Old Beer, New Beer

Erich, Bruno and I had a go at brewing some of our own beer the other day. Drawing on Erich's prior knowledge, we went for the full traditional technique buying only malted barley, hops and yeast and doing the rest ourselves: milling the barley, cooking the barley to extract the sugars, filtering, infusing the hops, more filtering, cooling (and building our own cooling coils from copper pipes) and bottling (including emptying out the Grolsch that was inconvieniently stored in the bottles we wanted to use). The beer is almost ready to drink now I think. Last night's sample revealed that it tastes a bit like a flat, old ale --- it still needs to produce a bit more fizz and then it should be tasting pretty good. It would have been even better if rather than buying yeast we had been able to grow our own culture. Or extract one from a 45 million year old sample in an amber encased weevil like this guy did.

08-09 Beer Brewing