Californication

... I prefer Tricerahops double IPA.

Holy hop explosion!

Now the real fun is about to start. Going from here

to there

only takes a siphon, clean bottles, caps and a bottle capper. Cleaning and sanitizing is as usual the most time consuming task.

In the first pic you can see the vinyl mesh bag that contains the ‘secret sauce’ (more about that later). It is clearly an amber or darker ale, which was the intent. A decent level of carbonation takes at least another week: the yeast, which was starving or near starving at this point, is now having a ball with the fresh meal (corn sugar), while us humans have an excruciating week or two left during which we can only wait!

These little guys (some look here rather dried out and imploded – they aren’t quite in their element in the high vacuum of the SEM) are only about a micron or two in size but they’re real workhorses. When they’re done feasting on the sugars and cranking out carbon dioxide and alcohol, things look like this:

This is starting to look pleasantly familiar!
Next: secondary fermentation, but first it’s time for some secret ingredients…

After the boil, it is time to cool. And cooling down has to be done as fast as possible, hence I made this contraption, a wort chiller: $8 worth of copper tubing from Home Depot, plus a bunch of flexible hoses and some fittings, and lots of fiddling around.

Before the Break:

After the Break:

The wonders of biochemistry! It has something to do with protein-polyphenol complexes becoming insoluble at 60 degrees C and below but I’ll spare you the details.

After the cooling, it will be time for some little critters called Saccharomyces but more about those later… let me just conclude here by saying that I love the smell of malt and hops in the morning…

It was on a lost Sunday morning in January…

Like with all proper engineering, the calculations fit on the back of an envelope – or, in this case, some old notepad from a conference I attended a few years ago. Some things are implicit (certain volumes, such as the one of my brew pot; and the hop utilization table, for which I consulted a book) but an extract+specialty grain brew comes as simple as this.

I’m not revealing the second part of the recipe yet, which is scribbled on the backside, as that contains the ‘special sauce’...

Making your own beer: few things can be as rewarding, I have found out (at least, if you like beer). You don’t need that much to get started, and a lot of the mystique is a bit overblown. What will certainly help you get going is a friend, family member or loved one with some experience, resources such as this fine book by John Palmer or this great site, and a local home brewing supplies store nearby (in casu, Fermentation Solutions in Campbell).

As a Belgian, I should have a genetic advantage as well, but to be honest, in all those years living there I hardly gave it any thought: beer was something to drink, not make. Also: I have to admit that these days I’m a little more into IPA (India Pale Ale, definitely not isopropanol!) and the likes than the typical Belgian beers. But I digress; I was happily surprised that there is a very active homebrewing scene here in the US (unlike back home, I’d say) – just check out the HomeBrewTalk forums. Lots of info there, and of course ideal to completely geek out on!

I did my share in said geeking out, as I took a yeast sample from the healthy krausen of my first batch (Rocky Ridge IPA), dried it out and shoved in into the SEM at work on a quiet moment to generate the SEM image in my first post on this – you’re looking at some saccharomyces from Fermentis, strain Safale US-50.

Oh, what is ‘krausen’? See below…

To be continued!