Brewing 101
What should I have done after my half marathon? Probably eat, sleep and veg on the couch. What did I do? Learn to brew :)
Naturally, if I can do science, I can brew…right? My co-worker and I are convinced that we have to be good at this…it can’t be half as hard as research and the rewards are so much better!
So here goes day one of brewing 101:
step one: after cleaning everything as carefully as possible to avoid any contamination we filled a 5 gallon pot with a lot of water and brought the temperature up to 155 degrees.
step 2: steep the grains for 20 minutes and do not let the water boil…maintain at 155 degrees.
step 3: add the malt and boil for one hour
step 4: add the hops and keep boiling
step 5: after an hour of boiling, you want to cool down your wort (what the mixtures is called at this point). you want to cool it fast. we bought a specific cooling system to help with this process. at this point you want to make sure you are very very sterile. any bacteria that gets into your wort at this point will grow and contaminate your beer. 
step 6: aerate the wort. yeast need oxygen during the fermentation process. you aerate the wort by pouring it from your primary fermentor to another 5 gallon bucket a few times
KEEP ANY CONTAMINANTS AWAY..no matter how cute they are :)
step 7: add your yeast and close your primary fermentor. let the yeast do their job. check on it every day to see if you see bubbles (aka…gas is being produced and alcohol is being made)
o and don’t forget to clean up….ugg!
3:45am wake up call, 13.1 miles of running, a short nap and a few hours of brewing later….i get my reward
