Museum • Homebrew • First 5-Gallon Batch
This is the full contents of the ingredient kit. There's a bag of a special mix of different barley malts, 6-lbs of liquid malt extract, two different types of hops, a "Smack Pack" of Wyeast 1272 "American Ale II" liquid yeast, and priming sugar.
Here is the yeast packet as it arrives. I need to smack it to break the food packet inside to wake up the dormant yeast.
A day after smacking it's quite clear that the yeast is alive and ready!
The specialty grains go in this muslin bag. This somewhat simulates the all-grain mashing process, where crushed barley malt is sparged with hot water to extract the flavor and sugars. In this style of brewing a few specialty malts are steeped in the pre-boil, but the bulk of the fermentable material (which would have been several pounds of "pale malt") is provided in the form of liquid extract.
It's kind of like a giant tea-bag.
Finished steeping the specialty grains, it added a surprising amount of color in a short time.
Now it's time to add the malt extract. This stuff is as thick as molasses, maybe thicker. I warmed it a bit by bathing the container in hot water before trying to pour it, but it's still slow.
After the malt extract is dissolved the wort is brought to a full boil.
Adding the first load of hops usually causes a lot of foaming initially, so you have to stay on top of it, turn the head down, stir down the foam until it settles to a normal boil
After the boil as the wort is being chilled I cleaned and sanitized the carboy. The boil was only about 1.5 gallons, so I pre-filled the carboy with about 3.5 gallons of make-up water, then siphoned in the concentrated wort.
Using the beer thief to grab a sample.
The starting gravity for this wort is 1.042
The beer has started fermenting and there's about an inch of krausen on top
After about a week the krausen has fallen and airlock activity has stopped. Another gravity sample shows that the beer is now at 1.016 SG.
I boil the priming sugar to dissolve and sanitize it, put that in the sanitized bottling bucket, and siphon the beer from the carboy to the bucket.
After three weeks in the bottles the beer is ready. Needless to say it turned out much better than my experience with the "MYOB" kit.