Art and I made an evening out of future ale last night and brewed our third batch of beer ever. An IPA, of course, cause we are addicted to those green beauties called hops. For the past two years we have grown and dried our own hops and put them into our beer! It's the most satisfying feeling ever, taking a drink from a cold, hoppy, delicious bottle of your own homegrown and homebrewed India Pale Ale.
I saw it bubble tonight!
If you've ever brewed your own beer than you know how sweet it is to witness the first time the airlock and stopper lets a bubble through. That means the yeast is going to work at fermenting your precious and hard-earned wort (wort is what beer is called before it has any yeast added to make it alcoholic). If bubbling never happens it means something isn't going right, so I am very grateful this moment that the bubbles have begun! If you have any interest in creating your own beer perhaps you'd like to read my blog entry from last February where I document the brew-day process step by step. I am quite proud of that entry, as I used it to help my own self along the way this time. Sometimes those brewing books can be confusing....
We stuck our bucket by the woodstove this evening cause the wort needed to warm up a bit to get that yeast going. Here's a pic of it without a cover, but the light has to stay out - so right now it's blanketed in wool.
Art and I are so lucky that his grandmother's property has been blessed with 30-year-old hop vines. They told us that they had actually tried to remove the vines on repeated occasion...but when we found out the treasure we were sitting on (we used to live there) we made immediate use of the honor. We did nothing more but tie some lines of string to the top of an old antenna and water the ground....alot. They grew inches every day. Next thing you know we were cutting down masses of hops. That was 2009. This past year we got about twice as many! I still haven't even fertilized the ground ever (I shall this spring tho because those sweet vines deserve it!), but thar she grew. Beautiful, huge, fat hops that were filled with the yellow dusty gold they call lupelin. It's what gives the hops their flavor. It's what gives good BEER its flavor. We cut them down this past year in different sessions and then lay them to dry on screens. Then we smashed them tight into double freezer bags and put them into our freezer, to be stored until our first brew day. We waited a few months because we were so busy, but it was so fun pulling them out and putting them to use!
We got so many bags of hops this year, this is just a fraction! We still have so many of the green delights (in case you want to add a few to your own brew:)
There's our dirty, sticky brew. It's extremely sugary, because basically all it is is water, sugars from grains, and giant bags of hops added in. You boil that brew for a full hour and a half. This time we had the company of the lovely Jorden Mingle, as he's ready to start a batch of his own soon and wanted to watch the process. Here's a photo of him (kind of out of place but it's all I could find), taken from the Epic Dust blog, a western short film series that Cinema Caldera is creating here in El Dorado County.
And more of the brewing.
Sterilizing equipment is extremely important! That's the fermenting bucket, before the wort is in it, filled with a sterilizing solution. I have to soak anything that touches the future wort in that solution for a full minute.
Cooling the wort as quickly as possible. We did ours with ice and a bathtub (the po' man's way).
Kind of an idiotic pic, but it's the only one cause let's just say I'm the brewhand and Art is the photographer. I'm thankful he took any pics at all though, cause I didn't take a one.
So ladies and gentlemen, somewhere in the beginning of February, our Hopular Valentine's beer shall be ready for the tasting. In the meantime, I'm watching those bubbles rise up, and it's extremely fulfilling.
