Second Batch More Involved

[nalidixic]

Ok so about two months ago I brewed my first batch using a Brew House kit. It was basically add some water and away you go. I wanted to start my second batch this weekend but wanted to try something "more involved". So I went to the local store where I bought my first kit and asked for some help.

Here is what I've brewed this afternoon that's now sitting in the primary.

I started off with another Brew House Pale Ale kit. You need to add 8L of water to these kits so the guy at the local store helped me come up with a hack for it. I brought 8L of water up to 170 and put a bag with 1lb of Crystal Malt 40L in for 20 minutes on the stove. After that 20 minutes I removed the grain and added 1oz of Zythos hops straight to the wort and upped the temp to a boil for 12 minutes. After that 12 minutes it was into an ice tub to chill down to 70. At that point I mixed it in with the wort from the kit, gave it a good stir and pitched my yeast.

I'm planning on letting it sit in the bucket for about a week and then moving it over to my carboy for another two weeks.

What do you guys think? I'm hoping for a fairly bitter beer. From the looks of the wort it will be decently dark as well!

Cheers.

 

[amandabab]

you wont get bittering from the 12 minute boil. you will get hop aroma though.
It sounds like a prehopped extract kit so the bittering is kind of fixed. more than a 20 minute boil does weird things to prehopped extract.

Should be a better result than a base kit.

 

[nalidixic]

By the way for anyone interested in pictures of the process I wrote up a blog post. Some how my software development blog is turning into a brew blog

http://blog.nositesleft.com/2012/04/beer-brewing-take-2.html