There's a hole in the Bucket, Dear Liza

So. Making beer is kinda fun. Yesterday, Josh and I (with assistance from Meghan and Jen) bottled our first homebrew, which is supposed to be a golden Belgian Ale. It used a yeast modeled after the type used in the Trappist monasteries of Belgium.

The beer brewing procedure is not to hard or complex. In short, you take some malted barley, extract the sugars to make a sugary water and then boil it with some hops for flavor. Then you take the sugar water, add yeast to it, and cover it up to let the yeast convert the sugar to alcohol. And BOOM... beer.

The longer explanation is that you take your malted barley, grind it up a bit, and the put it in boiling water to steep like tea. This pulls out the sugars into the water and then the water is drained into a boiling kettle. This sugar water is now the base of your wort or unfermented beer. You boil the sugar water for 60 minutes or so adding a small amount of hops at various stages. Hops added at the beginning are for adding bitterness to the beer, partway through hops are added for flavor and body, and the final hop addition is for aroma. (I may have messed up the different purposes here, but the three different additions are certainly true).

Once you have completed the boil and added all the hops your wort is essentially complete. The wort is cooled and transferred to a container for primary fermentation in a process that leaves most of the hop sediment behind in the boiling kettle. Primary fermentation begins with the addition of yeast. The container is kept in a cool place and ideally will be temperature controlled for the best function of the yeast. After somewhere between 3-7 days primary fermentation is complete and the beer can be transferred to the secondary fermentation vessel. This transfer again removes the wort from the sediment at the bottom of the primary fermentation vessel. Secondary fermentation continues for 5-7 days and when the yeast is tired and running out of sugars to convert to alcohol you can move on to bottling your beer.

The bottling process involves adding a priming sugar to the beer and then putting the beer in bottles and sealing them with a cap. The remaining yeast in the beer converts the sugar to alcohol and releases carbon dioxide in the process producing the carbonation in the beer. About two weeks after bottling your beer is ready to drink. This means that the Holy Bucket Ale from J.E. Watson Brewing will be ready for consumption on April 19th, a day that may or may not live in infamy.