Last Sunday we brewed a beer. We went with a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone recipe from the Clone Beers book. We haven’t actually brewed anything in about a year, and we we’ve used this recipe before, so went with something relatively simple and familiar to ease ourselves back into it. We used our homegrown Cascade hops for the aroma addition. All the other ingredients came from our local home brew shop.
The assistant brewer helps clean and sanitize the equipment.
The assistant brewer inspects the grain bag.
We did the mini-mash version of the recipe. We don’t have a proper mash or lauter tun so we’re not doing full grain yet. Our mash tun is our 11 gallon stainless steal kettle wrapped in a blanket with a couple towels on top.
Improvised mash tun.
Our lauter tun is a bbq grill with the steamer insert from a double boiler pot on it. We draped the bag of grains in the steamer. Then we scooped the sparge water with a small pot and poured it over a large perforated spoon onto the grains.
Improvised lauter tun.
And here’s our Pale Ale fermenting away:
This will be the first beer we’ve kegged and put in our kegerator. It should be ready in time for the Super Bowl!
The new kegerator.
