Our Amber Ale is bottled! And it has a name...

Please. Read the warning.

Last night, Dana and I bottled our Amber Ale. Lauren and I gave it its name, though in a strange fashion. When I was texting her about our preliminary brew, I described it as a "bare-bones Amber", because that's what it was. We weren't dicking around with the recipe in the least. It was a stock ale. In trying to come up with a name for the beer, she recalled that I had used an interesting adjective to describe it in a text message, but neither of us could recall what it was. I dug through my phone and found the sent message in question, and thus Bare Bones Amber was named.

Keep it safe.

We had heard, going in, that bottling was the most tedious and unfun part of the brewing process. Dana came over around 5:30 and we got to work sanitizing all our bottles -- two dozen 22oz bottles and two dozen 12oz bottles. In the bathtub. We used the absurdly dangerous sounding cleanser that came with the equipment, and while we were pretty sure that it was deluded enough to not be harmful, we still wore protective eyewear. Then we did the bottling bucket and the bottling equipment, which was a considerably quicker endeavor than the bottles. We set everything out to dry, and we put the priming sugar on the stove to boil.

Straight outta the prohibition.

We hoisted the fermenting bucket onto the counter, and set the bottling bucket beneath it. We peeled off the lid to the fermenting bucket and were greeted with a very delicious, beery smell. We started the siphon and into the bottling bucket that beer did go. We lost a few ounces of beer in the process, not due to spillage, but rather to the spigot on the bottling bucket being open. Oops. The beer flowing into the bottling bucket was a nice healthy yellow-copper color, just as it was supposed to be. Once the fermenter was empty, we moved the bottling bucket to the countertop and attached the bottling equipment. Stationed on the floor, Dana filled and I capped. It took us perhaps 45 minutes to finish the job, and it was, to our surprise, a very delightful period of time. We used all twenty-four 22oz bottles and eight 12oz bottles, putting us somewhere in the range of 620oz of beer. The sense of accomplishment when we were finished was quite excellent.

As we cleaned up, we realized that we should label the first beer we bottled. We had set it aside immediately after capping it, and I quickly grabbed a piece of paper, a sharpie, and a pair of scissors. In lieu of a fancy-schmancy label, I traced my phone on the paper in pencil, wrote "Bare Bones Amber #1 7/23/2010" and then cut it out. At this point, I went in the fridge and took out the bottle of milk, which confused Dana a bit. I put a bit of milk on the back of the makeshift label and stuck it, albeit crookedly, on the bottle. And with that, our first brew was complete. We are giving it roughly 3 weeks to condition, which means it will be served on or around August 20th.

Preliminary Brew - Amber Ale - Brew Day

Thursday night, Dana and I went by a local hobby shop that has a substore in it called Boston Brewin'. Yes, that's really the name. We talked for a fair bit with the purveyor of the establishment, and we purchased a basic kit, a True Brew kit.While it is a pretty basic kit, it came with everything we needed aside from bottles and ingredients. We picked up a set of ingredients for an Amber Ale, based on its simplicity and its relatively low price. All told, including taxes, we got our basic equipment and the ingredients for our first batch for $120. Split three ways, that's pretty damn reasonable. 

We put it in the back of my car, brought it to Dana's, where we opened it. We spent a good solid hour, maybe an hour and a half checking out the various bits and pieces. We made sure everything was seaworthy, and sure enough, everything was sound as a pound. Upon reading up on the process, we realized we needed roughly 3-4 weeks before the first brew was ready to drink. We did some quick math and realized that if we waited too long, Dana would be off to grad school before it was finished. So we decided to brew the next day. We packed it all back into the box, and I brought it back to my house.

 Late the next afternoon, Dana and I found ourselves in my kitchen, preparing to brew. Lauren, regrettably, was unable to be present, due to prior obligations. We decided to go 100% by the book, in order to really get the gist of the process down. We heated the can of malt extract, put the brew kettle on to boil, and got going. Once the water came to a boil, we cracked open the can of malt extract and hoo boy, what a smell. Not a bad smell exactly, but a very pungent aroma. For those of you who have been in Baltimore harbor, it smells very much like the Domino Sugar factory, but in your kitchen. We poured it in, and Dana stirred vigorously. We added in the dry malt and the hop pellets as the boil continued, and what we ended up with cooking on the stove looked something like this:

Not the most appetizing thing to see stewing on your stove, but we continued onwards with the assumption that we hadn't fucked anything up. Unfortunately, "continuing onwards" was simply letting the wort boil for roughly half an hour. So we sat and let it boil. We checked it to see how high it was foaming up every now and then, but there was never any risk of a boil-over. I think, again assuming that we didn't screw anything up, that the pot was simply too large for it to be a genuine worry. After all, being New Englanders, we were using a lobster pot. Towards the end of the boil, we filled the fermenting bucket with about 3 gallons of cold water. As the boil wrapped up, we grabbed a beach towel, put it on the floor, and put the fermenting bucket on it, in case of spillage. Dana took the pot holders, picked up the brew pot, and poured the wort into the bucket with all the gentleness and ease of a mother rocking her child to sleep. Now we had to let it cool to about 90 degrees before adding the yeast. How did we cool it? The same way we would cool ourselves -- by sitting it in front of the air conditioner.

After a fair amount of time, the wort got down into the 90-degree range, and we pitched the yeast. After letting it sit for about ten minutes, we put the lid on the bucket and sealed our baby up tighter than a drum. Lastly, we filled our nifty three-piece airlock with some water, and inserted it into the hole in the lid. I brought it down to the basement, where the temperature is a very stable 65-70 degrees, and I am proud to report that as of this posting, the airlock is bubbling, which means that the beer has started to ferment!

We plan on bottling the beer on Friday, July 23rd, then letting it condition in the bottles for about three weeks, so our estimated drink date is somewhere at the end of the second week of August. Huzzah!

About Us

Brewmaster Coco - That's me. I came up with this hare-brained scheme to homebrew beer. Why? Well, the shortest and easiest answer is what you would expect: I like beer. But more than that, I have always had a mind for creating, whether it was building with Legos or sketching out borderline crazy schemes. Combining the two seemed like a logical step to make, but I couldn't pull it off on my own. Fortunately, I knew just the people to ask.

Brewmaster Dana - Dana has been one of my best friends since... sometime in middle school. We are pushing a good solid decade of the most absurd, inside joke-laden friendship this side of Scrubs' JD and Turk, but thankfully without the uncomfortable bromance. He has a scientific mind that is perhaps unparalleled in my circle of friends, however I sometimes suspect he forfeited a considerable amount of common sense to make up for it.

Brewmistress Lauren - Lauren and I have been together for a bit more than seven months. We met at a Pixies concert late in 2009. I was immediately drawn to three things about her. The first was how attractive she is. The second was that she was at a Pixies concert. The third was that she was drinking Sam Adams Oktoberfest. Need I say more?