So my fiancé & I have been wanting to try our hand at homebrewing for awhile now and today we took our first plunge!
A few weeks ago we ordered the supplies from a few different online brewshop's and picked up the grain kits from Brooklyn BrewShop for our first attempt.
We choose the Smoked Wheat & the Chestnut Brown kits to try first. I cook for a living and wanted to make sure that I had the concept down before working on my own recipes. Next batches will be all grain originals, haha.
Even still, I wasn't entirely happy just with picking & making those two grain kits. We decided to alter them both! First we bought a peach extract "Brewers Best" to add to the Smoked Wheat - and secondly we purchased 1lb of Honey Malt that we milled 1/2lb of to add to both beers. (2/3 into the (now named) Honey Brown Ale (we decided to axe the Chestnuts) and 1/3 into the Smoked Peach Wheat).
Got our grains all good to go & our obligatory brews, brewing journal and sanitizing container all ready.
Everything went pretty smoothly & we mashed in at 170 - dropped to 150 and held for 60mins.
Sparged with 4q at 170, 3 times each.
Here's them filled with wort getting ready for hot break... not the most action shot, I know.
After it was all said & done (another 60min of hopping & then their ice water baths to drop 'em down to 70)... we syphoned into our 1G carboys, pitched our yeast (& shook 'em up) and here they'll stay for the next few days till we can pop in the airlocks.
All in all we're really happy with how everything went down! Made sure to have lots of StarSan on hand and kept everything super sterile. I can definitely see the allure of doing in this in larger batches but for now as we figure things out it's fun to cycle through 2 brews at a time to keep it fresh.
Really stoked to see how it works during fermenting & then when we bottle! The peach extract I mentioned earlier we plan on administering before we bottle as I had read that introducing it earlier could drastically reduce it's potency in flavour. (Yeast would wanna eat it all up!)
My main question is this: Introducing the Peach Extract - should I still prime the bottles with a honey/water mix? Or do you think adding that extra sugar then will give me all the carbonation I need? We only plan on adding the Peach Extract to the Smoked Wheat... so the Honey Brown would still get primed.
Thoughts?
Here's the bottles we purchased - got them over at Beergrains.com they're a swing top 500ml bottle. We figured we could invest in some that we'd be reusing quite a bit.
Anyway - as you can see - we're pretty excited about this new journey! Thanks for making it to the end of this.
Happy Brewing!
A few weeks ago we ordered the supplies from a few different online brewshop's and picked up the grain kits from Brooklyn BrewShop for our first attempt.
We choose the Smoked Wheat & the Chestnut Brown kits to try first. I cook for a living and wanted to make sure that I had the concept down before working on my own recipes. Next batches will be all grain originals, haha.
Even still, I wasn't entirely happy just with picking & making those two grain kits. We decided to alter them both! First we bought a peach extract "Brewers Best" to add to the Smoked Wheat - and secondly we purchased 1lb of Honey Malt that we milled 1/2lb of to add to both beers. (2/3 into the (now named) Honey Brown Ale (we decided to axe the Chestnuts) and 1/3 into the Smoked Peach Wheat).
Got our grains all good to go & our obligatory brews, brewing journal and sanitizing container all ready.
Everything went pretty smoothly & we mashed in at 170 - dropped to 150 and held for 60mins.
Sparged with 4q at 170, 3 times each.
Here's them filled with wort getting ready for hot break... not the most action shot, I know.
After it was all said & done (another 60min of hopping & then their ice water baths to drop 'em down to 70)... we syphoned into our 1G carboys, pitched our yeast (& shook 'em up) and here they'll stay for the next few days till we can pop in the airlocks.
All in all we're really happy with how everything went down! Made sure to have lots of StarSan on hand and kept everything super sterile. I can definitely see the allure of doing in this in larger batches but for now as we figure things out it's fun to cycle through 2 brews at a time to keep it fresh.
Really stoked to see how it works during fermenting & then when we bottle! The peach extract I mentioned earlier we plan on administering before we bottle as I had read that introducing it earlier could drastically reduce it's potency in flavour. (Yeast would wanna eat it all up!)
My main question is this: Introducing the Peach Extract - should I still prime the bottles with a honey/water mix? Or do you think adding that extra sugar then will give me all the carbonation I need? We only plan on adding the Peach Extract to the Smoked Wheat... so the Honey Brown would still get primed.
Thoughts?
Here's the bottles we purchased - got them over at Beergrains.com they're a swing top 500ml bottle. We figured we could invest in some that we'd be reusing quite a bit.
Anyway - as you can see - we're pretty excited about this new journey! Thanks for making it to the end of this.
Happy Brewing!
