation bucket after it’s drained.

Byron and empty fermentation bucket

Here’s what the inside of the bucket looked like after it was drained.  Notice the sludge on the bottom.  Mmm.  Sludge.

Sludge filled bucket. Notice the ring of hops around the top.

A close up of the sludge. What fell to the bottom!

Well, with 43 beers in tow after a few days of hard work, I feel pretty confident that our next batch of beer, a black beer, is going to turn out even better!  I have the beers in a temperature controlled room where I keep looking down at them, just counting the days until it’s ready to pop the top and pour it out for the first time in an ice chilled glass.

IPA conditioning for at least 2 weeks.

the booty!

I’m keeping the whole lot covered up with one of those special curtains that don’t allow like 99% of light to pass through, so I feel confident they’ll be safe where they are.

We brewed out black beer on Sunday, August 2nd, so expect an update on how that went as well, with plenty of pictures and video coming soon!  Stay tuned!

It all started when an ex-girlfriend bought me three beer books, “The Complete Joy of Home Brewing”, “Brew Ware: How To Find, Adapt, and Build Homebrewing Equipment“, and “The Brewmaster’s Bible.” Over the past few years I read them cover to cover repeatedly, but never took the time to actually do anything with it.

Well maybe a month or so ago, I was talking to my good friend Byron and said something to the beat of, “we should brew beer.”

“Yeah?” he replied.

“Yeah.”

I had heard about a brew store in Lincoln called Kirk’s Brew, so we went online to his website http://www.kirksbrew.com, and started pricing things out.  I had made a huge list full of equipment and recipes, and together Byron and I went off to visit Kirk.

Kirk’s Brew was an interesting store.  Upon opening the doors, you’re greeting with a rush of smells, from grains to hops to whatever else can be boiled and brewed that permeates the air.  Shelves full of ingredients and equipment line the walls.  But I wouldn’t be intimidated by all of this, oh no, for I had a notepad filled with specific things that I wanted because “I” was going to be brewing beer and I knew what I wanted.  “No ingredient kits, and no first time brewer kits.” This is what Byron and I agreed upon.  Only quality gear and quality ingredients.  Needless to say, less than 5 minutes into our conversation with Kirk, we were stacking ingredient kits on top of our first time brewer box kit, invalidating my notebook and our pre-agreement.

The cost associated with a first time brew can be quite low.  The first time brewer box we got had a primary fermentor (plastic bucket), a bottling bucket with a spigot, a hydrometer, airlock, bottle brush, sanitizer, liquid crystal thermometer strip, racking cane, tubing, and a bottle capper.  We also were allowed to pick out any beer ingredient kit tha we wanted from his shelf, and they ranged in prices from the low $30’s up to the $50’s.  We decided beforehand that we would brew an India Pale Ale (IPA) and a scottish ale, so we chose the IPA kit as it was one of the more costly kits.   I told Kirk my concern with getting a prepackaged ingredient kit, and he said that all the kits are made up of ingredients that he stocks in the store.  Later when I opened the box, I found that to be a true statement.

The second beer we were going to brew was to be a scottish ale.  I had written down several recipes for beers on my dusty notepad, and so I told Kirk I’d like to try one of them instead of the kits.  He said it would be more costly to individually price out the ingredients versus the kit, but we intended on spending up to $50 on a batch anyways, so we had him round up the ingredients for us.  Unfortunately for us, I had mistakenly given Kirk the recipe to a BLACK ALE, something quite far from a SCOTTISH ALE, but we’re still happy to brew it all the same.  We paid the man and went on our merry way.  Shortly after, we went to the grocery store to pick up some spring water as we didn’t want to chance using Lincoln’s tap water (when in doubt, don’t.)

Now actually brewing the beer!

We sanitized everything up and down with the included sanitizer, and put 2 gallons of water on the stove to start heating up.  We put our specialty grains from the kit into a muslin bag (basically a big sock for steeping), tied the end off and put them in the water.

After a few minutes in the water, the oils from the grains start to seep out.

After several minutes of steeping in hot (not boiling) water, the water turns completely different color.

Now, I will comment on a learning experience.  You can’t let that grain bag sit there and not stir it.  It will burn the bottom of your kettle.  Not that I would know from first hand experience.  But it will.  And I did.

I will say, there are few activities that I have ever participated in or known about that are as aromatically pleasing as brewing beer.  Those grains steeping in the water releases the most incredible smell!  When you add in your extract during the boil and put in those first handfuls of bittering hops, the aroma is almost overwhelming.  You just want to hover over the kettle and breathe it all in!

We let the IPA boil for 55 minutes, added our finishing hops, and boiled out another 5 minutes.  I had prepared a cold water bath in the tub for the kettle to sit in, and we added the huge bag of ice to it before submerging the kettle into it.  The ice melted very quickly, and I think we’re going to try it a little different next brew, as we sat next to that tub for probably 45 minutes trying to cool it down.  For the next brew, we’ll try cooling it down in the cold water first, THEN adding in a bag of ice, and THEN adding another bag when that one melts off.  Try to lower the wort around 20 degrees per “chilling” cycle.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’m ordering a wort chiller and looking at some nifty plans for a counter flow chiller.

We’ve had the IPA fermenting for several days now, and on the first day the activity in the airlock (a device that allows CO2 gases to escape from the closed bucket, but not allowing oxygen, which causes bad beer taste, to enter the bucket) was incredible!  I only wish I could see through the fermentor, to actually witness the process and the krausen (foam) and yeast going to work!

We plan on bottling the IPA today (Sunday, Aug 2nd) and letting it condition for the suggested two weeks.  We’re going to set aside 6-12 bottles of it and let them condition and age for different varying lengths of time.   The longer they go, the better they should be!

Today we’re also brewing that black ale, in memory of the scottish ale we SHOULD have been brewing!  Next week a porter is in the works!  Stay tuned for my updates!