Day 11, Sunday, January 11th, 2009 - Strange Brew

Sunday was a pretty good day. I slept in, which was great!! Then headed over to "The Rail", a restaurant/bar at the end of our street to watch the Sunday football game. David's and (by default, my) team, The Eagles played vs. the Giants. It was a pretty good game and the Eagles won, which was a huge deal because now all they have to do is beat the Cardinals and they are in the Superbowl. Not bad for a wild card team.

Later in the afternoon, a bunch of our friends came over and brewed beer. This is a hobby of Davids and a couple of our friends also brew or wanted to learn. It was interesting to see how it all works.

First you have to clean and sanitize the living daylights out of everything, before you start and in addition to that each and every time you use it.

Then you add and combine all your grains with some water and steep them, this is called Mash. The resulting tea-like substance is then added to other ingredients and seasonings depending on the type of beer you're making then boiled for an hour or so. This is called "Wort".
Once done, you pour it through a sieve, into a big fermenting jug. You have to let the Wort cool down before adding the yeast. This takes patience and when your patience runs out a little snow (hopefully you'll have some) and when your lack of patience finally turns to desperation frozen vegetables are a good option as well.

Just before adding the yeast, you pour the cooled Wort into this beaker-looking thing, called a Hydrometer and taste it, which usually results in the making of a sour face. This will also tell you what percentage of alcohol your beer will be. Also known as a "Gravity Reading".

Once you've rinsed your mouth out with whatever secondary liquid you find near by, you then prepare the yeasted wort for fermenting. You stick some tubes in it and some other stuff and then put it in a cool dry place to sit and ferment for a week to two weeks, again, depending on the kind of beer you're making.

Everyone will come back in a couple weeks to bottle and cap their beers. From there they'll be refrigerated and stored for another couple of weeks until ready for drinking. That's about it for brewing beer, well in my words anyway.

~Kelli