Beer!

by Crystal

While Katie is cultivating her garden, we're over here cultivating our drinking habits. For Christmas, E gave me brewing instruments and a kit to make our own beer! And now that March has rolled around, we decided it was about time we give it a go.

A few weeks ago, we stayed in for a date night to get this thing started. Conveniently, the kit came with all of the ingredients we needed, and had very thorough instructions which we followed closely, as we didn't want to screw it up and make an entire case of bad beer. So much pressure!! Here's a few glimpses into making our first IPA...

Remember to sanitize everything beforehand!!

You need a super large pot to boil the water and ingredients.

The glass carboy: before.

We saved empty bottles of beer we drank together - maybe one of my favorite parts of the whole process :)

Ingredients.

Helpful hint: This book is very informative!

The glass carboy: after!

 It takes a week for the beer to ferment in the carboy, so we left it on the counter to watch. The first few days it was really active! We could see the liquid swirling around, and the water bubbling up in the air tight cap. After the fermentation was complete, we were ready to bottle. So last Saturday, we spent the afternoon in the kitchen with 48 bottles and a siphon.

Empty bottles. Labels removed. We want to put our own labels on...what shall we name our beer??!

Mixing the priming sugar with the beer mixture.

Siphoning into bottles.

We were a few beers short when we were ready to bottle, we took one (or a few) for the team and drank some.

Doing my best not to make a mess.

Capping!

Our first homebrews.

Now we just need to wait 3-4 weeks until we can actually drink it!

If you like trying different kinds of beer, then this is something I definitely recommend doing. We found everything we needed on amazon.com to get started. We've had a lot of fun with this whole process. Stay tuned for another post with our assessment of how it tastes. In fact, we didn't even wait to see if this batch turned out well - we've already got an Oktoberfest in the mail! I guess we're pretty sure of our beer-making abilities.