For our second batch of homebrew we used a Wheat Beer recipe kit and added an orange ”tea” to the fermenter with the beer (which you can read about here). The goal was to add some citrus flavor and aroma to the beer and it was certainly a success.

This brew pours a rich amber-orange color with considerable haze. There is minimal head, which disappoints me a bit since our first batch had such thick, creamy head. With little to no head to speak of, lacing is poor to non-existent.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that we were blown away but the aroma when we opened the fermenter for the first time. When we opened our first bottles we were equally pleased. We achieved our goal of adding citrus aroma to the brew with the orange zest, yet it is not overwhelming. The malt is also prominent in the aroma, but there is little in the way of hops aroma.

This beer basically tastes like a poor-man’s Hefeweizen, which is really what we were going for (considering we were brewing an all-extract rather than an all-grain beer). The citrus flavor is definitely prominent; the addition of the oranges really come through. It is sweet, but not too sweet for my liking. Also, this batch tasty much less yeasty than our first. Finally, there is little bit of bite from the hops on the finish which was lacking in our first batch. Body is light to medium and feels a bit watery.

Jason purchased a hydrometer, so we were able to test the gravity of our beer before and after fermentation in order to measure its alcohol content. The recipe, if followed exactly, states that the beer should be around 4.5-5% ABV. Assuming I did the calculation correctly this beer comes in at around 6.2% ABV, meaning the additional sugar from the oranges really did help.

Overall, this brew is a huge improvement on our first batch and I’m higly pleased. We’ve learned a lot have begun discussions some of our future projects. What excites me the most about this batch is that, although the recipe is not entirely our own, we had a vision of what we wanted to create and it turned out as well, if not better, than we could have hoped. Our next step will be to create a recipe that is our own without the use of kit.

Note Regarding Batch 1: Jason shared a few bottles of our first batch with some folks he works with, and one woman in particular happens to be a great cook. She liked the beer so much that she made a barbecue sauce using our beer as a base and used that to make barbecue wings. I was not fortunate enough to try them, but I hear they were amazing!

Since we deemed our first batch of brew a success, and since we felt that we had learned a lot from the experience, we felt comfortable enough trying something new. For our second batch we purchased a Wheat Beer recipe kit from our local homebrewing supply store which contained all the ingredients we would need for a simple wheat beer. Our intentions, however, were not to brew a simple wheat beer.

For the most part, we followed the instructions included with the recipe kit exactly was they were written. However, after the brewing was complete, we added our own ingredients to the beer; Oranges! We started with six whole oranges and grated some peel into a bowl. The idea was to use the orange zest to add some citrus flavor to the beer. Next, we cut up all six oranges into small pieces, adding the pieces and zest to one half gallon of water to steep at around 150 to 160 degrees. Our hope was that the orange pieces would add some additional citrus flavor to be beer while also providing some additional sugar to the mix (hopefully increasing the alcohol content). It’s important to note that when cutting the oranges, the white part of the peel is to be avoided. This part of the peel will cause your beer to become quite bitter.

Once the brew and the oranges were cool enough, we added them both into our fermenter and pitched our yeast. This particular recipe calls for a fermentation period of only one week, but we allowed it to ferment for about ten days. We transferred our first batch into a secondary fermenter after one week and allowed it to ferment for another two weeks before bottling. However, with this batch, we decided not to transfer to a secondary and bottled it after the 10-day fermentation period.

When it came time to bottle the beer and we opened the fermenter for the first time, we were greeted with the most awesome aroma of bready malt and citrus. The orange aroma was quite a bit more intense than I had anticipated, but I was in no way disappointed. Bottling went off without a hitch, and we ended up with a total of 50 bottles.

We allowed the beer to carbonate in the bottles for about a week and a half before refrigerating and tasting. I will post our review and final thoughts on this brew later.

After several long weeks of waiting, our first homebrew is finally ready. It has been a fun and exciting process, but this is the moment of truth. This is when we’ll know if all time and energy we’ve invested have paid off, or if it was all a tremendous waste. Going into the project, we told ourselves that this beer really only had to be slightly better than Bud Light for it to be economically worthwhile. Let’s find out if that’s the case.

At each step in the brewing process there was a certain amount of anxiety over whether or not we were doing everything correctly. Is that fermenter sanitized well enough? Is the yeast still alive? Will our beer sour? Is it carbonated enough? The worst possible scenario would be to open that first bottle, taste it, and realize we’d be dumping 50 bottles down the drain.

I admit I was nervous as we opened the first bottles, but my nerves ease a bit when I hear the first “Tssss” as the cap is pried off of the bottle. Well, at least we know it’s carbonated, I say to myself, becoming more excited as the realization begins to set in that we may have actually done this right!

The beer pours a rich amber color with a lot of haze, which is to be expected since we did not filter out the yeast. I’m surprised by the two fingers-worth of thick, creamy, off-white head; it was considerably more than I had expected. I am also struck by just how carbonated it is; I can see a lot bubbles rising to the top from the bottom of the glass. So now we know it sounds like beer and it looks like beer. But does it smell like beer?

In short, Yes. The aroma is dominated by bread malts, no doubt due to the six-plus pounds of malt extract used in the brewing process. There is some noticeable hops aroma as well, but not as much as I would have expected. In fact, there actually seems to be a bit of a sweetness to the aroma that I didn’t really expect.

So, how does it taste? I raise the glass and sip the beer from beneath the thick layer of frothy head and the first thing that hits me is the malt. There is some caramel flavor present which adds a bit of sweetness to the taste. There is only a small amount of hops bitterness on the finish, which is a bit of a disappointment. Where I would expect the get a bite from the hops, as in other  Pale Ales, there is a bit of emptiness in this beer. It’s not a bad taste, it just tastes like something is missing. Since we did not have a hydrometer at the beginning of the process, we don’t know exactly how much alcohol is in the beer. If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s in the 5% to 5 1/2% range. Overall I am pleased with the outcome, considering this is our first foray into beer-making.

This has been an exciting process and something that I’m sure will become a regular hobby for Jason and I. In fact, just a couple days ago we began brewing our second batch of beer. We’ve learned from this first batch and we’ve added our own twist to an existing recipe and, hopefully, we’ll end up with an even better brew. We’ll have more on this in a later post, though. Until then, I’m going to go enjoy some more homebrew! Cheers!

Our first batch of beer seems to be going rather smoothly so far. As I mentioned here, the brew was transferred from the primary fermenter to the secondary last week. Upon a brief taste test by Jason, it seems to be on it’s way to being a pretty good brew. This week he will be working on removing labels from some bottles he had slated for recycling. He plans to sanitize them on Wednesday night and we should be bottling on Thursday. This is a pretty exciting step in the process because it puts us one step closer to drinking!

Today we made a trip to Gentile’s, The Wine Sellers, a local wine shop that also has a great selection of homebrewing supplies, where we picked up the tubing needed for bottling and a capper. Also, since we had a slight issue during our primary fermentation in which the beer was bubbling up into the air lock (we put five gallons of beer in a five gallon bucket which left little room at the top), we bought a 7 gallon bucket to use as our primary fermenter going forward.

Finally, we purchased another recipe kit for our second brew, this time a wheat beer. For our first batch, we did not stray from the instructions included with the kit at all for fear of ruining our beer. After going through entire brewing process once, and doing some additional research, we feel comfortable making some alterations to the wheat beer recipe. We have an idea in mind that we’re going to try, but more on this later. It should make for a pretty tasty brew, though!

I mentioned not long ago that I was giving some serious thought to brewing my own beer. It’s something that Jason and I had been talking about for a while but neither of  us had gotten around to purchasing the necessary materials. Well, the day after I wrote that post, Jason took the initiative by getting everything we needed, and on Saturday we brewed our first batch of beer!

For our first batch, Jason decided it would be best to keep things simple and go with a boxed recipe kit rather than attempt to create our own from scratch. The thought process behind the decision is that if we follow the instructions, we’d be hard pressed to screw it up. Given the time it takes to brew a batch of beer, the last thing we want to do is dump five gallons down the drain (especially not my first batch). The recipe he selected is a basic pale ale.

We started off by bringing our initial two and half gallons of spring water up to about 160 degrees to steep the grains. This part of the process is much like making a giant pot of tea. The picture below shows the grains in a mesh sleeve steeping for about 20 minutes.

The bittering hops are added first and this boils for about 40 minutes. As our brew continued to boil, Jason’s entire home was filed with an amazing hops aroma. After the 40 minute boil was complete, we added the second can of malt extract and boiled for another 20 minutes. Lastly we added the second round of hops; the aroma hops.

Once the boil was complete, we needed to cool the beer quickly to an appropriate temperature in order to pitch the yeast. This is a part of the process that we’ll need to better plan for next time around. Ideally, I would have liked to submerge our boil pot in a bucket of ice to cool it quickly. We were not prepared to do that, so we poured our beer into the thoroughly sterilized fermenter and it cooled slowly in the fermenter whilst submerged in a storage tote filled with cold water. This process took longer than I would have liked, but it worked out fine.

Rather than spend a lot of money on a pre-assembled kit of brewing equipment, Jason made two fermenters on his own by added spigots and air locks to a couple of 5-gallon, food-grade plastic paint buckets. It was an inexpensive solution and will provide us with the flexibility needed when transferring the beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary, and when bottling.

The most worrisome part of process for me was pitching the yeast because this is the most crucial step, yet it’s the step where the most can go wrong. If we had not sanitized our equipment properly, or if our beer had not cooled enough, all of work to this point would be for naught. Fortunately, less than 24 hours after we pitched the yeast we had fermentation.

As much as I love beer, I admit that I am far from an expert on the topic. However, ever since I was introduced to craft beer, I’ve been intrigued by the various styles of beer and the interesting ingredients used to produces them. Also, I’m deeply fascinated by the delicate process of brewing a great beer.

Therefore, in an effort to gain a better understanding of what it take to brew a really great beer, and to gain a greater appreciation of the brews and the artists that craft them, I’ve recently given serious consideration to homebrewing. I can’t imagine a better way to get closer to an art form that you love (and I’m sure we can agree that brewing is, indeed, an art form) than to do it yourself. I imagine the only thing better than a great beer is a great beer crafted from your own hands and imagination.

Having said all of that, I have some concerns:

1. Patience: Do I have the patience to brew a batch of beer? I understand that it can be a lengthy process, and I’m not known to be the most patient person in the world.
2. Commitment: How committed will I actually be to brewing beer beyond, say, my first batch or two? I’m sure the quality of the beers I produce will have a lot to do with, but I don’t want to make an investment in brewing equipment that will just get stored in the basement four months from now.
3. Quality: How good will be beer be? I have zero brewing experience and I’d hate to spend a lot of time and money and end up with a crappy beer.

Therefore, I ask for your help. If you’re an experienced homebrewer and you can offer any advise for newbie regarding equipment, recipes or resources (books, articles, etc), it would be greatly appreciated. In return, I’ll share my (hopefully good) experiences along my homebrewing journey with you each step of the way.