The First Year of Brewing All Grain Beer
Wednesday, October 24th, 2018
There are hobbies and then there are hobbies that get your drunk, I guess. I’m a big fan of making slow booze. It creates a different relationship and experience around alcohol in the same way baking a cake is way different than buying something from a bakery. Just be cautious… booze is highly caloric and I hear a little whisper that it might just be a little bad for you.
My hobby of making fermented beverages went a step further this year with (a) the gift of a grain mill last Christmas, and (b) the almost immediate purchase in late January of a 95 litre brew kettle and the other items I needed to produce all grain beer in our back yard. Since then I’ve made ten batches of various beers of varying sizes using a technique called Brew in a Bag.
Brew in a Bag is a method of all grain brewing that only requires a brew kettle and a fine mesh bag pegged inside the pot for mashing in the grain. Mashing in is just a fancy word for throwing your grain into a specific temperature water where you use a paddle to moosh it all into a porridge. It gets left an hour and voila… remove the bag & the sugar you need to make beer remains in the kettle. You have unboiled wort.
