On Tap

Sorry it has been so long since a Michael Update. Mary and I actually brewed a beer back in July. First off, the type of beer was kind of special because what we had wanted to do was find a recipe that matched one of our favorite local beer: Kiltlifter. It's a Scottish Ale that we often get at Four Peaks Brewery.

Secondly, this was gong to be our first time kegging! Our good friend, Matt, recently moved away and, before he left, he passed down his very nice set of kegging equipment, including keg-erator.

We found a recipe at out local brew store, The Brewer's Connection, that was supposed to be very similar to Kiltlifter called "Plaid Skirt Scottish Ale."

So we bought supplies for that and prepped our brewing station. Set-up was, basically, the same but for this recipe, we needed grains and malt extracts, making it a fair amount more involved than our first beer.

Ingredients.
These were the grains. There's not really much to say about them. They just looked like grains to me.

We put the grains in this nice porous bag.

And then we added them to the brew-salted water.

(Mmmmmm.....grains.)

And, just to make Mary panic, I drained the grains by balancing the strainer precariously on the lid of the pot.

Then we added the tasty molasses.

...and of course the hops.

Then we filtered out the hops before adding the yeast and bucketing up the beer.
We then sealed up the bucket and let it sit in the bathtub again to turn into beer.

Which it did.

Our personal beer critic, Jeremiah, agreed that, while the beer was similar to Kiltlifter, it didn't share the same sharp aftertaste. But it was still really delicious.

Maybe even better. If you're not into "aftertaste."

And: One of the benefits of brewing with whole grains is that you can bake with the leftover grains. Here is a picture of one of the loaves of bread that I made:

Success!