Well, this isn't beer. It is plum wine. Since we had all the sanitizing stuff out, I decided to sanitize some jugs and rack the plum wine off the sediment (that you see there on the bottom). It still has to finish aging for a few months. We tasted some and boy howdy is it strong . Very alcoholic. ;-) I think a little bit will go a long way.
Okay, is supposed to be peach beer. It is actually a Weissbier (wheat beer) that I'm adding peaches too. Wheat beer is very light and mild so the fruit flavors would stand out better than say... in a stout. (We've made that too.. very good!) . I froze about 5lbs of the peaches I got last weekend and then defrosted them for our brewing day. I mushed them up in the bag so they were more like a puree and then dumped them in the grain bag I have and it went into the wort after the boil.. I didn't get a picture.. but just take my word for it.
This is the "mashing" part. The grains have steeped , the starches have turned to sugar .. now they get sparged with 170 F water.
De hops.. I get organic beer kits from http://www.breworganic.com/ . The fine people at Seven Bridges Co-op are also really helpful. I called them up to ask about the fruit and a very kind lady explained the whole process for me. They also have tons of brewing info on their site .
Pouring in the malted barley..
The brew mistress needs to take a break and get her feet up as she has been standing all morning.. Punker Man sees this as an ideal opportunity for some cuddle time. This is a 60 +lb dog here and he curls up like a cat...
Isn't he precious??
Adding the hops... well, some of them anyway.. after the boil I added the fruit bag... weighted down with marbles so it wouldn't float.. That sat for 20 minutes with the heat OFF to pasteurize
the fruit. Then everything got chilled down so we could add the yeast..
Now if I had a wort chiller.. things would be so much easier. But I don't, so I put the whole thing in the sink and had my brother buy me a bunch of ice because I forgot to make big chunks the night before...
J.J.. can I have some beer???
Okay, then it all got dumped into the primary fermentor , yeast added , yadada.. Put behind the dining room door in the dark to start fermenting.. Well, the dogs started barking the next day at the strange noises coming from that location, Elly May went to check and found the whole thing spewing forth , ready to explode... I guess we'd got the thing a leeeetle too full with those peaches and all... Anyway, she brought it into the kitchen and took the air lock off and the foam just erupted.. :-) It was rather exciting.
So we moved it to a sink and put a blow off tube on it . Actually , before this, we just stuck it in the sink with the air lock and wrapped a towel around it . But the airlock soon got a bit clogged and then it started shooting spurts 2 feet into the air .. and the whole thing looked ready to blow again .. so then we put the blow off tube on..
We are now on day... 3 and things have calmed down so I could put the air lock back on and it is bubbling away nicely. In a few more days, we'll siphon it off into the secondary fermentor and take the peaches out.
Phew, it was a long day.. took 6 hours from mashing grains to getting it in the fermentor. But it was fun. And it smelled hoppy. :-)
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