Home Brewing

This past week two new batches of beer have been started. Truckman recently took a special Thursday at a local brewery to learn the ropes and get an idea of what large scale (by no means large considering there are such large corporations like Budweiser that basically own all companies that make the majority of commercial beer these days) really means. He got some supplies from the friendly folk, an awesome yeast culture,(which is simply taken from the bottom of their fermenting tank after it settles, it's eaten through a lot of sugar and multiplied itself, they just open up the spigot and out comes beautiful usable yeast, the circle goes round) and 5 gallons of mash liquid the liquid that holds the most sugars that are taken after sparging the grains to attain maximum sugar extraction.

With this he started basically a clone recipe of the pubs IPA (India Pale Ale) a traditionally English style beer with a higher alcohol content, and our favorite bittering agent hops!)

A couple of days later we decided to make a mild brown ale, we're not sure what will come of it. We were originally going to follow a recipe from an old Fermenters Digest, but after Truckman did some math the alcohol content was going to something close to a non-alcoholic beverage, so we decided to modify it. There is a mix of chocolate malt, and crystal malt, the chocolate being used quite often in stouts The old Fermenters Digest was gifted by the loving brew mama at Christmastime last year, and contain all kinds of interesting articles, hand typed, with hand done drawings and very homegrown feel.

The IPA is on its way into the secondary fermenter tomorrow, and we're going to do some dry hopping, the process of adding hops after brewing and fermenting for a short while. This helps to add more aroma and adds an extra bittering agent.

We've been looking into doing some hand silkscreening labels onto beer bottles, modifying equipment, and improving our setup. The book above by Charlie Papazian, a big homebrewing guru may be providing us with our next recipe, a stout. So far IPA's and regular Pale Ales have been our specialty but I think we're ready to take on the task.

I apologize if all of the explanations aren't clear, I'm doing a lot of learning myself on the whole art of brewing in general, types of beer, and the special skills involved in homebrewing. Most of which seem to involve fast problem solving, and the gathering of odd kitchen implements to help with the process! It's also a requirement to dump water all over yourself at some point, and also lifting large containers of water onto uncomfortably high surfaces.