Badger Dark Ale - Brewing

So today I finally took the plunge and brewed my Badger Dark Ale kit. Here's a somewhat brief account of how it went down. There aren't a whole lot of pictures because it's hard to take pictures when you're in the middle of pouring the wort into the fermentor, for example.


The first step was to sanitize everything, so I filled my bottling bucket with 5 gallons of water and some One Step sanitizer. The nice thing about one step is that it isn't terribly harmful and it doesn't require rinsing. I also found out that my auto-siphon doesn't work when the water level is too low, so I had to siphon water from the sink to my bucket the old fashioned way.


Next was filling the stainless steel pot with water and adding the steeping grains...


...then waiting for it to heat up to 170F. Luckily my digital thermometer has a temperature alarm so I don't have to babysit it.


Of course, you have to drink beer while you're making beer. Still waiting on that pot to reach 170F. (I wasn't drinking two beers, I had my friend Greg come over and hang/help out.)


The pot has finally reached 170F, but now I have to try to hold it there for 5 minutes. On my electric stove top. Yeah. Needless to say there was a lot of knob turning and lifting of the pot.


Meanwhile, the bag of dark malt extract is being heated up so that it will pour easier.


The extract has been added and now we boil.


Boiling!

So once the pot is boiling the hops are added (1 oz. of Tettnang). There is no picture of this because as soon as the hops were added the pot really started to foam up and more lifting and knob-turning ensued until it was under control.

When the wort was finished boiling (there was 0.5 oz. of UK Fuggles hops added right at the end for aroma) it was placed into the sink which was full of cold water to which ice was added. I was surprised at how fast the ice (two 2 gallon bags full of ice cubes) was able to cool the wort. It got down to about 80F in roughly 5 minutes.

While waiting for the wort to cool, we sanitized the carboy and then poured 3.75 gallons of cold drinking water into it. Then the wort was poured into it. I got this nice big funnel at Friar Tuck and it has this nice fine-meshed filter at the bottom. I think it's too fine-meshed however, because it took awhile to pour all the wort into the carboy. I had to get a spoon to sort of stir the wort around in the funnel to get it to drain faster. I think next time I'll just use my somewhat larger sieve.

Then the yeast was hydrated, but that takes 15 minutes, so a hydrometer reading was taken while waiting for that. It read 1.04 and the carboy temperature was about 63F.


Finally, the yeast was pitched, the stopper put on, the carboy moved to my closet, and the blowoff hose attached. Now to play the waiting game.


The whole process is actually rather messy. Also, malt extract syrup is quite sticky, but not too difficult to clean up with some hot soapy water.

The whole process took about 3.5 hours, from the addition of the steeping grains to the attachment of the blowoff hose. There are a few things I will do differently next time, but overall I think I was well prepared.

I'll be sure to post a picture or two when (hopefully not if!) there starts to be some activity, so stay tuned.