Bob & Ted's Big Adventure

It was that time again... what time, you ask? Time to brew more beer! 

My friend Bob, who owns the equipment and the house that the equipment is in, and I have been trying to get together to brew again since it had been last January that we brewed together.  With kids' schedules, vacation, and those pesky things known as jobs, it took a while to accomplish that, obviously!

But alas, the time had come.  I had envisioned a rather simple recipe using Simcoe and Amarillo hops and Bob helped me refine that with his brewing knowledge.

Here we are.  That's Bob and the boys adding the grains into the mash tun.

Robby taking his turn stirring the grains making sure that everything is moistened and eventually covered with 170 degree water.

At this point in the process, we got to talking and drinking some of his previous "potions", playing football with the boys, and cooking a pizza amongst some other things that I've likely forgotten.  I bring this up because the photos skip to the next day here...

What can I say?

This is his new conical fermenting chamber.  That light colored stuff you see climbing the walls is the yeast doing it's magic.  When the boys and I left on Saturday afternoon, the yeast was in probably the bottom 3 - 4 inches of the conical.  It became that active in less than 24 hours!

This is the hydrometer reading. It measures the density of the liquid which more or less tells you how much sugars are left in it, aka, if it's done fermenting, or not.  I'm mostly unsure of how to read these yet, but my day is coming!

And there she sits in all her regal beauty after being racked into the secondary fermentation vessel.  She'll get a dry-hop addition and then loaded to the keg for carbonation.  I should be tasting it in about 7 more days!