A Beer Making......

The adventure of all grain brewing has begun.  I was successful in making the beer, and now I get to finally share with you how it went.  I will also include the tasting, cause we all know I'm impatient and have to drink it as soon as i can.

First and foremost, I'm still confused as to the strike and sparge water amounts, so anyone who can help me out with that it would be appreciated.  I will say that many things went wrong in this batch.  First, I didn't know for sure how much water to use, but it didn't look too bad....

After the Strike water was added we allowed it to sit for one hour.....and since we were doing this in a garage in Alaska, we wanted to make sure it stayed warm.......it worked.  Only a 7 degree swing from beginning to end.

I may be a softy for  beer, but the smell in the garage was amazing, and interestingly enough, Kehn, Hollenbaugh and myself were about to take the grains after we were done with them, add sugar in a bowl and eat them.  It was tasty.  Second problem with this beer was the fact i didn't have a proper way to pour the water back over the grains to allow the wort to run clear.  So I started the boil with cloudy wort. 

Third problem we ran into was the fact the boil only lasted 20 minutes.  I know, its supposed to be 60 minutes, but my propane tank wasn't as full as I thought it was so i ran out and didn't have anymore.  Human error of course and we ended up with 6.5 gallons of wort for the fermenter, a problem if you only have a 5 gallon carboy like I do.  To make up for the loss in boil and addition of the last set of hops, I soaked the last set of hops for 10 minutes and then dry hopped the brew.  Dry hopping is the addition of hops in the Primary fermenter that will sit in the carboy for the length of the fermentation process.  Here is the brew with the hops working their magic....

After all was said and done, we needed a name for this beer and we settled on, "Ya Know What?"  Nate Kehn and myself always brew beer or mead and have something go wrong or find out something that we could have done better and one of us always says, "Ya know what?"  So since a lot of things went wrong on this batch we thought it fitting to call it "Ya Know What?"

In my next post I'll review "Ya Know What?"......till later.......