Perpetual Work in Progress

Setting up: Paul, Chris, Adam

Bear with me for such a historical post, but to tell you about what we are doing now, I must go back in history to tell you where we’ve been.

It was a hot day at the end of July and we were brewing our first beer.  3 weeks of work all lead up to this, getting the equipment, organizing our group, finding a recipe, and getting the ingredients.  Don’t for once think I was in charge.  We basically let the resident pharmacist tell us what we needed, how much, and when.  Granted we tried to pitch in where we could but it was painfully obvious that we were ALL beginners.  There are six of us in the group.  Adam, Paul, Tom, Jim, Chris, and me.  Its nice because it allows us to divide up the cost of materials and equipment, and make larger batches.  Who knows, maybe one day we will be competing with Schlafly and Boulevard!  Anyway- thats a long way off.  One of the first things we did was draw who was going to make what/ when.  Since there are six of us that meant we each get 2 turns during the year.

For the first beer, a red ale, we started with beer training wheels, otherwise known as (Extract Malt)  This one is easy- add the packages of syrupy stuff into the pot of boiling water.  Cook.  Add the hops when indicated in recipe.  and then you are done- kind of.  What is left is called the wort.  This then is cooled as quickly as possible from boiling down to 75/80 degrees through a “wort chiller”.  If you look in the photo its the coiled up thing under Adam’s armpit.  This coil goes into the wort before its done boiling to cook off any impurities (like patio dirt).  Its main job it to let water from the garden hose cool the wort down quickly.  Why?  I dunno the details.  I just do.  Maybe in the next post I will get into the technical aspects of wort chilling.  For now, assume that its gotta get cool.  Well, from all the research we know that the tap water wasn’t going to get it cool quick enough.  So, the final solution was to use a fountain/sump pump in a bucket of ice water to flow through the coil, recirculating back into the ice after it goes through the coils.  We had to let quite a bit run out onto the ground before we could recirculate it back into the ice bucket because of the temperature difference of water coming in, to water going out, but after about 15 minutes we were able to recirc fine.

Adam and Chris prepping the Extract

Cooking the Wort on the Turkey Fryer

The Wort w/ Chiller Inserted- Chris on the Temps

Chilling the Wort- Sparge cooler holding the ice/water (me in white shirt)

Beer... (must reuse bottles)

More Beer (and bottles!)

Once the wort was cooled, we had to pour it into the fermenter.  If you look in the photo, its that stainless steel thing with the cone at the bottom.  We also had to “pitch the yeast”.  The yeast was prepped ahead of time and tossed down into the fermenter.  The whole mixture was slowly stirred and then carried to be put into the basement in a cool dry place.  Here it sat for 4 weeks (about the length of time the wives give us before we can meet again), upon which time we add priming sugar (to help carbonate the beer) and then bottle it.

We try to get together once a month to do this.  We are bottling one, then go make the other for the next time.  If there is one thing I can impress upon you is cleanliness is next to godliness.  We had to sanitize everything!  Its important otherwise it could contaminate the wort.  Also- Festus has some really hard water.  Adam got this stuff that balances out the PH but there is still this thick layer of scum on the surface of the water after boiling.  So far though- its only on the sparge water and the water we use for sanitizing.  It seems to disappear when the wort is ready.

In the end- the Red Ale we made had good flavor, but it was a bit cloudy, and more brown than red.  Not too shabby for our first try.  I wound up giving some away at our holiday party.  I made labels.  The name came from when Adam got stung on the tongue after taking a drink of sweat bee laden beer.

I don’t have many photos from the subsequent two brew days.  I really wish I had taken more photos now, and documented better.  That will come next I think.  The second beer was a Hefeweisen (a wheat beer) which was also an extract.  Probably not my favorite of all the beers, but it was still OK.  I don’t have the palette to know if anything was wrong with the recipe, or if its just not my style.  The third however was a cream ale.  Talk about smooth and good!  Nice and light.  I think we will be making that one again.

This next meeting is on Feb 20 to brew our 5th beer.  This time its a chocolate Cherry Stout.  The guys at O’Fallon were nice enough to give us a vial of their chocolate extract!  I missed the tour but some of our group got to go on an early saturday tour of the O’Fallon brewery.  They had a great time and got to take some samples with them.  When we brew we also bottle.  We are supposed to be bottling  beer #4 which was my pick. I chose an Oatmeal Stout that we brewed when it was 5 degrees out.  The neighbors probably thought we were cooking meth with all the stainless pots, steam, and being in Festus and all.  I have been told that the beer is pretty thick.  I do love a beer you have to chew so I am looking forward to it.  The problem, Diane has a home based biz show that night and I will be home watching the kids.  Hopefully they let me partake in the beer.  I have 24 bottles ready to go down to Festus and return filled up.

Tags: beer brewing, brew club, homebrew, St. louis