Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Beer Brewing: Inventory of Equipment and Ingredients

JP decided a while back she wanted to brew some beer. She'd acquired most of the equipment over the past months, and for her birthday I got her all of the ingredients from Brewcraft to make two 5-gallon batches of beer. Since we don't know what we're doing, we're going to try to follow Brewcraft's instructions as closely as possible, and have our friends J & R come over and give us a hand. The equipment we have on hand down at Headquarters:

A 50L Stainless steel container, with a spherical bottom. No spigot, but other than that, I think this will work for the boil. The price was right.


Two five gallon glass carboys, with stoppers. We'll use only one per batch, so some day when we have two batches going at once we'll be set.
An auto-siphon. Not absolutely required, but after siphoning gas enough times and getting a mouthful of unleaded, I think this might be a better idea.A bubbler, a stopper with a hole to fit the bubbler, a floating thermometer, a hygrometer, and a clip-on thermometer.
We're going to have to clean all of this stuff, and this no-rinse sanitizer seemed like a good bet. We'll clean everything with water first at home, then do this as the final step down at Headquarters.
So, following the Brewcraft recipe and instructions, next we have the cheesecloth bags and the grains.
Two 6# tubs of malt extract.

Yeast for "Lawnmower" on the left, Kolsch on the right.
Hops, again for "Lawnmower" on the left, Kolsch on the right.
Dextrose for bottling
We found some 34oz bottles with Grolsch-style caps at IKEA for about $2 a piece. We'll try some of those, plus some recycled 1-gallon and half-gallon glass juice jugs.

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