Little or no space, where and how do you brew?

These are the questions that rattled around my brain as I was working out my first brew day. All the equipment was purchased around a week ago, and I’d been stalking the homebrewing Subreddit for a while. It wasn’t long before I’d sourced a recipe. The BrewGods were looking down on me favorably.

Or so I thought.

The recipe I had in mind was a simple chocolate porter (ambitious I know for a first time brewday,  but the wife really fancied a porter so I didn’t argue.) This recipe however was for 5 gallons and we didn’t have the space. A quick jump onto Google later, and I was back in business.  This site had a great post on what I was after – a one gallon brewing recipe for the sort after chocolate maple porter.

So ordered these items through the homebrewshop:

Maris Otter Pale Malt (crushed)
Chocolate malt (crushed)
Crystal malt (crushed)
Black malt (crushed)
100g Fuggle Hops

Which arrived in a very timely fashion and now all I am waiting for is this Sunday for my first brewday.

Homebrewing items

Stay tuned for more updates going forward in my One Gallon Brewday.

Brewday came and went:

This Sunday (26th June 2016) my wife and I cracked open the homebrew kit. For this we followed the Brooklyn Beer Company’s One Gallon recipe for Chocolate Maple Porter. It started with checking we had all the kit and then double checking just to be sure. With all of the kit ready, we then sanitized everything that the wort was going to touch. It turned out it was quite painless as we were already prepared for the amount of cleaning and sanitizing needed.

With the water boiling away at the correct temperature, we added the grains and steeped them for 60 mins (stirring every 10 mins). Once the 60 minutes mark came, we then carried out the sparging – this is where the extra pots came in handy. We decided to sparge 3 times, just to make sure we extracted as much of the sugars as possible. The end result was a dark wort that I was proud of. Adding the Fuggle hops, we then started the rolling boil for 45 mins, before hitting the last 15 minutes and putting the last of the hops in.

Finally, we added the maple syrup, and then hit the ice bath to drop the wort to the target 70 degrees F. Which I have to say was a lot quicker than I thought. But we were only chilling down a gallon of hot wort.

The final step was to then rack the wort into the gallon demijohn, pitch the yeast and then activate it with a vigorous swirling. The demijohn is now sitting in the office, where it will do its thing for the next 14 days. After which we be able taste the Dozy Pheasant Brew Co first beer : “Melody: Princess of Darkness” (yep we are naming it after our cat).

Stay tuned for the next update….