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Batch Number Two
By Mike | January 6, 2008
Its been quite a while since I brewed my first batch, and since my last post. Part of that is because I’m lazy, the other part is that I’ve been busy and haven’t had the time I thought it would take to get my next batch going. I took some vacation time around the Christmas holidays which solved that problem and batch number two is currently fermenting happily in my basement.
Last time wanted to keep things simple and got a pre-hopped malt extract. This time I wanted to do the hopping myself and so I went with one of the kits from Midwest supplies. Its basically just the ingredients you need to make a particular style of beer, which is nice for us beginners because we don’t have to experiment and potentially waste time and money (and Beer!) with bad choices.
I went with the Fuggles IPA kit because I’m really into IPAs these days. Fuggles is the type of hops used in this recipe. Thus the name. Incidentally, I got a microbrew sampler pack for Christmas and one of the beers was a fuggles IPA. It tasted very much like the hops I used smelled. I assumed that was just how hops smell, but I could definitely taste the type of hop in that beer. To be honest I didn’t really care for it, so hopefully mine turns out better.
Things went much smother this time around since I knew more what to expect, but there were a few items that concerned me nonetheless.
To start off, I soaked the specialty grains at about 150 degrees for half an hour. I’m not quite sure this worked as expected. They provided a bag to put the grains in, but it was a little more porous than I expected, so a lot of debris made it into the wort. I think most of it got filtered out, but I’m concerned that too much made it into the beer. I’ll have to see.
After that I added the malt extract, and the bittering hops. They warned you to take the pot off the burner while adding the extract to prevent scorching, and while I did that I don’t think I mixed it up enough because when I eventually emptied the pot I noticed some scorching on the bottom.
Hopefully my beer won’t taste like burning, as Ralph Wigum would say.
I boiled the bittering hops for 45 minutes, then added the flavoring hops for 30 minutes and the aroma hops for two. I closely watched the boiling wort this time around so that I didn’t have a repeat of the boiling over fiasco from last time.
Cooling the wort went much smoother this time around. I stuck some of my water jugs in the freezer so that they were colder when adding to the wort. And since it is winter and quite cold out, I could just put a lid on the the brew kettle and stick it out side to cool. And that was it. It cooled down pretty quickly, and I added the yeast, and let it go.
The next morning nothing was happening and the thermometer on the carboy read about 63 degrees, not the recommend 70 so I moved it over closer to the radiator. Sure enough a few hours later the temperature was up closer to 70 and there were happy little bubble raising from within. And so now I’m back to waiting. Oh, and for the record my initial gravity was 1.052.
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