The experiment

We had been planning for months and the day finally came. I was on edge and couldn't sleep. But after 2 hours of waiting it was finally 09:00 and my father and Chrille finally moved out of their lairs.

Since this was an experimental brew I won't go into detail on how we made the beer. The plan is to make a recipe that is good enough to enter the Swedish Championship with and I have a feeling it will change allot from today and onwards. I can tell you that we made a stout and a porter, but I will keep the exact type of the beer as a suprise for later ;)

Some roasted barley had to be crushed and then cooked on the side.

My father made a fake bottom in one of the buckets. Which we later used to filter the brew.

We boiled water and then poured the malt into it.

It had to be properly stired to avoid lumps.

We covered the bucket with hot water and malt with a blanket to keep the warmth.

I poured the wort into the bucket with the fake buttom and we had another bucket underneath to capture the liquid that passed through.

We then circulated the wort through the malt to filter it and extract as much of the good stuff as possible. We filtered some newly cooked water to get the right concentration in the wort.

We used a strainer to avoid making rivers in the malt. The liquid is supposed to pass evenly through the bed of malt which acts as a filter.

Chrille measured so that we had the right amount of concentration in the wort. We used Platon to measure but OG is also common.

After reaching the right level of Platon we started boiling the brew. Which we did for 1 hour. After 15 minutes we added the super secret ingredients ;)

As I mentioned earlier the first batch which was the stout turned out very promising. But the porter didn't look as promising. Both brews started fermenting very fast though. I can't wait to try these out and evaluate for the next brewing. It's gonna be allot of fun :)