Lock Down Level 4 = Home Brew Time !!
In South Africa, we are hit by the 3rd wave of Covid-19. Due to this we are back to Lock Down Level 4, which means we cannot go and eat at a restaurant, and we may not buy or transport alcohol.
Luckily we can still buy all the ingredients to brew our own BEER!!
That is just what I did, and bought enough ingredients to brew 2 batches. I brewed the first batch yesterday after work!!
5 days ago I wrote a post on Long Tom Dunkel and as they had the hops and some of the grain on the label, and I loved the beer, I thought I will try something along those lines. I could not find the Crystal hops at my local brew shop, but found a substitute - Strisselpalt hops.
Below you can see my hops and yeast.
On the photo below, I have my grains in a grain bag, which hangs in the water at 67 degrees Celsius!! I leave it at 67 degrees for 90 minutes.
On the photo below, I am boiling my wort, and if you look closely, you can see my bag with hops through all the steam!! The boil takes an hour. I added my hops as follow.
- 30g Saaz from the beginning
- 30g Saaz at 50 minutes
- 30g Stisselpalt at 50 minutes
(Saaz is not really a bittering hops, and is usually only used for flavor at the finish of the boil, but I did add some from the beginning, will see how it comes out at the end)
After cooling down, I took my gravity reading, which came to 1.055, this will be used to calculate the alcohol percentage, after fermentation.
My brew will now ferment for about two weeks, before I can bottle it.
Here is a list of all my ingredients and the cost of each. I did not use all the hops, I used 60g of Saaz and 30g of Strisselpalt hops. I will get between 40 and 50 bottles of beer from this, which means it will cost me less than R10.00 a bottle. (The current exchange rate is $1.00=R14.25)
Now I can wait for the fermentation to end!!
I hope you liked the post as much as I liked writing it.
I hope you have a wonderful day!!