Romancing the Home Brew (part 1)

My husband has been mulling over the idea of making his own beer for quite some time.  Like all things the Huz becomes interested in, he researches, and researches, and asks around, and becomes a type of connoisseur of whatever has caught his interest.  Anyway, home brewing caught his attention and he has been researching it and mulling it over for the past year or so and finally decided that he needs to try it out.  He loves to cook and he loves to please people with his cooking.  Beer brewing isn't too far of a leap from that.  About the time I started working on getting my aquarium set up, he starting working towards getting supplies.  A few weeks ago, he finally brewed his first beer.

He drinks for taste and quality not quantity, I sip for taste explicitly as alcohol in generally is not my thing.  I have however found a few beers that are okay.  With taste and quality in mind, he looked into various recipes and ran hundreds several ideas past me on different types and flavors he could possibly make.  He wanted to start out with one I might enjoy as well.  Being a, jump in with both feet, kind of guy, he decided to skip simple, easy, what you should do first, recipes, and went with one that falls into more of the, I've made quite a few batches and they've all turned out well so time to step up my game, category.  He likes to challenge himself.

He decided to go with a Blood Orange Belgian Wit.  I'm not totally up to speed on the whole process, but it involved cutting up blood oranges and putting them in a mix of hops and extracts and liquid malt and things of that sort.  He bought a big ass an eight gallon stock pot to boil it all in and made a mess of the kitchen, but he thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

boiling the blood orange slices

Bringing the whole mix to a boil

I'll get a wider shot of this pot the next time he brews, these just don't do it justice.  Anyway, once it was boiled and had been forced cooled (putting it in the sink full of ice and repeatedly filling the sink around it with cold water and more ice), he poured the whole mix through a funnel with a sieve in it into a big glass jug (6 gallons) called a carboy.  He then plugged a rubber bung and a one way valve on the top and we got to watch it bubble at the end of the hall and Andy got to agonize about the whole thing being infected and ruined for about 17 days.  Being his first brew, there were many possible points that the brew could have gotten an infection and be rendered worthless.

That foam is called a krausen. He waited for it
to bubble and then dissipate to determine
when it was done.

Tune in tomorrow for part two.