Beer Brewing from Boil to Bottle

After years of thinking about brewing beer, I received a loan of the book "The Brew-Master's Bible" from my daughter's boyfriend, Stephen, and after reading it, decided to move from thinking to doing. Along the way I took pictures (not all in focus) of the process. I'll outline the process in the photo captions. I purchased equipment and recipe from Austin Homebrew Supply. I chose the AHS Broadway Amber Ale recipe for my first brew.

20 Qt Pot and bag of crushed grain to steep.

Brew equipment soaking in sanitizer.

Beer Recipe Ingredients and Instructions.

After heating two gallons of water to 155 D.F. added grain bag to steep 30 minutes.
Removed bag, gently drained the bag added 1 gal h20 & returned water to a boil.

Removed pot from heat and added the three malt extracts from the recipe.

Added more water and brought to rolling boil - everyone mentioned boiling
over at this stage but I didn't have a boil-over.

Added bittering hops (here) then after 45 minutes added flavoring hops.

Inserted the wort chiller to boil off germs. Also added the Aroma hops
at 55 minutes from start of boil.

Placed brew kettle in sink filled with ice water and started cold water
flowing through the wort chiller. The red thing in the pot is the
thermometer to track cooling the wort to 80 D.F.

After wort cooled, poured into the primary fermenter.

Added purified (but not distilled) water to top off at 5.5 gallons then stirred thoroughly.

At this point I measured the specific gravity which came out to 1.052. (The recipe said it should be 1.053.)

Pitched the yeast which was a "smack pack" variety. I chose this
yeast because it has a more forgiving temperature range to ferment in.

Fermenter capped and the bubbler installed.

After the beer fermented in the primary for one week, I racked the beer from the primary (plastic bucket) fermenter to a 5 gallon glass carboy for the 2nd stage of fermentation. However, I forgot to take a picture of the racking process.

The primary fermenter after racking - lots of yeasty beasties in here.

Glass carboy secondary fermentation. Placed both primary and secondary
fermenters in a large bucket of water into which I dumped ice bags once per day
to attempt to keep the temperature around the 64-74 range this yeas likes. 

Second week - bottling time! Sanitized everything then
racked the beer into the bottling bucket. 

Using bottling wand, filled bottles. Wasted about a bottle of beer in over-runs.

Capping bottles.

Bottled Beer set aside to mature for 3 weeks.

The haul - a one liter (33 oz), a 22 oz, 12 16 oz, and 26 12 oz bottles.

My five gallon brew produced 559 ounces of beer or 4.36 gallons. I left a bit behind in both the primary and secondary fermenters to not siphon up the sediment. At every stage I cleaned up the brew gear immediately after use to make sure I wouldn't have to clean up dried up sediment from pots and buckets. I figure that's a useful habit to develop as it looks like the sediments could be a bear to clean if left to dry in the containers.

Before adding the sugar required to generate carbon dioxide for bottling I took the final specific gravity measurement which came to 1.014 as specified by the instructions (yea!) (OG-FG) * 131 gives the alcohol content of the brew which come to 4.979. (Percent?)

Next week I'll try one out as we're putting on an Oktoberfest for friends and if the beer is ripe enough I'll share. However, it should, according to the instructions, age at least three weeks for best results.