Brewing some ale

Today is brewday. I haven't brewed anything in over a year now so I thought it was about time that I got back into it. I had a couple of bottles of India Pale Ale left in the shed from the last batch I made. I had intended on using these to kill slugs in the garden, but when I opened the first one it smelled great. Drank them both and the slugs lived to crawl another day. All the books say to let it mature, which is hard advice to follow when you have spent a few weeks working up a thirst, but it is advice worth following. I reckon getting a new brew on as soon as you finish making the first is the only way to get near to this. Hopefully the beer overload will result in some of the bottles getting forgotten about for a few months.

The brew is a simple one. Just 3kg of liquid malt extract and some fuggles hops. I was watching Country File on BBC a few days ago and they were interviewing a hop farmer. He said that their industry was devastated by the huge rise in popularity of lagers. Lagers don't use fuggles, but ales do, so I decided to do my bit. 

Here are what my boiling hops looked like when they were ready to throw into the pot. That's my copy of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing in the background and the weighing scales is sitting on my brewing diary. Looks a bit blank, but I was just getting warmed up.

The smell in the kitchen when you are boiling wort is great. Like having your own private brewery. This is what the rolling boil looks like. The noise is my gas hob on full blast to keep all that liquid boiling furiously.

The wort is cooling in the sanitized fermentation vessel in the corner of the kitchen at the moment. Once it gets to about 25 degrees C I will pitch the yeast and let it get to work. It will take a week or two to finish fermenting and then I will bottle it and try to wait for it to mature. That's the hard bit.

Update: I pitched the yeast last night and the lid of the fermenter is stretched tight in a dome of carbon dioxide this morning. This is the equation for fermentation of glucose into alcohol:

C₆ H₁₂ O₆ ---> 2 C₂ H₅ OH + 2 CO₂ 

So for every molecule of CO2 that is pushing that lid up, a molecule of alcohol is floating around in the wort. The more alcohol in there the less likely the brew is to get contaminated. The risky bit is nearly over. I can relax and just let it brew away.