Christmas Ale With the Bros

Talk about brotherly love. Nothing better than being with family and making beer! Unfortunately, Ben had to work late and couldn't join us for the brew, but I'm sure we'll be doing this again soon and well make sure he can join us!

The new mash tun (the Igloo cube on top)! We put this thing to work! We were brewing High Gravity's Christmas Ale (www.highgravitybrew.com) so we'll have some good drink for next holiday season.


The first mash in the new tun! Isn't it a wonderful sight? This brew we were doing an extract with grains, so not a lot of grain, but it was good to see the new equipment at work! Since there wasn't a bunch of volume in the cooler it didn't hold temp as good as I had hoped, but mini and full mashes should work wonderful!


Adding the extract! With this brew, the extract is where we got most of the fermentable sugars. While waiting for the sparge water to get to temp, we stirred the extract into the wort. After doing the sparge we were ready to get boiling.


Finishin Up! After the boil, we topped off with tap water to 5 gallons, gave it a stir to make sure all was mixed well, added the yeast and capped the bucket!


Moving to Secondary Fermenter! Today I moved the beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary. I took the current SG and it came out to 1.02. Gettin close to having broken down all the sugar into alcohol!


Yay Beer! All we have to do now is wait. I'll be bottling in a week or 2 and then the bottles will sit until Christmas next year.