Amateur Homebrewing

Hey, Imgur.

Today I'll be sharing my favorite hobby, Homebrewing. I do this strictly for recreation and it brings me a sense of fulfillment. Hopefully it'll be just as interesting to you as it is to me and maybe you'll learn something new!

Above are the additives for a 3-gallon batch of Braggot ale. The white powder is urea nitrate (yeast nutrient) and citric acid, the purple stuff is lavender and juniper berries, the packet is champagne yeast, and way in the back is about five pounds (or a bit more than 2 kg) of local honey.

Fun Fact: I picked the flavor additives from that throwaway line at the beginning of Skyrim that Ralof spouts on the way to Helgen about wondering if "Hod still makes that mead with Juniper berries in it".

Additives for a 1-gallon batch of Imperial Oatmeal Milk Stout. Brown powder is Mexican hot chocolate and ground coffee beans. Packet is California or West-Coast IPA yeast. The white powder is lactose, which gives the beer a slightly thicker body and a sweeter taste.

The two mashes in the initial 'cooking' phase. Braggot is on the left, Stout is on the right.

Temp check! I try to keep the brew temperature as close to 140°F as possible to get as much fermentable sugar out of the grain as possible. I cut the heat for a few minutes after this to stabilize.

Spent grains from the stout.
The idea is to get as much wort (pre-beer grain liquid) out of the grain as possible without leaching out tannins that will give it that bitter wine-esque dryness.

Some of the grains sloshed into the collection pot. I strained them out because every little bit of wort counts down the road.

The spent grains from the braggot. There was less slosh because the grains were finer and there were less proportional to the wort. The honey makes up half the body of fermentable material, so you use about half the grain you would for a brew of this size.

After this, I sparged the spent grains by running hot water over them for about 15 minutes to get the last bits of usable wort out. It's an involved process to make sure you don't make a mess, so I didn't document that step. :(

I realized I hadn't taken any pictures of my hops so i had to dig way back for my first foray into homebrewing. This was done about a year ago at my in-laws' house.
The type and amount of hops you use and when you add them to the secondary boil depends on what you're trying to do.

Fun fact: IPA's have twice the bittering hops of a regular Pale Ale because the beer would taste limp or go bad by the time British sailors could transport it to India. The hops have antiseptic properties and give the beer a unique flavor hipsters and beer snobs the world over swear by.

And here's where the magic happens!
The Boil. At the start of the boil, you typically add your bittering hops. Because I'm a hipster, I bittered the Braggot like an IPA. If that sounds pasé, believe me when I say that it complements the herbal characteristics of the Juniper and Lavender.

The honey goes in in the last five minutes because you lose the flavor any earlier in.

Meta fun-fact: That Mead Ralof was daydreaming about is based loosely on Sahti, a Finnish beer that uses Juniper with or in place of Hops, then filtered through juniper branches before it's fermented.
To my knowledge, it contains no honey.

The Boil for the Stout. It gets hopped way less aggressively than most beers because you're drinking for the additives and grain character, not the hop.
I put the chocolate and coffee in at the very end after the boil was removed from the heat source. If you boil coffee in a beer, it makes it super astringent and stale-tasting.

This is the carboy I fermented the Braggot in. The sandy material is the flocculated (dead) yeast and protein that has settled out of the beer. The cloudy residue is Krausen, a nasty bitter byproduct from the initial stages of fermentation. It's a mix of hop bits, sucrose and yeast cells that foam up when the yeast really gets after converting sugar into alcohol. The device up top is an airlock to keep oxygen and bacteria out while releasing gasses from the carboy.

My one gallon experimental batch carboy. Note the improvised airlock. I had a blowout where the krausen flooded my airlock and I didn't have ready access to a replacement. The strip on the side is thermal tape, and indicates exterior and interior temperatures of the carboy. Some beers do well in higher temperatures, some do better in low.

Fun fact: Pilsner beers (Budweiser, Heineken, Miller) need temps below 50°F or the yeast gets funknasty.

Pre-bottling staging.

Here, I check the gravity (density) of the beer. The hydrometer on the right works on the principle of buoyancy to measure a liquid's density. When you brew the initial wort, you generally want a high gravity, and for it to be as low as possible at the end. This means more sugar was converted into alcohol and the beer is a strong one.

The stout is somewhere around 9.4.

Final gravity of 1.010, or as close to perfect as I'm gonna get.

The bottles sanitized and ready to be filled.

Fun fact: Beer comes in brown bottles to block UV radiation, which 'skunks' beer and makes it taste foul.

Using a racking cane, airline tubing and a hose clamp to bottle as in the olden times.

I add a simple syrup solution to the beer right before this step to bottle-carbonate the beer. Industrial brewers force-carbonate with fancy equipment.

My bottle caps and capper reporting for duty.

I can't upsell the Red Baron capper enough. It's quick, efficient, and well-made.

It's done!

And that's the bulk of the Braggot. I had some spares, but I put those in flip-top bottles because I like even numbers.

Apologies for gross feet.

Dani Tax.
She's my pumpkin.