We Brew

So it turns out that making beer is essentially just like making tea.  You take a bunch of dried stuff, add it to boiling water, and let it sit till it's good and ready.  Okay, there are a few more steps to the ale-making process, but it is more similar than I would have ever expected.  Graham has brewed a few batches, but this was the first time I got to be a part of it.  We spent a surprisingly sunny afternoon on the back deck brewing a new batch, and then spent today bottling the batch he and my dad made a couple weeks ago.  Below is a quasi-step by step of the process, which is by no means meant to be an instructional tutorial.  Just a photo-documentary of my interpretation of the process.

Grains

Going into the pot of water

Boiling.  This was almost as cool as watching the Mud Pots in Yellowstone

After the grains were strained out of the "tea" (technically wort)

Emergency sewing session (so nice to be needed!)

I made a bag for the hops so we could skip the straining

A handful of hops

Adding the yeast

Sitting for a couple weeks

After the second fermentation, ready to be bottled

 After sitting in the fermentation bucket, the beer is poured into this carboy for it's second fermentation.  Shown here is the batch G & Dad brewed up, but I'm going to skip ahead and show the last steps with this brew.  Remember it's the Cold Smoke clone I mentioned earlier...

Siphoning the beer into the sanitized bottles

Getting every last drop.  There was lots of sediment so we ended up with one "chunky" bottle

Capped and ready for aging

The name came pretty quickly.

That's it!  Okay yes, I skipped some details in there, but you can see that it really is almost as simple as boiling some water and adding a bag of tea.  Almost.  The name pays homage both to the original beer as well as the time spent among the true brewers.  Thanks dad and Graham, sorry I wasn't around to bug you with my camera for the original process.  Off to have a pint!