degringolade

Starting out the New Year right. Brewing beer.

I will say a lot of things in this post that will be considered heretical to that gang of enthusiasts known as the “Homebrew Hobbyist Claque”. The main purpose for this particular group is to run out and purchase the “latest” piece of equipment and/or ingredient for the production of a beer that is barely different from the last batch that they made with different equipment and that mimics the current fashion coming out of the advertising and fashion oriented craft-beer industry. (Really, $10.00 a six pack for beer?)

So fuck those people. Being a geezer, born of Italian/Austrian riff-raff, I know that just fine beer can be made on a much lower technology and crap base.

Equipment:

2.5 gallon stainless steel stock pot. These are a kitchen staple anyway. If you don’t have one, why not? Mine has a pasta drainer attachment which makes it double handy

4 gallon stainless steel “big pot”. Mine is a $25.00 Wal-Mart special. Bunches of uses. The stainless steel cleans up fine.

Couple of other pots to heat water, I use a 5 quart pot.

Thermometer. I actually have two of these. One is a long probe analog scale (which for some reason seems more sincere), and a short probe digital (which has an attached bottle opener and a magnet...sweet)

Colander: Found this one at Grocery outlet for $5.00. Thing is designed to sit in a sink and be used as a colander...Also have a smaller one in case that doesn’t pan out

Spoons and whisks and such:

Muslin Bags for Hops

Scale:

Materials:

Four pounds of mixed grains

Amylase (leftover from the tragic potato vodka experiment)

Yeast from last fermentation (this started out as London ESB English-Style Ale Yeast, went through a passage for the distilling using a sugar-molasses wash)

Hops: These have been sitting in the freezer for some time now (HopUnion Summit {Alpha 165.8, Beta 4.9} Lot ID 3-411-15, Still smell like hops to me.

Dextrose

Methods:

Fill a the 2.5 gallon stockpot with about 1.5 gallons of hot water from the tap, put the pot on the burner and turn it on low.

Dump in the four pounds of grain and stir it up. The temp for this first batch ended up at 110° F to start. Leave the heat on low and let the heat inch up. Gotta give the sludge a stir every so often to get a decent idea of the temp.

When the heat hits 140° F, put in a ½ teaspoon of amylase

Bring the temp up to 150° F. Turn off the heat and let it sit for a half hour or so.

Set the colander in the big 4 gallon pot and strain the wort, don’t freak out too much about bugs/critters, remember, this is going to be boiled for 30 minutes.

Dump in more hot water from the pots and strain again, repeat until you hit around three gallons

Add 2 cups of dextrose to up the alcohol a bit. This one should work out to around a starting gravity of 1.045

Bring the wort to a boil and toss in 0.25 ounces of the hops, start a timer for 50 minutes. Drop the range to between low and medium high to keep it at a low boil, uncovered.

When the alarm goes off, toss in the second 0.25 ounces of hops, cover the pot, and set a timer for 10 minutes.

When the time goes off, fish out the bags of hops and transfer the covered pot to the counter (on a towel of course) and let it cool overnight.

Next Morning: Dump around a quarter cup of the yeast sludge into the pot then off and running.

On a second note: At the get-together New Years, my gracious host waxed poetic on the merits of the musical group "Rush". In the spirit of the New Year for the sake of fairness, I listened to "Tom Sawyer" this morning.

Sorry Greg, they are still shit.