Brewing My Own Beer!!

Wow, it has been quite a while since I have written a post here. My goal has been to do a post a week. Well, that didn't quite go as planned. I would say that I would try to do better but then I am reminded of two very wise people, Yoda and my wife. They both say (my wife's syntax is better), "Try not. Do or not do, there is no try." I will do better.

Anyway, instead of writing a review about a beer, I decided instead to write a post about brewing beer. Wifey and I are homebrewers. I created a name for our "brewery", Four Paws Brewing. It was inspired by our four pawed kids. I created a logo:

Then I created a more colorful, Andy Warhol-type logo:

So, we have been brewing for about a year now. I love it. It is a lot of fun. The clean up part of it stinks but creating the recipe and actually brewing the beer is quite a bit of fun. So, that is what this post is about. I have fellow homebrewers and craft brewers that follow me on social media, so after reading this and you have some tips for me, it would be greatly appreciated. Those of you that are not homebrewers, maybe you will find it interesting and want to try it yourself. That would be awesome. You can find kits online to help you get started. Don't be intimidated, just try it out. Unless you don't sanitize well, you can't screw it up. Even if it doesn't turn out well, it's still beer. Drink it. There are four main ingredients to beer: Water, Malt, Hops and Yeast. That's it. 

Wifey and I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide on a style that we wanted to brew. We were supposed to invite a few people over the next time we brewed but since we could not decide on a recipe, we did not brew until this past Monday (sorry guys, hopefully next time!) That decision took quite a bit of time. Usually, we can agree pretty easily but apparently not this time. We wanted something that would be nice an crisp for the summer. We were going back and forth on what we wanted to do. I wanted to do a take on the Belgian Wit. It is a great summer beer. She wasn't in to it. She wanted to do more fruity, but I wasn't in to it. We finally decided on an IPA. Then we had to decide on the flavor profile. I like citrusy IPAs and she said that she is over the citrus profile. We finally decided on a more floral IPA. Ok, then we had to decide on the hops and the grains. We finally came up with something. 

We decided on three types of grains; 2-row pale malt, crystal malt 20L and honey malt. The 20L in the crystal malt refers to the color that it contributes to the beer from 10-120. A 20L is pretty light where the 120L is very dark. The 20L is a bit sweeter. The 2-row pale malt is a light malt and is probably one of the most common base malts that is used in homebrewing and in larger brewing.

We then decided on our hops. Wifey wanted to go with some of the UK hops because they had more of the floral profile we are looking for. We went with East Kent Goldings, which is a nice floral hop and Fuggle (love the name), which complements the Goldings pretty well. We also decided to use Centennial hops for the bittering and flavor/aroma.

I had to decide how much grain and hops I wanted to use and came up with what I thought was a good recipe. I use brewing software to help out with the recipe and with many of the calculations needed. There are quite a few out there but I use BeerSmith 2.0. Here is a screenshot of my recipe on BeerSmith:

I then had to buy all of my ingredients. I went to St. Louis Wine & Beermaking. They are great people there. If you are not in the St. Louis area, you should be able to find a homebrew store near you or there are a ton of them online.

Before you can actually start brewing, you need to clean and sanitize your work are and everything that you are going to use. 

This picture is some of the equipment that I will be using and it has been cleaned and sterilized. There are a few different ways to brew beer. There is extract brewing, partial mash and all-grain. We do a variation of the all-grain which is called Brew-in-a-Bag (BIAB). When we brew beer, we make 2.5 gallons. BIAB is pretty easy for us. 

We just got a new brew kettle and our bag is not big enough but we made it work. What you see here is pretty much all you need to mash (using hot water to convert complex sugars in grain to simple sugars so it can be fermented) and boil. We get the water to the correct temperature, add the grains and let it steep for about an hour (we did 70 minutes). 

These are the grains beginning to steep in the hot water. After the allotted time, we can begin the boil the wort (this is the sweet liquid after you have mashed). I started the boil (which is for 60 minutes usually) and began adding the hops. There are certain times to add hops, at 60 minutes the hops are used for bittering. Just because there are "bittering hops" does not mean the beer will be bitter, it depends on the hops. What we are making is not a bitter beer. 

I forgot! The second most important thing to remember when brewing beer (the first is CLEAN & SANITIZE), is to drink beer while you brew:

Here is an obligatory dog picture:

Here is the first hop addition.

Once you finish the boil, you need to cool it to about 70 degrees so you can add the yeast. Before you add the yeast you measure the gravity (original gravity OG). This refers to the density of the wort before it is fermented to produce beer. When I am entering my recipe into BeerSmith, I have some estimated numbers. One of the numbers is original gravity.Water has a gravity of 1.000. I had an estimated OG of 1.061. I use a refractometer to measure that. We were a bit low on our OG but I think we figured out what we did wrong. Anyway, here is a picture I took of the reading from the refractometer:

The last thing to do is to pitch the yeast (add yeast to the wort). I used an ale yeast from Wyeast. It comes in what they call a smack pack. There is a small nutrient pouch in the package that when you smack it, it releases the nutrient and gets the yeast working so it can start eating the sugars.

Now, we wait for the yeast to do its job. We will wait about a week or so for the yeast to finish. I will start to take more gravity measurements to see if it is finished. I hope this beer tastes good. I will keep you all informed of that. We will name the beer after we taste it. We have a couple names in mind and it depends on the taste which one we will go with.

If you are interested in brewing your own beer, go check out a local homebrew club. I belong to a homebrew club called The Brewminati. Actually, I was just elected president last night. I am pretty excited about that. If any of you in the St. Louis area would like to check out one of our meetings, we normally meet at the St. Louis Wine and Beermaking at 7:00 on the second Wednesday of the month. Our next meeting is actually at Craft Beer Cellar in Clayton on July 8.

Thanks for reading my post and if you have any questions or comments, please let me know.