First Homebrew in a Decade

When I was in college, I bought a homebrew beer kit and made several batches of good to fair beer. Through many moves and other disasters, I lost all of my homebrew equipment. But this year, for Fathers’ Day (early), Alex gave me a fully tricked out set up, and I’m back to making homebrew. This first batch is a brown ale and will hopefully be somewhat similar to Newcastle.

First I steeped some cracked grains in an insulated cooler:

Here’s some pictures of the equipment–a carboy for fermenting the beer, a bucket for some all-purpose mixing and straining, and the stewpot Alex got for me a few years ago:

After the grains steeped, I boiled up the wort on the stove, adding some malt extract. The floating things you see are hops:

After boiling the wort, I transferred the baby beer into the carboy and moved the whole business out to the garage to ferment. Yeah, that’s five gallons of beer:

In a few weeks, I plan to bottle the beer in Heineken bottles (I’ll post about that, too, if I remember to take pictures). Here’s a picture of the brewmaster getting one of the bottles ready to go:

If you’re around here in about a month, you are invited to share the final product.