Tomorrow-Land

batch #2 update...

jay and I brewed our second batch on saturday. goddamn it was fun. there's just somethign about making our own beer that's just such a thrill. i'm hooked on brewing like tyrone biggums at the 3 o'clock free crack giveaway.

anyway... this batch is a wheat beer. we're going to make one half of the batch a plain wheat and the other half a raspberry wheat. the ingredient kit we bought came with raspberry extract, but we figured out that we can just add it to half of the batch at bottling time.

here are the specs:

4 gallon wort: half light dried malt extract, half liquid wheat extract. we steeped about a pound or so of crystal malt. we did about a 1hour 15 min. boil this time, a little longer than the first batch. i've read that a longer boil helps carmelize the sugars in the wort and utilize the hops. we pitched 1 oz. of hallertau hops and 1 oz. of u.s. grown saaz hops. those are two nice varieties. both are more spicy and earthy than some of the more well-known u.s. hops like cascade (which is the main hop in sierra nevada pale ale). we're not shooting for a bitter beer, though, but a nice wheaty mouthfeel and easydrinking beer. the color came out nice and golden, too.

we then pitched our yeast, a packet of Safbrew s-33, which apparently an english ale strain called "edme." apparently the yeasties REALLY liked our wort, because the next day, jay visited his basement and found this...



the yeast fermented so aggressivley that they produced a mountain of foam that just shot up out of our airlock and made a big-ass mess. THAT is why dionne won't let me brew in our little ol apartment.

as for the first batch (the pale ale) that we made a few weeks back. well, we were amazed with it, frankly. it came out really well and seems to keep getting better the longer it conditions in the bottle. the head retention is really getting much better. we're gonna be damn good brewers some day.