It's brew day! I haven't made beer since 2019 (couldn't have friends over in 2020 to share it with...) But now I only have 11 old bottles left, and I'm excited today to start a PAWPAW amber ale.

If you've ever wondered how beer is made, I'll be live tweeting the process here.

Today I will be doing 4 steps, recorded in my brewlab notebook :)
1. Mash - break starches down into fermentable sugars
2. Sparge - runs to maximally extract sugars
3. Boil - sterilize liquid and stop mashing process
4. Pitch - add the yeast and start the fermentation!

The recipe I'm using is based on one I found online ( https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/pawpaw-recipes.170109/) with some adjustments for personal taste and advice from @BeerDurham.

7.5 lb American 2-row
1.5 lb crystal 60
1 lb white wheat malt
1oz Santo hops
1 packet hornindal kveik yeast (OYL-091)

Here are my grains! Mostly barley with a little wheat in there. At the homebrew store, the crush up the grains for you, which makes it easier to extract the fermentable sugars.

Step 1: Mash. I heated 2.5 gal water to between 148-158°F. This is roughly the optimal temperature range for natural amylases in the grains to break starches down into fermentable sugars. Now I just need to hold the temperature here for about an hour.

pH also matters for enzyme activity. Between 5.3-5.7 is ideal. My pH meter read 5.57, so we're good. If it had been above 5.7, I could have added a little (~1 tsp) lactic acid to bring it down.

I love the malty, caramel-y smell, btw.

It's been an hour. To check if it's done, we can use iodine. Iodine reacts with starch in a way that turns it black / dark purple, so if you see that reaction, it's not done.

I filtered a tsp of liquid through a coffee filter and added iodine. No color change - Time to sparge!

Now the messy part. Need to transfer the brew bag to this bucket.

One problem: accidentally burned a hole in the bag. This... kind of defeats the purpose of a brew bag but... It's fine. Not the first time I've done this.

Not nearly the worst mess I've made.

Oy. Ok next time gotta really stir up what's on the bottom so this doesn't happen.

Step 2: Sparge. Pretty straightforward - gonna rinse with an additional 2.5 gal of water at 180°F and collect the liquid (filtered of all the whole grains) back into a pot to get all those sugars we just produced.

Yum

Just adding a cup of water at a time as needed, and stirring the grains occasionally so they all get rinsed.

Sparging done. Now I have all this spent grain as byproduct. With all the starch and sugar removed, it's basically just protein and fiber. I plan to give it away as chicken feed. My wife has also made dog treats out of them before. I might save a bit to try to make a human food.

Step 3: Boil for one hour. Using two pots because the volume is so much. It's going to be a 5 gal brew, but to compensate for water lost to boiling, I'm starting with 7 gal here. Boiled uncovered because dimethyl sulfide (DMS) can form in boiling, an undesired flavor.

Hypnotizing

15 minutes left in the boil. At this stage, I do 2 things. First, I put in this copper coil to sterilize it. After the boil, it will be used to rapidly cool down the wort.

I'm also adding hops. Adding them with 15 min left is enough time to impart flavor and aroma, but not much bitterness. They smell really good. Like citrus and pineapple and lychee. Very tropical, which I think will complement the pawpaw nicely.

Now I need to cool down the boiled wort low enough that it won't kill the east. To speed things up (and thereby lower the risk of contamination), I run cold water through the copper tubing inside the pot.

While that's going on, I'm going to sanitize my carboy (fermentation vessel) and other equipment with Star San.

Now I use this giant funnel to pour the cooled wort into the sanitized carboy.

And finally pitch (add in) the yeast! I've chosen this norwegian hornindal kveik, which is also supposed to create tropical fruity flavors.

Yeast is pitched! Ended up with just over 5 gallons.

Last thing to do is take a sample to measure the original gravity (basically sugar content). I place a drop on my refractometer, look through the eyepiece, and it looks about 1.038. This will be used to determine when the beer is done fermenting and calculate alcohol content.

Next steps:
- Ferment for 2-10 days. Primary fermentation will be done when the gravity reading is stable and the airlock is bubbling at a rate of ~1-5 bubbles/min
- Transfer to secondary fermentation vessel.
- Add pawpaw!
- Ferment for another 2-6 weeks.
- Bottle!

Wrapping up the day with a 2019 vintage blackberry gose

It's alive!

Some nice frothing on the surface too.