beer #1 - ipathermia

Our very intricate garage brew setup.

Disclaimer: this post is going to have absolutely zero to do with fitness or health or food of any kind. In fact it is going to be 100% about brewing beer, because that is another thing that I do, on occasion. Carry on!

So this is not actually my first brewed beer. Prior to this I assisted a good handful of times on beers brewed by a group of my buddies, but decided recently to take the last big leap - this is my first beer brewed completely with my own ingredients, in my own garage, and without anybody reading me off what to do. And I can't bottle it for another week, so I'm mostly just praying it doesn't turn out like crap.

We wanted to go easy on this "first" one - I'm really hoping to get into all-grain brewing eventually, but right now I'm buying extract kits and modifying them with a little personal touch each time. For this particular brew, we used a Brewer's Best India Pale Ale kit, but planned to modify it by dry-hopping with the last of the Cascade hops I grow out of my backyard (another topic for another post, another time) - just to add a little extra bitter fun ;) (Another reason for the extract kit - it's COLD out there and my little propane burner doesn't make 4 hours of garage brewing feel any better!)

The brew went pretty smoothly (we took the 2 hour sanitizing & boiling opportunity to eat 5 lbs of peanuts and drink other beer) until we got to the very end - we're planning in building our own wort chiller but haven't had luck finding 25+ feet of soft copper coil yet, so we decided to do it the old fashioned way - use those giant snowbanks!

My neighbors must think I'm insane.

Note also the upside-down Christmas tree on my balcony - don't worry guys, I got this.

This is bound to work, right?

We knew it wasn't going to be a 20 minute quick chill, but it ended up taking over an hour!! Thanks to the cold, though, we were inspired (and frostbitten) & able to christen our soon-to-be beer - IPAthermia! Luckily when it finally got down to around 80 degrees, we measured the OG at 1.060, right around where it should be, sealed it all up, and left for dinner at a bar we heard had 2014 Hopslam on tap (they did, and it's great!).

I started to get a bit nervous when it took over 72 hours to start fermenting, but it did, at last, and by the time I got home from Ottawa it had stopped bubbling, I measured an FG of 1.015 (which puts our estimated ABV at 5.9%) we were ready to rack to secondary and add the hops!!

Goodbye, last of the 2013 Cacade Hop Harvest!

I read the best at to dry-hop with whole cone hops is to add then all to the carboy first and pour the beer over then, so that's exactly what we did....not looking forward to somehow getting all those hops out of the carboy when the bottling is over.

We pulled a tiny sample (which we should have done sooner because I'm pretty sure it was 50% trub) and holy bitter!!! Things bode well :)  It's insane how much darker the lupulin from the whole hops has made the beer, but it's looking (and smelling) good, so we're hoping in a week we'll be able to sample, bottle, and continue the waiting game....

BATCH #1: IPATHERMIA

Kit: Brewer's Best IPA modified by adding Cascade whole cone hops prior to secondary fermenting. 

OG: 1.060

FG: 1.015

Approximate ABV: 5.9%

Stay tuned for bottling & sampling!!