Busy Busy Day

Yesterday turned out to be long and productive.

The Apfelwein I put together six weeks ago was bottled:

The bottle drying tree with thirty cleaned and sanitized twenty two ounce bottles

Six and a half gallon carboy filled with fermented and cleared Apfelwein

A glass of the finished product minus carbonation

Twenty nine bottles filled with cider and primed for natural carbonation

At this point, the Apfelwein tastes like rocket fuel made from apples with an almost dry white wine quality to it. Cabonation should take three weeks and after a total of six weeks the rocket fuel quality should have mellowed out quite a bit. The ABV is at 8.8% and may rise slightly during carbonation.

Later in the day a good friend of mine came over to help brew a Blonde Ale. This type of beer is light and color and has a lighter flavor. I decided that this beer would be easy for my first all grain batch because it doesn't use a lot of grain or other ingredients. It sticks to the basics: water, grains, hops, and yeast. This beer should be ready to bottle in about a week and to drink two to three weeks after bottling. We finished about 9pm after starting around 3:30pm. Two trips to Staples had to be made to buy a scale to measure the hops and than exchange the non-working scale in the middle of brewing.

Boil kettle set up

Spent grains in the mash tun.

The wort boiling away towards the end of the hour long boil. The device on top has a bag that holds the hops. The copper tubes are connected to the wort chiller to bring the hot wort down to a suitable temperature for adding yeast.

Finished wort cooling down.

This beer should be a little below 4% ABV when it is done and the color should lighten up quite a bit. I forgot to take pictures of the beer once it was transferred into a carboy. It is in the basement fermenting at a good rate now and it began bubbling away C02 late last night.

Happenings with my "brewery"

I have been somewhat busy the last few weeks building a few pieces of equipment to be able to brew a batch of beer. I have one thing left to build and then it will be time for brewing the Centennial Blonde I have been planning for awhile.

So, on to what I have built:

Here is the final product of the keg I cut up a few weeks ago. I have mounted a three piece stainless steel valve and a sight glass with a thermometer and graduations. Not pictured is the inside of the kettle where there is a stainless steel pickup tube that goes to the bottom of the keg.

A wort chiller, which is used for cooling down hot wort ("raw" un-fermented beer) before adding yeast and beginning fermentation. Hoses were mounted on each side and one side is hooked up to a garden hose.

This is a detail shot of the coil and the copper wire I used to tie everything together.

I also built an inline water filter with a carbon insert that will remove the chlorine from tap water. I can hang the filter on the side of the keg and control the flow with a valve. I will post pictures of this later.

The cooling coil and kettle were leak tested last night and, with any luck, I can finish interpreting a water quality report I got and build one last piece of equipment today. That way I can brew tomorrow in addition to bottling the Apfelwein I started six weeks ago.