Merry Christmas!

Hello beer lovers! Welcome back to Barely Brewers!

Almost three weeks ago I brewed my first attempt at a gluten-free beer for a friend of mine. The gluten-free pumpkin spice ale has now been racked to the secondary fermenter, moving it off of the huge quantity of trub this brew produced. Much of the trub was, as usual, coagulated proteins, dead yeast cells, and hop solids but having forgotten to add the clarifying whirlfloc tablet near the end of the brewing process led to a lot more suspended matter in the beer. The beer has been sitting in the secondary for a week and a half and some of the cloudiness has settled out, particularly near the top of the carboy. I'm hoping that a few more days will allows some more of the suspended particles to precipitate out but I have a back up plan!

There is a process called 'cold crashing' that helps to clarify beer. Prior to bottling (or kegging) a brewer can chill the beer to somewhere about 40°F for a day or two. Before launching into the scientific reason for how this works, there's an important distinction to be made: that between particles existing in suspension and those in solution. A suspension is composed of a liquid medium and particles small enough to appear 'dissolved' but large enough to eventually settle out. A solution is defined by a homogenous mixture of a dissolved substance in a liquid medium that will not eventually settle out. From a scientific point of view, there are a number of reasons this helps to clarify the beer. First, colder temperatures force yeast in suspension to enter dormancy, slowing cellular respiration and causing yeast cells to flocculate (clump together) and settle out. The cessation of respiration also slows the motion of particles and medium in the carboy, allowing additional sedimentation to occur. Cold liquids, with slower-moving water molecules, are less soluble than warm liquids because there is less available 'space' between water molecules in cold liquids. So cooling the beer forces some of the larger soluble molecules to precipitate out as the cold beer no longer 'has room' for the exotic particles.


The only problem with my brilliant cold-crash back-up plan is that we don't have a dedicated fridge to keep our fermentation temperatures constant so I don't really have a way to cool the beer cold enough over a long enough period of time. Fortunately, mild winters in Northern California may save the day! My plan is to fill a large tub with water, put the carboy in it, and leave it outside for a couple of days. The reason islands like Hawaii have such nice climates year-round and day and night is because water has a high 'specific temperature' and doesn't change temperature easily. During the day, water around the island slowly heats up and evaporation keeps temperatures relatively cooler. At night, water slowly cools, releasing the heat it accumulated during the day and keeping the temperature from dropping precipitiously. With temperatures at night in California dropping to the mid-30s, I figure the beer in a tub of water will get cold enough during the day and stay warm enough at night to accomplish my goal.


The final update for this post is significantly less technical! My dad and I brewed another batch of a Boont Amber clone as soon as the GF pumpkin spice ale was out of the primary and it is bubbling away in the living room right now. We drank our whole first batch of this beer in a couple of weeks last time so we're very much looking forward to this beer!


Until next time, faithful readers! Cheers!

The Return of Barely Brewers!

So I kind of let the blog go for a while... I've been traveling in Asia for the last 2 months and am excited to be back and brewing! I was traveling with a good friend of mine, Caitlin, who was teaching in Thailand for the last year. She also happens to be gluten intolerant. While Asia is great in terms of gluten-free (GF) food options, it's not really possible to get a GF beer over there. I pledged to try to brew a GF beer for her when we returned and after a couple weeks of jet lag, I got right on it! A few friends, including Caitlin, were interested in participating in the brew so we all got together for a fun-filled evening of brewing.

I'd done some research on GF brewing and the base is nearly always malted sorghum or malted sorghum extract. I decided to use the extract, having malted sorghum replace malted barley extract as the main source of fermentable sugars. In addition, some molasses and raw turbinado sugar will provide the rest of the fermentables. 

I also bought some roasted buckwheat, kasha, and roasted it further to darken it and bring out some more caramel-y flavors and colors. While the buckwheat will provide very few fermentable sugars, I'm hoping that the nutty flavors I read are associated with brewing with unmalted buckwheat come through a bit.

After giving Caitlin some options on styles and components of the beer, she settled on a pumpkin spice ale. So I we used the flesh of 5 sugar pumpkins, roasted to bring out the flavors and sugars, as well as the usual suspects of pumpkin pie spices: cinnamon, all-spice, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves.

I grated whole nutmeg

The pumpkin was integrated into two different stages of the brew: the mini-mash and the boil. It was mashed slightly for the mash, allowing more surface are in contact with the wort. The hop schedule was very simple, only Northern Brewer.

Adding the pumpkin to the boil

The whole process was incredibly smooth with so many hands on the brew pot it was really fun to brew with friends, teaching them a little bit as we went. The only thing that went wrong I didn't realize until much later: I'd forgotten to add the whirlfloc tablet, a clarifying agent made from refined Irish moss, a red-algae sea weed. So the beer may be a bit cloudier than our usual output but hopefully with a good long rest in the secondary fermenter it will clear up on its own.

My buddy Jack pouring the wort

The beer is bubbling along now though the process is certainly playing out differently than with gluten-full beers. For one, there is no krausen, the foamy yeasty layer formed at the top of the beer during rapid fermentation. It does indeed smell like delicious beer and I'm excited to see how it winds up!

Sam aerating the beer

Brief Absence and Updates

Hello beer lovers! It's been a while! I went on a week-long backpacking trip to the high desert on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mtns. so have been out of the home-brewing loop for a little while. Right now, stop for a second and look to the right of your screen. Take this opportunity to vote for what you think we should brew next!

First up: an update on the IPA. After opening a (lot) more bottles of our hop-tastic creation, we've determined that only the first few bottles we opened were super over-carbonated! I'm not sure whether we just got antsy and cracked the first few before they were really ready or what the chemical/yeast explanation for the rest of the bottles being carbonated correctly is, but I'm very happy to report that the beer is pretty close to exactly how I envisioned it, now.


Right before I left, we racked the Boont Amber clone to the secondary fermenter. We will bottle it later this week and it will be ready to drink a few weeks later. Look for tasting notes on this beer (hopefully with a real Boont Amber for comparison) in a few weeks!

The day before yesterday, we went into San Francisco for some delicious dim sum with family friends and hit up San Francisco Brewcraft afterwards to buy more ingredients. The poll got only ONE vote since I put it up and that vote was for a chocolate or coffee stout. Upon reflection, I realized I wanted to do a chocolate AND coffee stout. So we purchased ingredients for a mocha stout and for a clone of one of my dad's favorite British ales, Bass Ale. We also bought a new digital thermometer because the $19 we purchased from Amazon crapped out during the last few brews and we wound up using the glass floater again.

The mocha stout will be flavored by racking in into the secondary on top of a 1/2 pound of beautiful, rich chocolate nibs and by a pot of cold-brewed, extra strength coffee in the secondary fermenter. Hopefully, the proportions we use will be in line with what I'm imagining and the chocolate and coffee will balance each other. This brew also utilized a more all-grain like method of steeping the grains that involves a process called 'sparging' in which hot water is poured slowly over the grain after steeping to drain the rest of the sugars. This being new to us, we probably messed it up in some way but we'll see at the end of the brew whether our bumbling affects the final product. Lactose, milk sugar, was also incorporated into the brew to give it some the creaminess the palate associates with chocolate, coffee, and stout ales, for that matter. Lactose is not fermentable by the yeast and so will act to sweeten the beer and add to a familiar creamy mouthfeel.


We brewed the mocha stout the day before yesterday. There were some intense biochemical reactions last night, with the airlock bubbling more than once a second, and a nice krausen had formed. By this afternoon, the bubbling had receded to one every 10 seconds or so and the krausen had actually fallen.

The Bass Ale clone will be brewed some time next week after the Boont clone is in bottles and the stout is racked to the secondary.

Cheers and thanks for reading! Don't forget to vote for what we should brew after the bass clone!

Boont Amber in the Primary and IPA Tasting Notes

Hello beer lovers! Welcome back. It's been a couple weeks since my last post and we have some new developments. Our Orange Peel Pale Ale, which was the focus of the previous post, has been in the secondary fermenter for two weeks and we are planning to bottle it tomorrow afternoon!

Boont Amer Ale in Primary Fermenter

The results from the last poll came in and the Boont Amber Ale clone was the winner! We brewed last Saturday and it went incredibly well. The beer is in the primary fermenter right now and has been bubbling away all week.

This beer called for California Ale yeast (by White Labs, if anyone is curious). This ale yeast is significantly different from the other yeasts we have used so far in terms of what is called 'flocculation'. Flocculation is how well the yeast clumps together while active. A yeast with high flocculation will have large clumps of yeast actively moving through the water column while a yeast with low flocculation will have very tiny clumps of yeast in motion. The California Ale yeast we used for the Boont clone has medium flocculation while the majority of beers we've brewed use yeasts with high flocculation. While this has little effect on how the beer tastes, it looks very different while fermenting. We will also probably transfer this beer into a secondary fermenter tomorrow or perhaps Sunday, depending on hydrometer readings and yeast activity.

We cracked the first few bottles of our somewhat-botched Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA clone this week, as well. If you remember from my post on bottling, we used the wrong carboy and wound up with only 30-some bottles of this beer. I was worried that the huge amount of head space in the secondary fermenter would lead to oxidation and off flavors in the final beer. I was also concerned that the heat wave we had a couple weeks ago would affect the yeast. Fortunately, it seems neither of these concerns were founded and the beer tastes great!

Unfortunately, there is one major issue with it. Notice how large of a foam head the beer pictured has. Because of the odd size of our batch (somewhat less than 3.5 gallons), we had to estimate the quantity of corn sugar to use in the bottle conditioning. It seems we overestimated the quantity necessary and all of our bottles are over-carbonated. When opened, a few have erupted with foam, leaving only a few sips in the bottle to pour. Others create such a large head when poured that it takes a few gulps just to get to the beer. A few have turned out just fine, albeit somewhat fizzy for my taste.

The beer has a big, very fresh hop aroma. It is a little bit sweet with spicy, piney notes and BIG BOLD hop bitterness. Despite the bitterness, it has a surprisingly smooth finish with a bit of an alcohol burn due to it's high alcohol content and possibly from the temperatures during the last week in the secondary. It has a rich, caramel amber color and decent clarity, which is usually made cloudy from the over-carbonation disturbing the small yeast cake at the bottom of the bottle upon un-capping. Overall, definitely a beer I would make again!

Thanks for reading, friends! Don't forget to vote for what we should brew next near the top of the page on the right-hand side of the page! Until next time!

Pale Ale Update and Racking to a Secondary Fermenter

Hello again, beer lovers!

So due to some unfortunate computer issues, I was unable to post the updates I wanted to all week on the fermentation process of our Orange Peel Pale Ale. Instead, I've got a few pictures of what happened this week and some information on racking our beer to a secondary fermenter.

This was taken about 24 hours after the brewing finished. Notice the thick layer of krausen on top of the beer and how uniformly cloudy the beer is. The beer is cloudy because there is a ton of yeast floating in suspension, absorbing sugars and processing them into carbon dioxide and alcohol. The krausen on top is composed of proteins from the malts, insoluble acids and oils, hop resins, and yeast cells. At this point, the airlock was bubbling vigorously, twice a second or so.

We had a mini heat wave here in the Bay Area early this week with temperatures getting into the high low 90s on Wednesday. As a result, our house was a bit warmer than we would have liked and I think the fermentation finished faster than usual. So by Thursday afternoon, there was very little action in the airlock. A hydrometer reading yesterday confirmed that it was time to rack to the secondary fermenter.

This was taken this morning, right before we began racking. The krausen has fallen completely, its components settling out on the bottom along with dead yeast cells and anything else that was suspended in the beer. This layer is visible at the bottom of the carboy as the whitish-grey junk and is referred to as 'trub'. Once the vigorous primary fermentation is complete, continued contact with the trub can impart undesirable flavors to the beer so may brewers move the beer off of the trub and into a secondary fermenter by siphoning. This process is called 'racking'.

Here is the larger primary fermenter, filled with beer, and the smaller (5-gallon) secondary fermenter. Using the auto-siphon, we transfer the beer from the primary to the secondary, avoiding sucking up any of the solids at the bottom of the carboy.

Beer Starts to Flow

Our Orange Peel Pale Ale, like most California pale ales, wants to have a crisp, hoppy aroma when when you crack a bottle open. This is accomplished by adding some hops into the secondary fermenter. This is called 'dry-hopping' because the hops have not been boiled. Hops have natural anti-bacterial properties so there is no worry of infecting the beer through this addition. The nylon mesh bag was sterilized prior to use, however. Inside, we put 1/2 oz. Cascade hop pellets. The beer will absorb many of the delicate alpha acids that contain that wonderful aroma over the next 10-12 days before bottling.

We filled the secondary fermenter almost the way up, leaving very little head room for oxygen to damage the beer. This is the best we've done yet at getting the volume in the primary to match the volume of the secondary. This has probably been our most successful brew, apart from the uncontrollably warm weather during the primary fermentation.

The beer will sit for 10-12 days, allowing for the yeast to clean up some of its early-fermentation by-products and for more suspended particulate matter to settle out.

Thanks for reading and cheers!

Brewing Our Orange Peel Pale Ale

Welcome back, beer lovers! Today my dad and I brewed the second batch of our Orange Peel Pale Ale. It is a fairly standard California-style pale ale with cascade hops but we brew it with the zest of a dozen oranges for extra citrusy punch. In this post, I'll be walking you through our brewing process and explaining how to brew a fairly basic beer.

First off, here's the recipe we used:

Malt Extract, Specialty Grains, Whirlfloc tablet, hops, and yeast

6 lbs. Liquid malt extract

1.5 lbs. 2-Row malt

1/2 lbs. Vienna malt

1/2 lbs. 10L malt

1/4 lbs. Flaked barley

3 oz. Cascade hops

Zest from 12 organic navel oranges

1 Whirlfloc tablet

Nottingham yeast

I'm not going to go into why we chose these ingredients in this post, instead focusing on the brewing process. Let's get to it!

The process we use is called a mini-mash or partial-mash brew. This is because we use specialty grains in addition to the malt extract. It is possible to brew using only malt extract (easier than our method) or using only grain (called all-grain, much more complex than our method).

First step is to bring 4 gallons of water to 155 degrees. While that is happening, we dump the specialty grains into two mesh bags. When the water is at heat, we turn off the heat, put our pot cozy on the brew pot and place the grain bags in the water. It is then topped and the grains steeped for 45 minutes. This process extracts the sugars present in the grains and puts them in solution.


The grain bags are drained and dipped about 10 times to make sure all of the sugars are extracted from the grains. We remove the cozy and heat the incomplete beer (now called wort) to about 170 degrees.

At 170 degrees, the heat is again turned off and we add the malt extract, stirring to ensure it dissolves and does not char on the bottom of the brew pot.


Now we bring the wort to a full rolling boil.


When it has reached a rolling boil, we set a timer for 60 minutes, the standard boil time for a simple beer, and add the first ounce of hops to the wort. This first addition of hops is for bittering as over the course of the hour, most of the compounds that lend flavor and aroma will be boiled off. Pictured below is an ounce of hops pellets about to be poured into the boiling wort.


After 30 minutes, the next ounce of hops is added, along with the whirlfloc tablet. This hops addition is mainly for flavoring as with 30 minutes left on the boil most of the delicate aroma compounds will still boil off. The whirlfloc tablet is a fining agent made from a red algae that helps proteins coagulate and makes your beer more clear in the end.


With 10 minutes left on the boil, we add all of the orange zest. This allows for a bit of flavor to be added and a ton of orange-y aroma. Five minutes later we make the last hops addition of 1/2 ounce. These are the aroma hops, adding that sharp, fruity smells to beers like pale ales and IPAs.

In the last couple of minutes of the boil, we place the wort chiller (see Equipment: Part 2 post) in the wort to sterilize it. When the wort has boiled for an hour, we remove it to the sink where we have made an ice bath and plug the wort chiller onto the faucet.

In this brew, because we were using dry active yeast (as opposed to liquid yeast already in suspension) we rehydrated the yeast prior to adding it to the wort (called "pitching" the yeast). This is an optional step as we have brewed other beers by simply pitching the dry yeast on the top of the wort in the fermenter but rehydrating allows for more even distribution of yeast in the wort and for a shorter lag time (the time between adding yeast and when fermentation starts).

As the wort is chilling down to about 80 degrees, we measure 3 gallons of cold water and pour it through the funnel into the 6.5 gallon carboy. Pouring quickly and allowing the water to splash around in the carboy aerates the water, adding dissolved oxygen which will later be used by the yeast in fermenting sugars.

When the wort is chilled, we pull out the wort chiller and pour about a third of the warm wort into the carboy. Then we pitch the yeast and pour the other 2/3 of the wort in the carboy.

Finally, we fill the airlock with water, place the plastic bubble in it, cap it, and shove it in the stopper in the mouth of the carboy. The brewing process is now complete and we relax for a week while the fermentation is going on. We have a cardboard box with no bottom and an airlock-sized hole on the top that we place over the carboy to prevent light from damaging our beer.

Approximately 4 hours after this, the beer has begun to ferment, with yeast forming a layer on the surface of the beer called kraeusen, and the airlock has begun to bubble away, expelling excess carbon dioxide. It smells like hops and oranges! Awesome!

Thanks for reading; I hope this was illuminating. I'll post more pictures and updates on how this beer is progressing as the week goes on. Cheers!

Bottling

Ok, ok... I know I'm skipping ahead and reneging on my promise of a brewing process run-down but we bottled our first attempt at an IPA yesterday and it seemed like I should write something about it! We bottled our first draft (hah- a beer pun!) of a Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA clone. The distinguishing characteristic of this beer is a 90-minute (duh) long boil with continuous hop additions, leading to a high gravity (I'll get to this eventually in the brewing process post; for now read: high alcohol) and incredibly hoppy beer.

Oops! Look at all that head space...

The one (BIG) mistake we made in brewing this batch was so elementary I didn't think it could ever happen. Instead of using the 6.5-gallon carboy (see equipment post #1 for explanation) as the primary fermenter, we used one of our 5-gallon carboys. Why is this a mistake, you ask? Well, because we wound up with less beer, for one! You have to leave some room at the top (head space) of the primary fermenter for the fermentation process to take place. If you use a 6.5-gallon carboy, that means you wind up with about 5 gallons of usable beer. As we used a smaller carboy, we wound up with only 3.5 gallons of usable beer. Additionally, using the 6.5-gallon carboy for the secondary fermenter (our other 5-gallon was already filled with a Scottish strong ale), there was a ton of head space. While added head space is ok for the primary fermenter (still not ideal), more oxygen present in the secondary fermenter can lead to oxidation of the beer, producing off flavors. We tasted a little bit from the siphon when we'd filled as many bottles as we could and it tasted pretty good so I don't think our mishap affected the final product but we will see in a few weeks!

On to the main event: bottling

Bottles and IPA, Ready to Go

Bottling beer began for us as an ordeal, requiring nearly two hours of set up (sanitizing anything that contacts the beer, mostly), over an hour to bottle, and at least a half hour for clean up. We have since whittled that down to about two and a half hours of work in total. We used dunk each bottle in sanitizing solution (we use a product called OneStep) and then place them, upside-down, on paper towels on the counter. After we accidentally broke 7 bottles by knocking over a single bottle, we decided there must be an easier way. Now we simply run the bottles through the dishwasher on the pots and pans setting with a heated dry with no detergent.

Right before we put it on the counter, we add 4.5 oz. of corn sugar, dextrose, disolved in 1 cup of water to the beer. As the yeast has already consumed all of the sugars present in the beer, converting them to alcohol and carbon dioxide, this additional sugar jump-starts the yeast again, providing enough carbon dioxide to carbonate the beer. Because we are relying on the yeast carbonate, the beer must sit in the bottle for about 2 weeks before it is drinkable. This process is called bottle conditioning.

Bottling is an easy process to show and explain, so I'll be brief and there will be lots of pictures. If you have any further questions, leave a comment and I'll answer!

To the right, my dad starts the siphon by pumping the inner tube. The end of the siphon is about two inches under the surface of the beer to avoid sucking up any solids still floating on the top (like yeast rafties, hop particles, etc). The other end of the tube is in a bottle.

The bottling tip allows beer to flow through only when the valve at the end is depressed in the bottom of a bottle. I'm pictured to the right filling up bottles. Bottles are filled all the way up and removing the bottling tip leaves just enough head space for proper carbonation. Such a brilliant invention, the bottling tip.

As you fill bottles, you place a cap on the top lightly. This allows the yeast, which is already pumping out carbon dioxide to push out any oxygen in the bottle, replacing it with heavier carbon dioxide. When you are done filling bottles, the first ones you filled will have done this already and are ready to be capped.

At right: I prepare to cap this bottle. Below: I pull down the handles of the capper, crimping the edges of the crown cap onto the bottle rim.

Once the cap is on, you are done! Put it in a box to prevent light  damage and oxidation and wait for a couple weeks.

Below, my dad is cleaning the carboy with the L-shaped brush mentioned in the equipment guide.

It's so hard to be patient...

And that's all there is to it! Thanks for reading, I know this one was kind of long, and join us next time when (seriously, I promise this time) I'll explain the basic brewing process.

Equipment: Part 2

Hello beer-lovers! Welcome to the second installment of my equipment run-down. Let's get to it!

There are three things in the picture to the right: our 2.5 foot-long plastic spoon, the all important auto-siphon, and the plastic tubing for the siphon.

The spoon is pretty obvious; it's for stirring, whenever there's stirring to be done!

The auto-siphon is an amazing device. The left-hand end of it goes in the beer, the plastic tubing attaches to the other end (the one with the right angle). To start the siphon, instead of sucking on one end, which could introduce beer-ruining bacteria, all you have to do is pull the right hand side and pump it down a couple times. If you are unsure how this would work, google an auto-siphon and I'm sure you can find an example.

                                 Bottling Tip 

A bottling tip is used for– you guessed it – bottling. It has a spring-loaded valve at the end that allows liquid to pass through it only when you are pushing that little black tip down into the bottom of a beer bottle. The bottling tip attaches to the other end of the auto-siphon. It allows you to fill the bottles from the bottom up, without splashing beer, eliminating the possibility of oxidation. This thing, from reading up on beer-making, saves a ton of hassle and time.

Bottle Capper

This cool device is what we use to put caps on our bottles. Inside is a short post with a magnet on it. You place a cap on top of the beer bottle, carefully put this thing on top of the bottle (the magnet helps keep the cap in place), and pull down on both handles simultaneously. The cone around the magnetic post is pushed down and crimps the flanges of a crown-cap blank (also shown) around the rim of the bottle.

Thermometer
We stared off with a normal, weighted glass thermometer and promptly broke it while cleaning up. So we found this nice digital thermometer on Amazon. It was designed for meat but it has a handy alarm on it that allows you to set a desired temperature and it will beep when that temperature is reached. All you have to do is dangle the probe in your wort.

Hydrometer
All I'm going to say about the hydrometer right now is that it's used to measure the density of a liquid compared to distilled water. Hydrometer readings help you determine when your fermentation is complete and aid in approximating alcohol content by volume of your finished beer. There will be an entire post at some point dedicated to how to use one of these. Having studied marine and aquatic biology in college, I have some experience using these in the field of science, as well.

Wort Chiller
This is the most recent gadget added to our set-up. My very-handy father rigged it up based on suggestions in John Palmer's excellent home brewing, How To Brew. This helps cool wort faster, allowing more proteins to coagulate and settle out and shortening the overall brew time. One end screws onto the kitchen sink faucet and the other flows into the drain. You put the wort chiller in the brew pot and turn on the cold water. As cold water flows through the copper tubing (25 feet of it!) it cools the wort and carries away heat. We are thinking of adding another 25 feet of coil to this, increasing its efficiency.








Well, that's all for tonight folks. Cheers and thanks for reading!

Equipment: Part 1

Welcome back! Today and tomorrow I will be showing you the equipment we have been using. I've taken some pictures and hopefully this will give you an idea of what kinds of stuff it takes to make beer! After covering equipment, the following post will be an introduction to the brewing process and I'm hoping that this equipment guide will be a useful aid for understanding the basic brewing method.

First up: Carboys

A carboy is an enormous glass jug, much like a glass version of the jugs used in water coolers in offices around the world. The one pictured to the left is a 5-gallon carboy. We have stuck a basic thermometer onto it so we can see at what temperature our beer is fermenting. We have three carboys, two 5-gallon carboys and one 6.5-gallon carboy.

The 6.5-gallon carboy is used for primary fermentation while the two 5-gallon carboys are used for secondary fermentation. See the next posts for more on fermentation.




Airlocks/Blow-off Tubes

An airlock is the strange looking device shown on to the right. The kind we use is a 3-piece airlock consisting of the main housing, the bell-shaped piece inside, and the cap that has a number of small holes punched around the rim. The purpose of the airlock is to allow carbon dioxide created during the fermentation process to escape the carboy, thereby relieving pressure inside the carboy, without allowing any oxygen in.

You fill the main housing with about an inch of water, place the bell on top of the interior tube, and snap the cap on top. As carbon dioxide is pushed into the airlock, it bubbles through the water and out the top of the cap. This video has some brief footage of an airlock in action, to give you a better idea of how this really works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK-UoULKyTo

We have 2 airlocks. We also made a blow-off tube which accomplishes the same goal while allowing foam and particulate matter to escape through a larger diameter hose. This is used only if fermentation is particularly active. In the upcoming post on the beers we've been making, I'll have some images of a blow-off tube in use.

Brew Pot

A good, extra large pot is essential to the brewing process. Ours is a 7.5-gallon, stainless steel pot. While this has been adequate for our purposes, so far, we may eventually need a larger one when we decide to take the plunge into all-grain brewing. We also have a thermo-foam cozy (pictured below) that we made for this pot to help insulate it and keep internal temperatures constant while steeping specialty grains.

Carboy Brush
As you will learn in subsequent posts, sterilization of brewing equipment is essential to successful beer-making. This type of brush, with a right angle in it, can help clean fermentation residues off the interior of the carboy. This task is nearly impossible without such a brush.

Funnel

The last piece of equipment I will be discussing today is the funnel. A large funnel makes transferring the young beer, called wort, from the brew pot to the primary fermentation carboy (the 6.5-gallon one) a cinch! We bought one that has a high back wall so you can pour as fast as you want and not spill precious wort in the process. We originally had a nylon mesh screen in the funnel but have since discovered that the screen created more problems than it solved. Pouring through a funnel also helps to aerate the wort as it goes into the carboy.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the somewhat-exciting conclusion to our equipment primer!

Hello New Readers!

Welcome to my blog! My name is Taylor and for Christmas 2010, my father, Larry, and I bought ourselves the equipment we needed to start brewing our own beer. Thank you for joining us on our journey from complete noobies to (hopefully) all-grain masters. Since getting the equipment, we have bottled four batches of our own homebrewed beer and are working on more, as you read. We have expanded our equipment and become more well-versed in brewing lingo, procedure, ingredients, and potential problems. There will be upcoming posts dedicated to the equipment we are using, the general procedure we have been following, and, of course, the beers we have been brewing!

So far we have yet to have a perfect brew; something has gone wrong or not quite according to plan in every one of our sessions. But this is how you learn! We have not yet needed to dump a batch but in each of our brews there is something we would have liked to have done differently. The most important take-away from our brews so far has been relax, Relax, RELAX! Yeast and the fermentation process are inconsistent and sometimes worrisome, particularly for novice brewers, but we have discovered that it is very hard to totally screw up.

I'm very excited to be starting this blogging project and look forward to hearing from you as my dad and I work on our new and delicious hobby!