The Brewing Process Update: Making Wort

In retrospect I'm not sure what I was so intimidated by. The brewing process (so far) has been remarkably straightforward. I was most likely getting hung up on why the process works (as I'm prone to do) rather than accepting the fact that it was working. It also makes more sense seeing and doing it, rather than just reading about the parts as a sum of a whole.

We began by sanitizing the equipment with a powder that is something like a diluted bleach, and submerging the can of extract in warm water in the sink. Next we brought a pot of 1 1/2 gallons of water to a boil, removed the extract, opened the can, and poured it in slowly while stirring. It became apparent to me why we initially submerged the extract in water; it's very viscous. Remove the pot from heat and stir the extract until uniform color. Next add dextro-maltan, the hops, and more extract. Stir until uniform which takes a little time because the dextro-maltan and extract are powders. Bring back to heat and "boil off." While on the heat this time, it's normal for it to bubble up near to the top of the pot. When it does this take it off the heat and let it go down, then bring it back until it no longer bubbles up, then take it off the heat and allow it to cool.

The solution in the pot is called wort. It is unfermented beer in a concentrated form. I got the sense that it was beer, something just needed to happen to it. While the wort was cooling we added 3 1/2 more gallons of warm water to the fermentation bucket which coupled with the wort would make 5 gallons, the normal size of a home brew beer batch. It equals out to somewhere between 48 and 50 12oz beers. After the wort had cooled we poured it vigorously into the fermentation bucket and stirred it. Next came the yeast which as I understood it, did all the leg work in actually making the beer. Stir the yeast and give it 7-10 minutes and cover it with the sanitized lid of the fermentation bucket. It was this time that we took a specific gravity.

A specific gravity is a measure that provides a density for your solution against water which has a specific gravity of one. The higher your specific gravity, the denser a liquid is. The instruction provides a beginning and ending specific gravity that you should be aiming for. We took a specific gravity and found it to be precisely where the instructions said it was supposed to be. This made me very excited for some reason and I launched into a discourse in what a urine specific gravity is, normal and abnormal, and what it could mean for a person. To his credit, Dan did his best to humor me, and appear interested. I honestly couldn't care if he was interested, I was going to ramble, it's what I do. It's what I'm doing.

With the lid on it's time to stay out of the way, store it in a cool location, and let the yeast metabolize and ferment the wort, bringing it ever closer to the Brown Ale that we will bottle and let sit for two weeks longer before it's ready for consumption and distribution to my friends and family.