And here it is: the result of my first real home-brewed beer. It had only been in the bottle for one week at this point, so technically it wasn’t ready, but I was extremely anxious to try it out. It is unbelievably delicious. Tastes very much like Sam Adams Christmas Ale.

I didn’t have any measuring equipment yet when I originally brewed this, so I don’t know the *exact* ABV percentage, but it has to be up there a bit (8-10%), because I got HAMMERED off of 6 of them.

Looking forward to more of them after they age a little more. This is the one I’m taking to the family holiday parties, so I’m really excited.

If you are interested in making this, kits are available from Northern Brewer in two forms; the extract kit and the all-grain kit.

Northern Brewer is also really great in that they make the recipes for their kits available. Since the links above are to limited edition kits, here are the recipes and instructions for each:

AG-SaisondeNoel

SaisondeNoel

So… I’m completely obsessed with this beer making thing. (previous post)

OnlyWife let me buy my own brew kettle, which I found SUPER cheap at one of the online stores; a 5 gallon stainless steel boil kettle for $17.99! Yeah, great price… until you get to the shipping. So of course, I had to get a few other things to make it worth it; some cleaner, another beer kit to brew, some more bottle caps.

But this kettle… big. Bigger than the one I used in the last batch. A little flimsy; definitely not the best kettle, but it will do.

So I get to brewing the next batch. Get the kettle on the stove, follow the instructions and… it doesn’t boil. I’m freaking out. If it doesn’t boil, the beer may be ruined. I’ve read alot about home brewing, and everything says not to panic; it will be alright. But I was panicing.

2 hours and no boil.

Then I leaned on the stove in frustration and almost burned my hand. Aha! The pot was too big for the burner on my glass top electric stove! The glass was actually dissipating the heat away from the pot. Damnit! Luckily, my stove has a “bridge-burner” on the other side, which basically makes the whole left side of the stove one big burner, so I cranked it up, and moved the boil kettle over.

In a short while, it finally started to boil.  Whew!

So I finally got moving on the brew. Everything worked out, and now I have two batches of beer fermenting and getting ready to finally drink. The waiting is the hardest part.

While I was waiting for the boil, I also made OnlyWife a small batch of “Hard Lemonade”. I’m using my old Mr. Beer kit to ferment it. I had to actually put the thing to use; couldn’t let it go to waste. 🙂

Now I’m trying to convince “Santa” (OnlyWife) to buy me an outdoor propane burner so I don’t have problems with the stove again. And I’ve got the process pretty much down, so the next brew day should go pretty smoothly.

Now if I can only figure out how to keep glitter out of everything. 🙂

Can there be anything more manly than brewing your own beer? I think not.

A few christmases ago, OnlyWife bought me one of those cheap beer making kits you see at bloodbath and beyond; Mr. Beer. It sat around for awhile (a LONG while) and I finally got around to making it this past summer. It wasn’t BAD… but it wasn’t really good either. But I had the curiosity and motivation to search out better ways of making beer. There are tons of really informative sites on the inter-tubes, as well as tons of online shops.

While browsing these shops, I entered any and every kind of giveaway/contests I could find. Well… I actually won one. A whole starter home brewing kit, including a beer recipe, as well as another beer recipe of “holiday” beer. Just in time to brew it and be ready for the holidays.

The funny part is, the kit didn’t include exactly EVERYthing that you need to brew. You need a pretty large stock-pot, as each kit brews 5 gallons of beer (that’s roughly two cases), and you need the bottles to put it in. The bottles are not really a problem; I LIKE to drink beer, and collecting pry-off beer bottles from myself, friends and family members would be pretty easy. The stock-pot on the other hand… we only have a 2 gallon one, and I needed at least a 3 or better yet, a 5 gallon one to brew the beer. So I had to borrow one from the neighbors for the first batch.

Even then, it was just a little bit too small. At certain points in the brew process, you have to add more ingredients, and then watch closely for boil-overs. During one of those additions, OnlyWife was asking me questions about the whole process, and I was so excited that she was interested that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, and we had a boil-over. ALL over. Now beer is basically just sugar water, so the entire stovetop, counter top, stove sides, counter sides and floor were covered in sticky goo. I couldn’t stop the brew/boil so we had to let it go until it finished.

I finished the brew, got it into the fermenter and cleaned everything up.

Then I convinced OnlyWife to let me buy my own bigger brew kettle for the next batch. 🙂