Finally good beer!

Hello my friends!

It's been a long time again, I know...
But I've got a lot to tell you!

The last time I brewed was mid march. A friend from the good old army days came to help me... :)

Every brew day starts with the preparation of the machine. I've to pull it in the kitchen, connect the hoses and cables and then I disinfect it with "Halades":

I put 1% of Halades in 20 liters of water and heat it from around 16°C up to 40°C. By spinning the drum the solution builds foam and gets everywhere.

While the machine is heating, I prepare the hop and the malt. I now have more bags to get more essence out of the malt:

Once again, the comparison between the amount of malt on the left (4.5kg) and the hop (45g) in my hand:

Once the temperature is 40°C, I also pump the solution through all hoses and accessories to clean that stuff to and finally pump it in the keg:

The now disinfected material has then to be rinsed very well, to get all the foam out of it.
Finally, the brewing can begin!
I start by letting 25 liters of fresh water in the machine and heat it to 45°C. Thats the point where the mashing begins, I put the malt bags in the machine:

Here they are:

From now on, it's the machine and the software which do the job by heating to and holding the different temperatures. Time to drink a beer:

Once the iodine test is good, I can start lautering.
The lautering is done by simply getting the malt bags out of the wort. Well, simply, it's about 78°C hot... To give the beer its taste, I then have to boil the wort with the hop for 90 minutes.

Then I get the hop bag out, cool and filter the wort and pump it in the keg. Down on 20°C I add the yeast and let it ferment, I spoke about these parts in earlier posts.

I never spoke much about the bottling yet. Every bottle I open gets directly rinsed with hot water. I have one of these for that, I have a blast... ;) And they also all pass the dishwasher.

On bottling day, about a week after brewing, I first disinfect the bottles by rinsing them with boiling water:

I fill the bottles with a filling pistol which automatically stops when the bottle is full. This way I have the same quantity in every bottle.

With the little white thing up in the right corner of above picture, I add some sugar to every bottle. Finally, every bottle gets rinsed with cold water, turned heads down and stored in the case:

Et voilà, 40 bottles of beer. For one week they stay in the kitchen in ambient temperature and than they go in the fridge for some more weeks. And then:

Cheers! :)

One more thing...
These last days I got a little tiny thingy:

This my friends, is a HC-05 bluetooth module! I had to program a new driver, it's now a server/client based solution and was hard work, but it works! I don't have to stay besides the machine the whole time now, I got it wireless, baby... :D

I've only 15 bottles left, this time it was really good. The first time actually...
So I guess I'll be brewing pretty soon again...

See ya!