Brewing day has finally come!

Haiku-a-day:

Mar 7^th

The smell of barley

mixed with hops and Irish moss

is stuck to my clothes!

Come one, come all.

Today, the day many of you have been waiting to hear about, has finally come.  Today, I brewed my own beer!! 

Yesterday things were rocky.  Quite.  However, answered prayers, my group members emailed me really late last night (~11PM - 12AM) and we finally were able to decide on a time to meet.  We chose 9:00AM.  I'm sure glad we did, because aparently that's when all the groups were planning on starting.  This was not a widely known fact throughout the groups, but apparently everyone thought it to be an appropriate time and just showed up.  Well, everyone from everyone else's group, that is.  For my group of 5, I was the first one there and only one person showed up for the first round of brewing.  It turns out that one of the girls had a meeting with her professor that she had forgotten about.  I never heard what the excuses of the other girls were.  

Anyway, James (the only other person from group 4 who showed up) and I set to measuring the malted barley and roasted barley.  After we measured everything, we put the barley into sacks in a cooler type of container.  It was rather large, considering it had to hold about 22 liters worth of soon-to-be wort.  When everything was assembled, we took the container over to where stations of boiling water were.  We let the water containers drain into the barely container as we stirred the barely.  It smelled sweet, like watered-down porridge.  We had the chance to try the barley, too, before we started.  It was very interesting; quite sweet.

The first stage of the process was complete after all the water was drained into the barley container.  We tied up the sack, placed a lid on the container, and left it to sit in the water for 90 minutes.  ((During this time, I did homework (almost done with East Lynne!  It's sooo good!) and reserved hostels for myself in Florence and Venice.  Venice is sooo expensive!))

When we were ready for the next stage, the rest of our group showed up.  I'd say I had a pretty good group.  We all got along very well and were very talkative.  I think it's funny that I was in a group with 3 British students and 1 American.  Firstly, the majority of my brewing class is international, mostly American or Canadian.  Secondly, out of everyone I could have been placed with, I was placed with 3 Brits.  Most groups have none.  At all.  I got 3.  What are the odds?!  It was fun talking to them about life in England, where they came from, amusement parks in Britain, etc.  This class overall is great.  And the professor is hilarious.  But how can he not be?  He teaches kids how to make alcohol for a living!!

So, the second stage consisted of sparging.  We took our container, removed the lid, and placed what looked like a hand-held turning sprinkler over the container.  I should mention that the container has a spout at the bottom, so we drained that back into the empty water boiler (~30 liters deep for our 22 liter solution--it's big). Sparging is the process of sprinkling water through the grain to extract sugars from the grain.  Depending on the pH of your water, the taste of your beer could be effected.  Our recipe called for 3 ingredients that we didn't bother adding because they were all there to protect the beer against certain chemicals in the water (this was an American recipe = different water).  After sparging, we had to get our wort back to a boil.  In the meantime, we sanitized a large bucket that would hold the final product of our beer.  Cleaning the bucket took...a long time!  We used bleach and rinsed it out several times.  One of the girls in my group even got a little bit of it on her shirt which promptly turned from blue to pink.  Luckily, she was a good sport and thought it would be neat to dye her shirt when she got home because the pink splotch looked cool.  

After the liquid came to a boil, we added our hops and took our 1 hour lunch break.  This was the first time I was able to leave the building.  I had been there since 9:00AM and it was 1:00PM by the time we were able to take this break.  One hour is definitely not enough time to walk home, eat lunch, and walk back.  I had to scarf down my lunch and run back.  

On returning, we added our second hop to the mix.  The instructions, according to the recipe I found, said that it should be added in the last 2 minutes of the boil.  Well, that sort of didn't happen.  We had it in there for the 2 minutes, but were then told not to strain the hops out, that it would act as a filter for when we drain the final product into the bucket.  So, it remained in the wort for another 30 minutes or so.  I'm hoping it tastes OK...  When we got back after the hour (and after adding the other hops), we unplugged the boiler and installed a cooling system--basically a copper-coiled convector--to "force cool" it, as the recipe said.  As this was cooling, we prepared our yeast.  Once the wort was cool enough (~20˚C), we measured the original gravity and then added the yeast as we drained the liquid into the bucket.

For those of you who know alcohol, our original gravity was 1.125.  I bet you're jumping out of your seats!  Yup.  1.125.  The recipe said the final gravity (target gravity) should be 1.046... yeah, that probably won't happen.  In regular English, this means that our beer has a lot of sugar.  This means that it will be VERY alcoholic!  As soon as we measured (a teaching assistant/person did the actual measurement, so we know we measured correctly) and I saw that it was that high, I knew our beer was WAY above average.  My group members didn't understand what I meant until they heard the professor's exclamations when he saw it.  Here's a quick breakdown: 1 is what the measurement would be if the hydrometer were just sitting in water.  If it was very sweet, it would be above 1; if it was very alcoholic, would be below 1 (This is how the professor explained it).  Usually you'll find beers to be something like 1.04.... or 1.0........  It's good to be this much above 1 because leaving a little extra sugar gives it a good taste.  Basically, the point is that the sugar in our beer will intensify the taste/flavor/etc. of our beer and people will get tipsy faster.  The yeast will eat up all that sugar and convert it into alcohol.  The less sugar, the less alcoholic; the mor sugar, the more alcoholic. 

We have no idea how this beer will taste (especially after learning how ridiculously alcoholic it will be), but we are excited to try it (next week?  week after?  Who knows!  We need to bottle it soon...).  We also have to come up with a name for it.  Some floating options right now are:  Blackout, Swamp Scum, and Seganula Jelanor (a combo of everyone's name: Sarah, Megan, Fionuala, (pronounced fin-ooo-la) James, and Eleanor).  We figured funny is better than serious!  

For you brewers out there, I have skipped a lot in this entry.  I've left out mentioning ingredients and steps, technical terms, etc. mostly because it takes too much time to type, it might get boring, and I have tons of homework.  

Overall, a good day.  I brewed for 7 intense hours and got to try the "winning" brew from last semester (every group's beer is entered into a "competition" between groups.  We'll have a "Beer Festival" and rate everyone's beer in a couple weeks).  Lecture tomorrow will be fun and hopefully just a review.  I should hope that by now I possess plenty of knowledge about brewing that I'm not surprised by anything that he says!