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Brew Day - 3/4/07

Posted on March 5th, 2007 by GregPC.
Categories: Brewing, Beer, Photography.

I’m still planning on doing this Beer-B-Q thing on April 14th so I realized I’m going to need some beer on hand. Every weekend I think, “I’m going to brew today,” but either because of the weather, other plans or the fact that I’m lazy it just hasn’t happened.

I said it to myself this past weekend too. It was in the 50s here in Boston so it should have been ideal. But . . . My kids had stuff going on in the morning and the back yard (where I brew) is a muddy snowy mess and Betty was coming over for help with a slide show, and, and, and. And so I didn’t brew on Saturday.

On Sunday it was cooler. The yard was still a mess but I really needed to get a batch started. So I decided to brew over at Barleycorn in Natick center. Barleycorn is where I get most of my ingredients and advice. You can also brew on premises which is great when you need to brew but are facing a thousand small conspiracies.

I called in the morning and arranged to come in at 1:30. Dan Eng, the owner was there and we talked for a while about recipes. I wasn’t looking to do anything fancy so just went with an ordinary bitter I’d made a couple of years ago.

I was planning to brew with my nephew Justin and friend Marcos but let’s just say things came up so I did most of it solo. Which isn’t that big a deal.

Things started with weighing out the grain. You can only do extract and specialty grains at Barleycorn so I only needed a few pounds of grain:

Dan helped grind and bag it.

After that we began to heat the water. The set up he has is very nice, big 15 or 20 gallon steam-heated copper tanks.

I was using the second to last kettle on the end up above. Here it is with the recipe.

The grain went in at 2:00 or so and steeped for 30 minutes.

While the grain was steeping I got together the rest of the ingredients. 20 pounds of light malt extract and hops (I used cascade and goldings for this batch)

Justin was around for part of the brew and did help add the extract

Adding the hops at the boil

The process is so much easier than doing an all grain batch, but I still like brewing with grain. When the boil was finished, I stirred the wort into a whirlpool just before it got pumped through the cooler and into a fermenter.

Probably the best part about brewing at Barleycorn is that you don’t have to worry about cleaning and sanitizing everything. To me, that’s the least fun part of the process but a pretty critical one.

Just before Justin left I IMed my brother-in-law James to see if he might be free to help out. He and Chesley did come but things were pretty well finished by that point. We hung out a bit, had some food and beer and then went on our way. I need to go back in in a couple of weeks to keg. I’ll end up with 12 or 13 gallons so I should be in good shape for the 14th. I’ll probably do one more batch for variety before then though. I’ll post again when this batch is finished to say how it turned out. It it’s as good as it was the last time I’ll post the recipe as well.

Here’s an update on how the batch turned out.

Technorati Tags: Beer, brewing, Barleycorn, Natick

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