Bottling Wheat Beer, July 12th, 2011

After waiting patiently for two weeks, it is finally time to bottle "Pancho Villa", our first beer. Having heard that brewing a wheat beer is pretty tough from a neighbor at a party the past week, we were pretty nervous about our little experiment. He mentioned that there is a lot of possibilities for off flavors and that the proper technique is to hop the beer to death. I don't know much about that, but it sounds to me like the words of a hop-head. 

Sweet, sweet success.

Wheat Beer Blow Off - July 6th, 2011

A few days ago, we noticed that the air lock on the fermenter was full of a pale yellowish liquid. Looking closer, we saw that the cap of the air lock was crusted over and that there was a puddle of the liquid on the lid of the fermenter. 

Aww man.....

Brewing Wheat Beer, June 29th, 2011

After brewing hard cider, we decided that it was time to stop the childish acts and get down to brass tacks and brew something serious: wheat beer. Why wheat beer you ask? Because we like to live life on the edge. And because we wanted to start off brewing more than just your run-of-the-mill beer. 


"Pancho Villa" Recipe
- 5 gallons of tap water
- 1 package of Irish Ale yeast
- 4 lbs. wheat malt
- 1 lb. light malt
- 1 ounce Kent Goldings hop pellets (4.9% Alpha Acid)
- 1 lb. sugar
- 5 teaspoons yeast nutrient.

Most of the ingredients, the sugar was AWOL.

Follow Up on Hard Cider #1, June 29th, 2011

My brother and I decided that today would be a good day to follow up on our hard cider. It really hasn't been sitting long enough to have fully finished "maturing", but we were really in the mood to try our cider, so we did. Bauss.


Unfortunately, it almost exploded in our faces. 

I can't wait to drink this awesome cider...

Bottling Cider, June 26th, 2011

Today, the fermentation of the hard cider stopped again. Figuring that we had added enough sugar to the cider and that it had been sitting in the Ale Pail for one week, we decided to bottle it and see how our efforts turn out. 


Little did I know what an involved process this is. Bottling is beer takes up a lot of space and requires a lot of equipment, which makes it look interesting so people around you will at first want to help but will then wander off when they realize that its kinda repetitive and messy. But you end up with 55 bottles of cider!

That's right. More cider than we can drink. Deal with it.

Hard Cider - Attempt #1, June 19th, 2011

A few weeks ago my brother and I decided to brew something. Anything. As long as it tasted good and had alcohol in it. We wanted to make honey mead but the price of honey forced us to postpone that endeavor. So we settled on making hard cider. Apple juice with alcohol, one of the best inventions ever.

This is our first attempt at making a hard cider, so there I'm sure there is a lot of room for improvement. In fact, this is our first time brewing anything. Well, you don't need to brew anything for this recipe, so this was our first time making an alcoholic beverage from scratch. Here is our recipe that we came up with while at the grocery store.

The secret recipe