My First Batch

MY FIRST BATCH OF BEER!!



For my birthday this year, I got enough "birthday money" to get started brewing my own beer.

I spent the extra money to get the deluxe kit, as this will become a regular thing around our household, and apparently some of the same equipment can be used for making wine as well.

We bought our supplies at Rebel Brewer out in Gallatin per an overwhelming number of recommendations to them. They were great to us and answered all of our questions, and I'll definitely be getting my supplies from them from now on.

We decided to start with a simpler beer, the Hefaweizen. As we are completely inexperienced in brewing, this time around we just followed the directions, but we fully intend on getting creative with flavors and blends once I get comfortable with the ingredients, what they do, and how the science of it all works.

I feel like its the same as cooking, in that once you get to know your tools, spices, and how to prepare different types of food, then you can start to get creative. Furthermore, it also feels a bit like baking, as there is a lot of chemistry involved, and its not something that you can taste to make sure its right until its already done. And in the beer making process, that's about 6 weeks wait time.

We took pictures:

Here I'm starting a boil with some spring water. Everything I read said that the water makes a big difference, and I've always loved spring water more than any other...

So then, after bringing some water to a boil, we added our dry malted barley and malted wheat (part of what makes specifically a WHEAT beer):



Added 2 bags of that (2 lbs.) and brought that business up to a boil:


Lila was helping:



So then, after boiling and stirring for a bit, we added the hops. These are added to add a little bitter to the flavor to balance out the sweet of the alcohol, and to give that wonderful aroma... mmm, hops...


Now its getting a nice dark color:


It smells yummy! (Actually, by yummy I mean it smells kind of like hot cereal and tea... BTW it tastes gross at this point too)

So, after its done cooking, its time to let it cool off, so we took out the hops that were steeping, similar to a tea bag:

Once it cooled, which took forever... Shannon took a nap and I played a little Zelda... then we activated our dry yeast by adding water. Mmmm, living micro-organisms:


And added it:


And transferred everything to our fermenting bucket, where it is living until all the yeast turns all the sugar into alcohol:



Then the airlock goes in to make sure no outside contaminates can get in, but the CO2 produced by the yeast can still get out:


Next we wait... and wait... and after a couple of weeks we'll bottle, then wait some more!

There will be more pictures when the bottling happens...

Thanks for reading!

- Grey