Brewing HBK # 9

Good people of the HBK:

It's past time we had a word about the actual brewing process of the much anticipated Eartha's HBK # 9 : Sweet Corn Cream Ale!

The brew took place earlier this month on August 8th, 2012 to be exact. Preparations were made the day before by Chief Tim Himself and my trusted co-blogger, the Queen Bee Kelli wherein they purchased all of the grains, yeast and other ingredients needed for the brew.  If you haven't already checked out the concise and informative blog about this, don't hesitate to do so! Here's the link: Grain Shopping

Now I'll begin by describing the process of brewing, as I experienced it.  I'm going to try to be concise because there were a lot of steps taken and a whole lot to talk about but I don't want anyone feeling like they're reading from a textbook here - that's not the point.  It was a lot of fun.


We began by mixing in 2.5 pounds of fresh sweet corn in with some of our base malt (Maris Otter) and some water and put it all on to cook.  The idea behind this is that the sugar inside of corn comes in the form of starch and is pretty complex and hard for yeast to start breaking down (into alchohol).  This isn't any good because we want the beer to ferment so we cook all this corn up real good like to break the starch down into simpler sugars.  This makes it easier for the yeast to get started in the fermenting process. 

As you can see from the image the total volume of the mixture was probably only about 10 - 15 cups worth.

In the meantime while I stirred this mixture, Tim had a ~15 gal modified keg (that is awesome by the way) warming up to about 150°F on a propane burner on the front porch.  The whole process of simultaneously warming the water and cooking the corn mixture took about 45 minutes.

When the water in the keg was hot and after strong man Justin (excuse me) CHRIS Yoda carried it into the kitchen, we poured the cooked mixture and all of the rest of the dry grains and flaked corn into it.  The idea is that the relatively small amount of cooked mixture will 'kick-start' the yeast into fermentation where then it will be lively enough to take on the more complex starches in the rest of the un-cooked corn.  We also added a considerable amount of rice hulls to the mix so that when we were to drain it later on, all that delicous, sticky cooked corn wouldn't clog the opening of our awesome keg turned Mash Tun by HBK welder Adam (props!).

So the whole concoction was stirred up a bit and left to sit for about an hour basically to steep, just like you would have your tea do.  Only it's a 15 gallon cup.  And it's beer, not tea.  So we all sat back tasted previous HBK creations, talked about beer, had some totally delicious Eartha-made hummus and edamame and watched water polo.  Very nice.

 Once break time was over we prepared to drain the "tea" that had been steeping, called wort, through the filter at the bottom of the mash tun into yet another awesome spouted keg.  So we began draining the full mash tun into the empty one by spout and hose and slowly adding in fresh hot water to the top (since a good deal of the volume in the first mash tun is occupied by grains).

So once our second mash tun was full of good filtered wort, beginning to look a lot like beer, we put it back on the burner and began bringing it to a gentle boil, which happens at around 212°F.  The purpose is to let it boil for 60 minutes and at certain intervals we would add beautiful, marvelous hops as follows:
Boiling begins - 2 oz (about 2 pints full) of nugget hops added.

30 minutes into boiling - 1 oz Cascade hops added.




 45 minutes into boiling - 1 oz Cascade Hops.



 57 minutes into boiling - 1 oz Cascade Hops.

And at 60 minutes we turned off the burner and began the cooling process wherein we ran cold spout water through a copper tube coiling placed in the keg.  Sadly, I can't find a picture of this but You'll get to see it on subsequent brew logs (blogs).

In the time between adding hops we kept ourselves busy by practicing our washer throwing arms.  If you haven't played this game, just come by for the next brew the first Sunday of September and I'm sure you'll get a chance.

Once the wort was cooled to room temperature-ish we went ahead and poured it into iodine-sterilized carboys to get them ready for the ~ 4-5 week fermentation process. 






All in all the brewing was a great success.  We had no accidents, no real delays or errors.  A few HBKers swung by during the whole things to help out and to hang out.  The whole process from beginning to end took about 8 hours but the greater part of that time was spent pitching washers and horseshoes, drinking beer, jib jabbing and laughing our heads off!  It really was a lot of fun and what we'll have to show for it is some undoubtedly very tasty ale!  We'll keep you all posted on the status of our beloved cream ale and any further important HBK related operations.





Until Next Time,
Jester out.