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Hello and happy new year! It’s been a long couple of weeks and the posts I want to make are starting to fuzz up in my memory so I need to start cranking them out lest I forget what I’ve done for the past month.

First up is documenting my second attempt at homebrewing. As this is only my second attempt, I’m still working from kits. I picked one that seemed a little more complicated than the last one: BrewCraft Heather n Honey Deep Brown Kit:

A variation on an American style of brown ale, this beer is heavier and darker than typical English brown ales. It also has the unusual addition of wild-harvested Scottish Heather tips in place of flavor and aroma hops, for a unique floral/herbal twist. Heather was once used for both medicinal and flavoring purposes in ancient Scottish and English ales before hops were readily available. Nowadays it is used to create a stand-apart brown ale by brewers in both the UK and US. We include rare Meadowfoam honey which has a “caramel-marshmallow” flavor and aroma; we think it’s ideally suited to compliment the flavors and aromas of toasted brown malt and heather in this beer.

I steeped the grains in 3 gallons of filtered tap water at 165* for 10 minutes.  Then I removed the grain and added 3 pounds of Breiss dry malt (amber). Dry malt is weird – if you don’t stir vigorously, it chunks up into – looking bits.

You can see some of the malt stuck to the side of my tub. You can also see the pan I used to make scrambled eggs next to that.

I brought the wort to a boil. The instructions warned me that it might boil over, but it never did. It foamed about as much as it is in the above picture. I added 1 ounce of US Northern Brewer Pellet Bittering Hops and boiled for 45 minutes. Then I added 4 ounces of dried heather tips and 2 more pounds of Breiss Dry Malt (amber).

I stirred this for 1 minute and boiled for 12 minutes.

I transferred the wort to the fermenting bucket, making sure to pour vigorously to aerate it properly. I then put it in my sink full of ice until it reached about 70*. I sprinkled dry yeast on top and put the lid on.

It’s been sitting in the primary fermenter since 12/9. I was thinking of doing a secondary fermentation to clarify the beer, as some friends had recommended, but after doing some research on the homebrew forums I decided to just leave it in the primary fermenter for longer than the 2 weeks the instructions recommended.

Tonight I’m going to add the sugar (which is in the form of raspberry honey!) and bottle it. It’ll be a long time before I can taste it (more on why later..) which will help me work on patience for bottle conditioning. I won’t be tempted to open it a week after bottling, like last time, which didn’t end well.

Victory is mine. My IPA is done and it is amazingly good. But it wasn’t all hops and malt.. check out Part I and Part II  to read more about the process.

I bottled the beer on October 19th. The recipe that came with the kit said it would be ready in two weeks. I was curious, so I opened a bottle after a week of bottle conditioning and the beer shot out of the bottle. I went to the beer brewing book I had and it told me that I clearly had some kind of terrible fungus or disease or something that has completely ruined my beer. I figured it was right, because if you remember, I did accidentally use a non-sanitized item to stir the wort with before I realized what I was doing. Clearly I had ruined my beer.

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and I googled around and looked at some homebrewing message boards. They suggested that beers need a MINIMUM of 3 weeks in the bottle before they’re ready, and any blowout from the bottle is just the carbonation escaping from the uh, yeast flatulence that hadn’t pushed its way back into the beer. None of the bottles exploded or had caps that looked like they were about to burst, so I took the three week conditioning advice to heart and let the bottles sit (not after opening another one just to make sure, of course.)

After two and a half weeks or so, I opened another. It didn’t come shooting out everywhere. It tasted like an IPA. It still tasted sort of green, as if it wasn’t quite ready, but it was drinkable. Now that we’re about 4 weeks in, the bitter bite of the beer seems to have receded in favor of the smooth hoppiness of a decent IPA. It’s no Dogfish Head 90 Minute, but I made it, it’s not full of evil bacteria, and it tastes good. Victory.

I ordered another beer brewing kit. I went for something a little more interesting – a BrewCraft Heather n Honey Deep Brown Kit. It sounds interesting. I just hope it’s not too flowery!