Kegging and Tasting American Pale Ale

TASTING DAY HAS COME!!!

Firstly, I would like to congratulate ourselves on successfully brewing our first beer!!

So, after two weeks in secondary fermentation, the yeast had settled out of our American Pale Ale quite nicely.

Settled Yeasties.

Since this was our first home brew experience, we wanted to bottle a bit of the beer, just to say we did. Because we had racked the beer into secondary fermentation, we were pretty successful with racking into the bottles.  The bottling wand is pretty damn genius. It fills the bottles perfectly. At present, the bottles are in a box, hiding from the light, making carbonation bubblies.

Capping the bottles.

The racking process from the carboy to the keg went nice and smoothly.

Racking into the Keg.

 Per the directions from the guy at Wilmington home brew, we added CO2 up to 30 pounds of pressure. This carbonates the beer, eliminating the need for priming sugar and aging (for the purposes of carbonation). The keg just needed to sit for about 24 hours before it was carbonated. Then we dropped the pressure back down to like 7 pounds and drank it up! The first pour came out perfect!

American Pale Ale - Brewed March 31 - Tasted April 15

The beer definitely has a hoppy taste and is VASTLY better than the Coors Light we drink on a regular basis. It does have a bit of a sour undertone, though. We think that might be because some of the malt extract burned to the bottom of the pot during the boil. Overall, though, it is delicious and a total success!

Happy Drinking!

Secondary Fermentation

One week into our American Pale Ale fermentation, we racked the beerski from our fermentation bucket into a carboy. Supposedly, this leads to a clearer beer and an easier to clean carboy. The process of getting the beer into the new vessel is similar to that of bottling or kegging. You basically have to siphon the beer out without disturbing the gunk at the bottom of the vessel. But you also have to make sure everything stays sanitary. You fill the siphon pipe with sanitizer then put one end in the primary fermenter. Then you start letting the sanitizer flow out into a spare bucket and via gravity and pressure the beer in the primary fermenter follows and flows out the tubes. Once the liquid is no longer clear, you can move the exit end of the tubing into the secondary fermenter.  Here is what our set up looked like post-transfer:

Into the secondary fermenter!

 We completed this process the Sunday that we got home from the beach for Easter. While we were there, we broke off from the family for a little while to check out the local Wilmington homebrew shops. The first one, Nocci Boca (or something like that), was a winery that seemed to want to cash in on an unfilled niche in the area. They didn't seem all that knowledgeable and their prices were really high.

Then, we went to Wilmington Home Brew and found a store much more to our liking. The staff was super knowledgeable and friendly. It definitely had a homey, welcoming feel and actually looked like a brew shop with barrels of grains and shelves of equipment. They were also doing a free tasting, which, of course we loved.

The kegging expert there explained the kegging process to Landon a bit more clearly than what we'd found on the internet thus far. There seems to be a lack of information on the kegging process online because new brewers tend to bottle exclusively and experienced brewers know what to do already. The gist of what he told us was that after secondary fermentation, we could keg imediately and drink our beer the following day. But, more on that next time.

American Pale Ale

For our first brewing adventure, we decided to get a kit from American Brewmasters' in North Raleigh. We don't want to start picking ingredients until we're comfortable with the process and have acquired more of the equipment we'll need to have a fully-functional set up. We chose an American Pale because we both like Pale Ales, because it was one of the cheaper kits, and because it had Oregon hops and we LOVE Oregon! According to the website, it was inspired by Shipyard's Export Ale.

Hoppity Hop Hops! @ Rogue Farms, Oregon 2011 - Photo by Ali Sears

Ingredients:
6.6 lbs light malt extract
8 oz Wheat Malt
8 oz Crystal 40 L Malt
1.5 oz Bittering Hops - Willamette
0.5 oz Flavoring Hops - Cascade
1.0 oz Aromatic Hops - Willamette and Cascade
American Ale Yeast

We used both Willamette and Cascade Hops but didn't write down which one we used when. The aromatic hops should have been 0.5 oz of each. I'm fairly certain we had 2 packets of Willamette Hops so I'm guessing the above breakdown is what we used.

First off, we sterilized everything we would need pre-boil. This isn't necessary as any contamination will be killed during the boil, however we really wanted to be sure we were being as clean as possible. We also don't have a large enough pot to have as much water as we would like in the actual  boil process, so prior to starting brewing, Landon sterilized everything and boiled 2 gallons of water which went straight into the primary fermenter.

We started the actual brewing process by bringing 2 gallons of water up to 155°F. That took quite a while, even on our gas stove. We used a meat thermometer to monitor our temperature until we get a digital candy thermometer. Once it reached the desired temperature, we added the Wheat Malt and Crystal Malts to a muslin bag and added that to the water. Basically, we made malt tea. The water stayed between 150° and 155° the whole time, but required a lot of babysitting. We discarded the used grains this time, but in the future we want to make bread, etc. to eliminate waste and make tasty food!

Steeping Grains - Before

After the steeping, we added the liquid malt extract. It tastes a lot like molasses, but lighter somehow.

Steeping Grains - After

Once that came up to a boil, we added the first set of hops -- for bittering. When we added the hops, the mixture foamed up and smelled DELICIOUS! It really started to seem like beer at that point.

Hoppity Hop Hops!

After 45 minutes, we added half of the flavoring hops. At the 1 hour point, we took the wert off the stove and added the rest of the flavoring hops and all the aromatic hops.

Looks like we're making green beer!!

We put the boil pot in an ice water bath to cool it down so it wouldn't kill the yeast. While it was cooling, we rehydrate the yeast in warm water. You've got to be really careful with yeast and heat. It dies at about 120°F, which I can attest to through my time making bread and ...other things.

Ice Bath.

We stopped taking pictures at this point, because, you know, what good brewer doesn't drinking while he's brewing (hmm- in retrospect, Sunday Funday + Sunday Brew Day are not such a great idea come Monday). Actually, we stopped taking pictures after we added the hops -- the ice bath picture is actually from making ...something else. Once the wort was cooled off, we added the yeast, then mixed it all into the 2 gallons of water in the primary fermenter. We added more boiled water to top it off at 5 gallons.

We measured the specific gravity. Landon did it and his notes say 44% and 14. I'm not sure what that means right now because he's doing homework but I'll find out soon and let you know. 

Right now the wort is chillin' in our spare bath tub fermenting it's little heart out! We're really excited to see how it comes out! It so hard to drink crappy (but cheap!) beer for the next few weeks while our beer does it's thing.

Mack Spirits!

Welcome to the first ever post for Mack Spirits. We're a couple of beer enthusiasts who've decided to start home-brewing our own beer. We know one of the keys to successful brewing is to keep very accurate records of your processes and what worked/what didn't work. So, we decided to turn that record-keeping into a blog so others could learn from our mistakes and so we can access our work from anywhere. Anyways, on to the beer!