Sunday, March 29, 2009

Batch #002 Brewday - Tres Perros Brewing!

Yes, yes I havent posted in long time, and there are some fun excuses for that that maybe I will explain later on, but not in this post. Instead, we will jump right back into the swing of things with a post about. . . . HOMEBREWING! yes, we have taken it up, more seriously these days. Carrie even named our little endeavor "Tres Perros Brewing", after these three fools:



Cute, huh?

Well anyway we are going to be brewing quite a bit more these days, and I figured I could post our adventures here. For now its mostly malt extract based recipes, but we intend to get more in depth with time Today we brewed a Scottish Export Ale, which I named 38 Schilling Ale in honor of the recently retired Red Sox pitcher. Here is a look at the brewsheet:

recipe

Brewing extracts (with specialty grains) is a relatively simple, if a bit time consuming, procedure. First you put all the grains in a sack, and stew them in some hot, but not boiling water for half an hour:

homebrew1

After that, you remove the grains and bring the liquid to a boil, and add the malt extract (Dried, Liquid, or in our case, BOTH):

homebrew2

During the boil you also add hop pellets at certain intervals (in our case 60min/30min/5min), to enhance the flavor and add bitterness to balance the malts sweetness.

homebrew3

After boiling. the resulting liquid (called "wort") is cooled, strained, and added to the container it will ferment in, and the yeast (Wyeast 1728 in our case) is added:

homebrew6


Now, all there is left to do, is wait while the yeast does its thing. Happy munching little guys!