Beer Girl. I am a girl who loves making and drinking beer.

It's true. I am a girl who loves beer. I love learning about and partaking in many different kinds of foods, wines, sake, coffee ......but mostly, and truly, I love beer..........(OK- coffee ties.) Especially super hoppy IPAs. And I loved them enough that I decided to learn how to make them myself. That's kind of saying alot for me- because it ain't no simple process, crafting a beer. It's a fricking science project, complete with precise degree-ery and vials and vats and boilovers.......... so many instructions that my brain literally HURT after our first batch (AND our 2nd!). Mad scientists, I guess we are. Mad for beer.

One of our firsts!

So we undertook the task of making our first batch of beer this past December. We started our brew on Nov. 30 and it was bottled and delicious by December 21st! We modeled our recipe after Lagunitas IPA but substituted the hops they called for with our own that we grew last summer! It turned out lovely, with about 6.7% alcohol. We were very proud of our first born- our Solstice Brew....which we named "Hoppin' A Feel".....among other names. Anyhow, we were almost finished with our last bottle from the first batch a couple days ago(5 gallons makes 42 or so 16 oz beers!!!!!) and we needed to get brewing on the 2nd batch. By the way, 42 bottles of good beer costs about 200 bucks at $4.50- $5.00 a bottle...so we are saving some serious money doing this as well! The cost of each batch is about 30-40 dollars! After startup costs of course...........


Modeling some of our last bottles from Batch Numero Uno.

Aha! A little navigation thru the process.

This handbook is my bible, constantly referring to it. (One of the contributing factors to my brain literally HURTING though)

OK. The bag on the left is full of the grains to be steeped, four different kinds, kindly cracked by the nice lady with the grinder at Sierra Moonshine Brewing Supplies.....Steeping these grains is Step One. The middle bags are dried malt extract.....which come into the brew at Step Two.


You put the cracked grains into a metal pot and then cover them with about ten cups of hot water....154 degrees to be precise. You then soak them in that pot, in an oven turned to 154 degrees, for 45 minutes.

Then, with a wire colander, you strain the water out of those grains into an even bigger pot and you make sure to get all the precious drops pressed out as to get that flavor into your beer. That part is called "sparging". You have to pour more 154 degree water (which you have been heating) over your colander and smash all the flavor out.

Then you add the Dried Malt Extract (DME) to the grain water and as much more water as you can add to the pot with room at the top so it doesn't boil over. And you add your hop bag...a vinyl mesh bag that sits in the brew during the whole time it boils. You add the hops in increments as the recipe calls for. Note our hops and scale to the right of them. We have to do our brew in two pots as we only have a 3 1/2 gallon pot and a smaller one. In our small pot we just boil the hops loose and then strain them out at the end.


The boiling goes on for so long that every single window in our house gets fogged up. This recipe calls for a full HOUR AND A HALF of boiling the hops and brew. And every half hour you add more hops....and what you are making is called "wort". This time we used hops from our crop last year as well as some amazing smelling Cascades that we bought. You lose some water with all the steam during the time that it's boiling as it's best to not have the brew covered with a lid. (Lets the impurities escape) We make up for water loss at the end by boiling an extra gallon or so of water and adding it in to the final bucket. (Everything has to be boiled so as to stay sterilized!)

Finally....when the boil is over....you fill a large tub with ice water, so as to cool the wort as quickly as possible down to about 75 degrees. At this point in the process ART DITCHED OUT ON ME (band practice) and I had to finish the brew alone!!! Pretty scary as 5 gallons of sticky sterile wort can be a really heavy thing to be left with! First I let each of our two brew pots cool down a bit in the tub....but then I had to strain them out and transfer the wort from BOTH to a 7 gallon fermentation bucket to finish cooling it. Because at some point you have to combine the two pots and add the extra sterilized water to make the full five gallons! I was a bit overwhelmed doing this pouring alone. You have to be SO careful....A: because if it gets on your floor this stuff is a sticky PAIN to clean up. And B: Because you have to be so fricking STERILE about everything. You can't touch your arm into the bucket or anything. Only a sterilized spoon. Needless to say I was a bit frazzled.

After straining it into the big bucket.
Plus, the cooling part is kind of a pain in the butt. You have to have a pitcher of the sterilization fluid prepared and ready for utensils to constantly be soaked. This solution is made from iodine and if you were at the Unicorn Brew Amateur Film Festival in Placerville you might have seen it's cinematic debut in Shane Skogberg's amazing videojournal film that shows it dissolving into a carboy jug. (A possible metaphor?) ANYHOO....the cooling takes FOREVER and you have to constantly sterilize the spoon you are stirring with AS WELL AS the thermometer you are taking readings with and you can't just add cold water into the wort to cool it or anything. You have to just WAIT. Stir and stir and stir. You can't really just leave the lid off either (to let the steam escape) and go take an hour long break cause weird stuff could fall in. You have to babysit the cooling wort. Or at least....that's what I think you're supposed to do. I get overly worried about everything though, so I am sure other people are way more lax. But after all the painstaking measuring and boiling and creating of the wort, I'll be DAMNED if some stray ant or piece of lint is gonna fall in MY brew. You can't get anything in the wort so as to not contaminate it's precious cleanliness - for it is stray bacteria or wild yeasts that roam free in even just the air that can actually ruin a good beer! So you have to just set it there....in the bathtub for us, and keep taking off the lid and stirring it with a sterile spoon and keep stirring the ice water in the tub (with anything BUT your sterile spoon) around the pot or bucket. It's much easier with two people.

Once your wort is cooled to 75 degrees you get to "pitch" the yeast!!! Yay! The hardest part is over. "Pitching" means just shaking up the yeast and adding it in to the bucket and stirring it up. If Art had been here, he would have first picked up the bucket out of the tub and shaken it pretty well...with the lid on tight. This aerates the wort and then the yeast takes to its new home pretty easily. But he wasn't here, so I just stirred like crazy to aerate it. Apparently, it worked well despite my doubts, because that bucket is in the other room this very moment bubbling away!!!!!


After stirring in the yeast you attach the sterilized "air lock and stopper" which is a handy little unit with water in it that blocks ANYTHING from getting in your bucket while simultaneously allowing gas bubbles to escape. They escape through the little blockage of water and out the cap which has tiny teensy little holes in it. But the sterilized water in this unit stops bacteria from entering the bucket. Also....you must keep your home around 70-80 degrees.....optimum fermenting weather. Fine with me, we just have to work extra hard to keep that fire a goin'!


We have a "beer corner" cause usually you are supposed to let the beer ferment in a darkish closet or something but we have NO extra room in any of our closets! Not with mine and Art's clothes around! So.....we have this handy wooden divider thing and we arranged it with the beer bucket in the corner of our living room and put a dark cloth on top to keep the light out.


Here she is. Lady Lager! (JK she's an ale dangit) It already has a good "krausen" forming on top! A very good sign and it's only been 2 days! Bubbles are constantly coming thru the loop on our air lock and stopper. You can hear it all night. It's so exciting.

And although I was left with not one, but TWO hefty vision-killing migraines that ensued about a half hour after I was finished, the stress and hard work and headaches will be surely worth it in the end. I am a beer girl and ain't nothing in the world gonna stop me from DRINKING it and from BREWING it. Cheers!!! If I see you in 3 1/2 weeks I might just pass you an excellent bottle of brew!!! Cross my fingers it turns out good that is!


My friends are all happy about it.