Adventures in Homebrewing
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:00AM by Anthony Sheler Making my own beer has interested me for a while, but it seemed like something you needed a lot of equipment and time for and I didn't really know much about the process. When I met my wife, several years ago, I discovered that her parents had been home brewing for some time. Last year, we participated in brewing a couple of batches of beer at my in-law's house, using their equipment. We gave it away as Christmas presents to friends and family and I must say it turned out very well. Since I needed yet another expensive hobby, (it's really not that bad compared to others) we decided to start home brewing for ourselves.
We bought or inherited all the essential equipment plus the ingredients for our first batch of beer. My in-laws came down for an early Easter dinner and helped us brew that first batch which was a barley wine. It will require aging and is still in a secondary fermentation bucket. While waiting on that, we decided to start something else which could be ready to bottle at the same time. We found a recipe for a dunkelweizen on the web that looked good. On Sunday, my wife and I brewed our first batch of beer entirely on our own! We fumbled around a bit, but I think we were successful. It's in the fermenter now and bubbling away while the yeast converts all the sugars into alcohol.
I took a couple shots of the carboy. You can see the foamy head on top of the liquid. That's the yeast doing it's job. There's an airlock on the top to release the CO2 that's produced as a byproduct of fermentation, without letting any air back in. One of the biggest concerns in brewing is sanitation. You have to keep everything clean and sealed up as much as possible to prevent unwanted bacteria or wild yeasts from ruining your beer.
I should point out that I didn't use a lot of light for this since it can be bad for the beer. I just did long exposures on a tripod with a couple of diffused lights.
