Homebrewing

Well finally went out and purchased a homebrewing kit, been thinking about it for months. The wife and I went to the local fermentation supply company, they walked us through the different kits, we decided to go with the deluxe model. Not sure how that will work out for us but hopefully everything goes well.

We purchased an ingredient kit for making Belgian Tripel beer. Got home and decided to get started, we read all the instructions and it says to use a stainless steal pot that is 20 quarts or larger. Great the supplier sold us 16 quart one, what do we do? Oh well, they are closed all we can do is try. We put 3 gallons of water in the pot, and it was close to the top, so we decided to remove some of the water. I would say we had 2.75 gallons of water in there.

Next step was to steep the grains for 15 minutes, that was really cool. The kitchen started to smell like grapenuts cereal. Then we brought the concoction up to a boil and added the malted barley, hops and other ingredients. Boiled it for 45 minutes then added the finishing hops and boiled for 15 more minutes. Now the important part rapidly cool the mixture, well that didnt go so well, we got it down to the 100 degree range fairly quickly but ran out of ice so it took a while to get to sub 75 degrees so we could add the yeast and start the fermentation. Hopefully everything turns out alright but if not, oh well scratch it up to a learning experience.