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.