Kelley talks about home brewing!

Hello you beautiful My Billie readers! I'm so excited to be here in this lovely corner of blog world today. I'm Kelley and I blog way over here at A Crooked Trail. Today I'm going to teach you guys the basics of home-brewing your own beer. *score, right?* The set up that you see here is a kind of all-grain brewing. This is similar to what breweries do. Exciting? Yes, it is. Are you saying, "wait a minute Kelley you're kind of terrifying me with this." Then I'd say you can buy a starter kit for extract brewing, which is super basic. Trust me, you can do it. 

I'm going to run through the basic steps of brewing so you can actually understand what goes into that drink that we all love. The photo above shows the three different tanks needed for this setup. The hot liquor tank is where you boil the water, the mash tun is where you mix your grain and water, and the boil kettle is where you boil your wort (the liquid that comes from the mixing of water and grains). Pretty easy right?

 Oh wonderful, beautiful grain.

Okay, so at this point you've heated up your water in the hot liquor tank and now you are adding the grain to the water in the mash tun. Good for you. Make sure to mix the grain in so there are no clumps. That way water can saturate all the grain and get as much sugar out as possible.

After you've added the grain to the water, you let it sit for about an hour so the water can convert the grain to sugar. We use a cooler for this step because the mash has to stay at a constant temperature.

After your hour is up it's time to sparge! Isn't that a fun word? Seriously brewers have the best jargon. Anyhoo, sparging is when you rinse the mash out. Basically you are trying to get all the sugars out of the grain bed.

 Then it's off to the boil kettle where you boil the wort (now it's wort!) for about an hour.

It's during this time that you add your hops at different intervals. Hops are bittering agents that help balance out the sweetness of the wort. If you've ever had a really bitter beer with an aftertaste, that is probably because it has a lot of hops. Not going to lie, hoppy beers are not my favorite.

Finally, you put your wort into a fermenting tank and add some yeast. Usually you let it ferment between 4-6 weeks. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. When it's done fermenting then you will have beer!

So now you are all master brewers. Congrats. 

Thanks for sticking with me. Now come on over and visit me here so we can be friends!

Source: 1.4.5.6

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Kelley thanks so much for doing this rather intense post! I actually had no idea how the process of brewing beer happened and you broke it down perfectly in a way that made total sense! PS-I hate hoppy beers too!