We are making beer.

[grousemouse]

We got the kit for my nephew at Christmas but he's a lazy-ass teenager and hasn't done a damn thing so we decided to make make the beer after the Liverpool game. There was a great deal of boiling and near-boiling and filtering , but it's done now and just needs to sit for about 10 days. Yay! Beer! It's an IPA, but it's American so we'll have to see if it's any good.

 

[Fluent In Silence]

I hope you nephew is at least 16. Old enough to get away with a fake ID so old enough to make his own beer. That's cool, but I think you should wait until they turn 18 before giving them their first meth lab. They'll only mess it up and cause explosions.

Are you a scouser then? Woolly here, and if you aren't a scouser that will make no sense to you.

[Cerberus]

16 hours ago, grousemouse said:

but it's American so we'll have to see if it's any good.

Why on earth would you think it might be any good? We don't specialize in quality, we specialize in "Exceptionalism". You had to have noticed it; it was tattooed on Donald Trump's ass when he mooned the entire rest of the planet from the White House.

[grousemouse]

Yay turkey day!!

Hi guys! I think we're hoping one of the girls will pick up the meth trade. But nope, not a scouser, but a lifetime fan. Cerebrus, I didn't know what you meant by 'exceptionalism' until I googled it and found that its definition also included the word 'unusual' which I will go along with. Was that Trump's ass?!? I assumed it was his face.

[Gearhead]

Keep us posted on the brewing. My friends and I did it once when I was about 19, and somehow we screwed it up, and the bottles began exploding. It was...stimulating.

[Cerberus]

On 4/5/2021 at 12:23 AM, grousemouse said:

Was that Trump's ass?!? I assumed it was his face.

An easy mistake to make in his case—both orifices emit the same thing.

[grousemouse]

Halloo,

Managed to get the slop from the primary fermenter into the carboy. Looks like hell but smells like heaven. The siphon hose was way too small so that process took forever. Not going to use bottles, just a spigot on the carboy. 

[grousemouse]

Tomorrow we're ready to put it back in the primary fermenter, I think. There are a hell of a lot of instructions on the web for how to make beer. Oxygen BAD obviously, but after that it seems like a crapshoot. We aren't going to bottle, just put a spigot on the carboy. But we have to filter it first. Coffee filters? Not a clue. Despite its wondrous initial smell I don't expect that it will be drinkable. Still, $200 bills just grow on trees according to my nephew......

[Complicated toad]

An ex and I did  bunch of homebrewing for a while.  The first few batches were not terribly enjoyable but the more trials the better it got.  We finally did an IPA and a stout that were darned good.  Don't get discouraged if the first one isn't great.  Once you have the equipment the hops and yeast and whatnot arent too expensive so hopefully you can continue trying to get the hang of it.  I dont remember a lot of details 'cuz it was many years ago and it turns out I'm an alcoholic so not the best choice of hobbies (he used Everclear to sanitize the bottle caps and was furious when every time he went to do it I'd already consumed the sanitizer), but it really was fun at the time.

[grousemouse]

Well.......we made beer!

It looked like hell in the carbuoy, but it smelled good and tasted even better! It's an IPA so it's hoppy, but nicely so with a long, drawn out hop flavour rather than a sharp bite. We've decided to keg it rather than bottle (you're not the first person I've heard of that had bottles exploding, Gearhead). We kind of effed up the filtering though, leaving us lots of chunkies, so we'll have to figure that out tomorrow before we keg the beer. Having dormant yeast in the bottom is fine, but we have hop chunk floaties that just won't do.

[grousemouse]

WE BOTTLED!!!

So that's it we're done, unless the bottles start exploding. We were going to keg the beer but the bill for that equipment rose into the $400 range so we opted for bottling. Two weeks from now we should get to try it.

Nothing goes off without a hitch of course, like my sister breaking a bottle and then me spraying her with beer from the auto-siphon (oops). Oh, and having to stop and find their cat which escaped for an hour during the bottling.

[grousemouse]

So, the beer is good, almost very good in fact. The uncapping wasn't quite the joyful event we'd hoped following two deaths in the family over the last week, but the beer is good. It is a hazy IPA with great hops and a lingering hoppy flavour. We used natural carbonation so it took two weeks for the fizz to build, but it was worth it. We are very pleased with our first attempt. We used grains, malt extract and fresh hops.

We call it the Bad Cat IPA because my sister's cat ran out the door while we were bottling and jumped the fence to next door and went to ground. Thirty minutes later we had the bugger back inside.