90 Shilling Ale - Part 3

I'm not sure if I've mentioned in prior posts, but with beer making, the entire process must be very sterile to not contaminate your final product. When it comes to the last stage in the beer process, I almost cringe. We have no dishwasher. Chalk that, my husband says we have a great dishwasher, aka me. Cleaning all of the bottles is a long, tedious process.

The day before we bottled the beer, I spent all night scrubbing and then boiling each bottle. In the morning, we checked the gravity one more time before siphoning the beer back into our brew bucket. The only purpose is because it has the nice tap on the bucket to fill each jar. As we siphoned over, we also combined the last addition, the priming sugar. (A combination of sugar and water.  This sets the yeast to eat more sugar creating CO2, bringing the delicious bubbles to our beer.)

To minimize foam while you are filling the bottles, we recommend to tip them on an angle.

Make sure you leave some head space!

Let sit in a dark, room temp place for 2 weeks. Be patient.

After your 2 weeks, chill a bottle to test.

Ahhh perfect! This batch is ready to share with everyone for Christmas!

90 Shilling Ale - Part 2

It is always exciting to open up the bucket of beer after the initial fermentation process. It already smells like beer.

You can see just how violently the beer was bubbling in the first stage as it is stuck to the lid and up the sides of the bucket.

One item we are a little lax on is checking the gravity with a hydrometer. This is a measure of the alcohol content by measuring the amount of sugar left in the beer. We are a little bit under where the recipe says we should be. (This could be due to us having to use different yeast because our beer supply shop was out of the variety the recipe called for.)

Content with the reading, we proceed by siphoning the beer from our 5 gallon brew bucket, into a large 5 gallon glass jug.

We do have a tap on the bottom of our brew bucket, but I recommend siphoning it over from the top. As you get to the bottom, there is a lot of sediment. Even though it is healthy and fine to eat, it is just not as appealing to have floaters in your beer. It is said that a lot of this is B vitamins and it is supposed to help with not getting your usually headache/hangover.

Once we reach the "sludge" on the bottom, we remove the siphon so we don't suck it up. We then put the normal bubbler on top of the jug. It sits in this next stage for a week. It will still be bubbling but not as actively as the 1st stage as it continues to ferment.

Continue to keep the beer in a dark area, with consistent temperatures. We want to brew beer and not make anything else. Sunlight can cause other unwanted bacteria to grow.

It is also recommended in all stages of the beer process to not bake bread or other foods with yeast. As it can come in contact with the beer and change the flavor.

Next step is bottling the beer! Stay tuned!

90 Shilling Ale- Part 1

When my husband and I first started dating, he had recently bought the house we live in today. Him and his best friend would remodel a room of the house, each brew a different batch of beer and then have all their friends over to help drink it up.

Though my husband and I don't drink very often, it became a fun process that we do occasionally. We will share with friends and family this year for Christmas.

We have a great local shop full of beer supplies. They help you get the grain and grind it up, As well as the yeast, malt and other items. We follow the Brew-Master's Bible by Stephen Snyder.

First we take a bit of water, heat according to directions and put in your bag of grains. Essentially you are making a "tea."

Then we added into our large stock pot with more water and bring to a boil adding the different kinds of malt. This recipe called for a powder and syrup malt.

Next we added in the hops.

And you continue to boil and boil and boil.

The hardest part is cooling down the beer before adding the yeast. It can't be too hot or the yeast will die. (or too cold) That is one reason why we enjoy making beer in the cooler months here in Michigan. We already had a bunch of snow, so my husband, Nate, took the pot outside and set it in the snow, monitoring the temperature to get it down to 70 degrees.

Then we put it into our 5 gallon bucket for the first stage of fermentation. Added the yeast and some more water. Let this sit according to directions. In our case about 5 days.

This beer recipe we have done before and in the past it built up so much pressure we couldn't use the traditional bubbler. So we attached our siphoning hose to the top of the bucket to a canning jar filled with some water.

The 2nd part of the fermentation process to be continued in part 2- coming soon.

Can't wait to show you the whole process!