Beer Brewing & Bottling

About two years ago Mary had been nice enough to get me a gift certificate to a brewing store for our anniversary and it only took me until about a month and a half ago to actually brew my own beer. For my first beer I decided to go with the easiest recipe I could to cut back on the possibilities of me screwing it up. The beer I chose to make was the Dry Heat Wheat from our local home brew store. (http://www.brewersconnection.com/recipes/DryHeatWheat.htm)

Sorry for so few photos. Mary was busy with finals and was unable to help me brew and take photos. I promise a better collection on the next beer brewing excursion.

The first thing I had to do before I even started was to clean and disinfect all of my beer brewing material.

Once I finally got everything clean enough to eat off of it was time to start boiling the water with the wheat malt and hops.

Once I finished with all of my boiling I dumped everything in a bucket and stuck it in the bathtub for about 4 days. After the 4 days I transferred the beer from the bucket into a big glass carboy but not without creating a huge mess. I learned all the wonders of siphoning beer.

After another 4 days it was time to bottle the beer. In order to clean all of my bottles I employed the use of our handy bottle washing machine.

Look how pretty they look.

Here's the big glass carboy full of beer right before it went into all of those shiny clean bottles.

After a more successful bout of siphoning and then capping I had all of my beer bottled.

After another week of waiting we were able to break into the first bottle. It was kind of wheaty and fruity (banana-ey?) and over all pretty good for a first shot.