Hops and barley will be the death of me / It comes from wood and does you no good / Raise your glasses to the good men of Kent / Who worship the hops and the barley

Apparently it's NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month, for those not in the know. As I was approximately six hours ago.) Which is really weird since apparently I didn't get my official e-mail in time to get prepped for it. Regardless I guessed it was a good time to get back to the blogging thing that apparently I used to do. I don't really think that I'm going to make every day this month. In fact, I'll guarantee that I don't being that I've already missed two days of posting this month. OMG AM I GOING TO LOSE MY BLOG CREDENTIALS?!

So are you adequately prepared to be bored? Because I'm brewing beer and I'm taking this over to discuss the daily progress of the wort and other beer-related type things. There may actually even be MATH involved. The horror!

These totally aren't drugs. I swear.

I made the wort and pitched the yeast yesterday. The recipe was very simple; this was an all extract starter brew just to get my feet wet. The last one I made didn't turn out so well (it was undrinkable — the fermentation was finished way too quickly due to the temperature and ended up reeking of bananas). I used:

3.3 lbs of amber malt extract, liquid, unmalted
2.5 lbs of amber malt extract, dried
1 oz of 6% AA Sterling hops
1 oz of 5% AA East Kent Golding hops
11.3 oz Safale-05 Ale yeast

I dissolved the 2.5 lbs of dried extract in two gallons of water in the brew pot, stirring frequently over high heat. You gotta watch carefully and keep stirring to prevent boil over — if it looks like it's about to boil over, drop the heat and wait for the foam to subside before bringing back up. Once it's been at a boil for a few minutes you'll notice it'll stop foaming. This is the "hot break" — it has to do with protein coagulation or something, I'm not 100% sure. There are several books about it though.

Anyway, you're looking for this to occur because this means you can add your initial hop addition. This recipe called for 6 AAUs of bittering hops; these get the full boil along with the wort to breakdown and impart their magic. You can calculate the AAU of any hop by multiplying the amount (in ounces) by the percentage of alpha acids in the hop. By using the 6% Sterling hops, this made the calculation super easy. After stirring in the hops, leave it boiling away.

30 minutes into the boil you want to add the first half of your flavoring hops. My recipe was calling for 5 AAU aroma hops; again using 5% East Kent Golding made this easy too. I put in half an ounce of these and let it go. At this time I also started rehydrating the yeast. In a sanitized pyrex cup I measured out a 1 cup of boiled water that had gotten down to 90°F and sprinkled the yeast packet on top and covered it with saran wrap.

With 15 minutes left to go I added the final set of hops and stirred the yeast into the water.

With five minutes left I added the liquid malt extract (it helps if you heat this in a pot of water for a little bit — gets it flowing better since it's rather syrup-y). You'll want to add this with the flame off since it can very easily scorch with the direct heat under the pot.

Once the time is up you now have to get this as cool as possible as quickly as possible. I used an ice water bath and got the temperature down to about 75 degrees in about 20 minutes. You want to do this quickly to prevent "beer haze" from forming. Once you've got it cool, you want to add 3 gallons of water to your fermentor and then add the wort. You actually want to be splashy about this (within reason; don't get it all over the floor) to aerate the final wort so the yeast have oxygen.

Once the wort is combined with the water, add the yeast slurry and pop on the lid tightly, fit the airlock and keep some place where it'll be between 60 and 70 degrees for 10 days.