3 Feb
Since we are based in Brooklyn, it’s always news to us when a brew shop opens in the city. A new establishment, conveniently named Brooklyn Homebrew, has opened in Gowanus. They seem to be filling the void of dedicated home brew shops here in the NYC area. More local based shops are always welcomed, as it’s great to have a place to run to when you realize you are short on hops, for example. Brownstoner has a pic of the interior and more info on the shop.
25 Jan
On Sunday, we dropped in on the first Home Brew Salon hosted at the Brooklyn Kitchen. We were a bit nervous to share our first beer with strangers, especially those that have been at this longer than us. However, all of our fears were quickly dismissed after arriving and mingling with the group. We met a lot of cool people with different levels of expertise, got to sample some home brews, and had a delicious meat platter courtesy of the butcher on duty. Best of all, we got some positive feedback on our brown ale. Thanks to the Brooklyn Kitchen for putting this event together. We hope it becomes a regular meetup.
21 Jan
Transferring beer from a primary to a secondary fermenter. Notice the trub sediment.
I was inspired by this thread on Brew Advice to compile my own findings on primary vs. secondary fermentation and when it’s necessary in the home brew process. Our list of equipment started off with a plastic carboy from Better Bottle and a bottling bucket sans lid. Recently, we discovered you can get airtight lids with a port for an airlock and so now we have the capability of fermenting in either container. In fact, a lot of home brewers go straight for the buckets, as they are often cheap, easy to move around, and block out light.
To tackle this issue, first we have to define what happens in primary and secondary fermentation. Primary fermentation is, in essence, when you start to make actual beer. After your wort has cooled and you add it to your fermenter, you pitch in your yeast and seal the container off. Within hours, the yeast start to eat the malt sugars and as a by-product they create alcohol and carbon dioxide. Now you have beer! Most recipes call for a fermentation of 7-14 days or until fermentation activity has slowed to almost nothing.
20 Jan
Emptying our carboy.
Our first real attempt at a brew was this recipe straight from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which has served as our guide into this world thus far. This is an Intermediate level recipe in the book, but does not call for any actual grain, instead favoring dark liquid malt extract.
Since Chris had been picking up the supplies at our LBS: The Brooklyn Kitchen; he was lucky enough to catch their in-house home brew expert who talked him into modifying the recipe into a partial mash (a step in brewing between using only malt extracts to going all grain, for those new out there). Unfortunately since we started this blog after this beer was already brewed, I can’t recall the exact recipe (we’re bad brewmasters, but we’re trying!). I do know that our grain mix featured black malt and non-malted roasted barley. We used a mix of both liquid and dry malt extracts.
19 Jan
After a couple initial batches and trips to the LBS, it’s become apparent that we are hooked on home brewing. Inspired by other bloggers and finding that we’re not really good at writing our recipes down, we created this blog to keep track of our creations and make sense of the complex chemistry behind home brewing. We’re hoping we can help anyone who was in our situation just a month ago; new to this world but ready to dive in. Along the way our skills will (hopefully) be honed and we’ll learn a lot from other brewers out there.
So here we are. Let’s talk about beer!