Saturday Brewday - "Before" Picture

I'm sitting here sipping a bottle of my Red Ale. It is cold, frosty and delicious. Right now, I have a bag of grain steeping in the brew kettle outside. My basic setup is a 7-gallon stainless steel brew kettle, which is basically a big kitchen pot. It sits on a propane burner on the patio in the back of the house. I filled it with 3.5 gallons of filtered water, and a bag of pre-measured grains which came in a kit. The kit comes from a home-brewer supply store.

I heated the water to 160 degrees F, dropped the grain bag in, and put a cover on. The bag will sit in the water for about half an hour. Then, I uncapped a bottle of my previous home brew, and here I am. The next step will be to dissolve a pail of concentrated LME, which is Liquefied Malt Extract. It comes in a drum, and the brewer's supply guys put it in plastic buckets about a gallon in size. I get the pre-mixed grain, a bucket of LME, and some hops, along with an instruction sheet, which together is basically The Kit.

For this batch, I have a couple of variations planned. The grain is for a Pale Ale, and so I'm going to try to make an IPA, India Pale Ale. IPA is a class of beer once brewed for export in England. They sent it to India. Before IPA, they just sent regular ale, but it sometimes would spoil before it got there, so they modified the recipe to add more sugar in the wort, and some extra hops. That way, it would arrive intact. IPA tends to have more alcohol, and a stronger flavor of hops. Normally, the Pale Ale recipe calls for an ounce of hops, so I will add an extra ounce of hops, and some extra sugar. I'm not using malt sugar, I'm using agave extract, which is what tequila comes from. This will add some sugars, and some impurities which will give the brew a honey-like flavor.

Well, it's been about half an hour. It may not seem like it since reading this took only a couple of minutes. Writing it took half an hour. Stay tuned for my latest developments, coming this afternoon, on this same page.