Merry Christmas!!! I hope you had a wonderful day full of family and love and food and happiness! I’ll try to recap the foods sometime soon, but first, I need to recap a very important gift!
One of my presents was from my brother and his wife (aka “the vegans”, now to be known as “the brewers”), and I got to utilize that today! I’ll give you one guess…
If you still don’t know, the brewers took me to pick up a homebrew kit!
We stopped by The Home Wine, Beer and Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills to get supplies and ingredients for my first ever homebrew!
Carboy fermenter and fermenter lock and stopper.
The home brewer’s bible.
Pitchable yeast.
6.5 pounds of amber extract.
I’ll do a basic glazing over of the steps we took to make my beer so I don’t bore you too much. First off, and the most important step:
Try an amazing beer that you’ve never had before – this one was made with Nelson Sauvin hops that are only grown in New Zealand. The aroma is very familiar to apricot and pineapple, and the taste has a slight similarity to orange juice, with plenty of hops aftertaste.
Me likey!
We boiled about 3 gallons of water, then added the extract and brought it back to a rolling boil.
Stirring like crazy!
Boiling sugar. Yummmm!
We added an ounce of Hallertau hops and boiled the wort for an hour, then added another ounce of hops for aroma and cooled it in an ice bath.
After the temperature had been brought down to about 75 degrees, we sanitized the fermenter and the siphoning setup with Star-San.
After draining the sanitizing fluid, we siphoned the beer directly from the boiling pot into the carboy.
Awesomeness!
Afterwards we topped it off with filtered water to bring it up to five gallons, put the stopper and air lock on, then stowed in my closet to ferment for two weeks.
I don’t have any clothes left in my closet, but I think beer is more important anyway!
Now I just need to think up a name – any suggestions? It’s an amber ale, so I’ll probably include “amber” in the name. Maybe Dec-Amber? Too corny?
C’mon, I need help here!