I saw a commercial a few weeks ago about Sam Adam’s having a homebrew contest. I’ve always wanted to try brewing my own beer, so I decided to check out their contest. 
They’d made a deal with Beer-Wine.com to provide homebrew kits at a discounted price for the contest, so Ryan and I purchased a kit. It came with everything you need to brew your first beer. You can see some of the supplies there to the right. There’s some amber malt extract, three bags of hop pellets, some crystal grain and some priming sugar. We decided to go with the amber ale first just cause it seemed like it’d be the best choice for a first go. I figure that a lot of people were like me and had no idea what all was involved in brewing beer, so I’ll give you a brief overview / lesson on the beer brewing process.
The whole process was a lot less messy than I imagined it would be (a good thing). There are a few steps you have to go through before you can start the fermentation process. You’ve got to make a wort (unfermented beer) to add the yeast to so that you’ve 
got something to ferment.
You start with boiling and steeping the crystal grain for 5 minutes. It took us like 30 or 45 minutes to get all the water boiling since it wasn’t in direct contact with a burner.
Once you’ve got the grain steeped, you remove it and then add in the two cans of malt extract and the hops. Doesn’t that just look delicious?! The green crap that looks like crap is the hops that have broken apart and risen to the top. Once that finishes boiling for 30 minutes you have to cool it off rapidly to prevent any unwanted bacteria or anything from trying to grow in your wort. So we submerge th
e pot in some ice water to cool it down rapidly. When that’s done cooling off a bit you add it to a bunch of water that will become your finished product.
In order to determine the final alcohol content of our beer, we need to know the specific gravity of our wort before it ferments and after it’s done fermenting. Since alcohol is lighter than water and someone decided that water should have a specific gravity of 1.00, it makes it simple to use a hydrometer to determine how much alcohol is in the finished beer. When that’s done we add our yeast and stir vigorously. Then we just have to attach our fermentation lock to keep air out of our airtight container but to still allow air to escape.
In 3 or 4 days, the beer will be ready to be siphoned over to our glass carboy to finish fermentation for 7 to 10 more days.
Once that’s finished, the beer is ready to be bottled. After bottling, the beer must s
it for a few days to carbonate itself. After it’s done carbonating, it can be cooled. In about five weeks or so it’ll be ready to drink.
It takes a while to brew beer, but we hope it’ll turn out well. Our 5 gallons will end up being between 50 and 60 12-ounce bottles, so we’ll give ya some when we’re done. We’re getting a second set of supplies from Ryan’s dad, so we can make more without having to wait as long between batches.
I’d like to try a Christmas or pumpkin ale or some other kind of seasonal brew in the Fall.
You can see all the pictures in the photo gallery.
Now all we need is a name for our beer…any suggestions?
