Rock the Block/Homebrewing
Here’s a design I did for EMU Hillel. Click for large.
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I’ve talked a bit on here about my housemates and their homebrewing predilections. They’ve settled on a name for their company: Schruible Brewing Co. The word Schruible is pronounced Shry Bull. It’s a mash up of their two last names.
Up until now all beer has been fermented solely in large glass jugs called carboys, and then bottle carbonated. Here is the (intensely) basic process beer goes through in a homebrew setup:
The homebrewing process can be broken down into the following steps:
• Making Wort
If you have fresh wort materials (barley, adjunct grains and finally hops) thats awesome. Most homebrewers get dried barely and grain from a brew shop like the terrific Red Salamander in Grand Ledge, MI. You boil it up.
• Fermentation
Add yeast. Leave it to ferment in a carboy for a couple weeks.
• Conditioning
Called “racking” the beer, you basically tranfer it from one carboy to another, which gets rid of a lot of the settement the collect on the bottom. The more times you do this, the clearer your beer gets, which can be good or bad depending on what your trying to make.
• Packaging
In bottles, kegs or casks. Leave it there for another two weeks if your letting natural carbonation happen. If you have a CO2 set up and want to force carbonate your beer you wont have to wait as long, but there’s controversy over whether or not the flavor is affected. We’re going to let the carbonation happen naturally and then use our CO2 tank to push the beer out. Also it will give us more control over total carbonation.
[homebrewing wiki] [brewboard– great brewing forum ]
So thats what we do every other week or so. There’s a lot more to it then just this, and contamination is a constant worry. I just felt like putting up a list of things.
Our Sierra Nevada clone will be done this weekend. This is the first batch we’ve racked into our dual corney kegs (5 gallons) instead of bottles. This is because of the awesome fridge I bought, which is in the process of being converted into a two tapped Kegerator. Photos in the next post. [edit: post after next post. -a]