Beer Diaries: Episode 1
Roughly a year ago, in the build up to the Cape Town Festival of Beer, bloggers from Cape Town all started posting about this competition in which beer has to be brewed and whoever brewed the best batch, would get a stall at the festival and all sorts of other perks. Despite being a bit jealous about The Pundits not being invited, it really got me interested in finding out how to brew my own beer at home.
A year later and finally I’ve managed to make the time to embark on this journey and boy, am I excited.
I will document all the main steps right here so be sure to come back to check my progress. Also, if you have any advice, please share it here or tweet me @thatWallace – maybe after a couple of brews I’ll be able to share advice on here myself – but for now, I’m sticking to the book, brewing a simple Lager and after that I’ll start playing around with different types of beer and techniques.
Equipment
I only got my equipment today so this post will be based on what you’ll need to get started. Tonight I’ll sanitise everything and throw all the ingredients and update you all once fermentation starts.
This is what you’ll need:
- Airlock and Grommet
- Bottle Brush
- Bottle Capper and Caps
- Bottling Tube with Valve
- Carbonation Drops
- Dry Malt Extract
- Fermenter
- Hydrometer
- Lager Hops and Malt
- Spoon
Two things that I do not have pictures of, which are also very important is unscented, plain bleach to sterilise everything and of course the bottles, which I’ll buy in about a week’s time.
Now I’ll have to get cracking with the ingredients. More on that in my next post!
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