Amir's Photos -- Beer Brewing



December 2000
I first became interested in brewing beer in high school when I bought a book to help me study for the SAT's. I didn't like the book, so I returned it and while I was browsing for another book, my eye caught a book on beer brewing. I bought it and then in my sophomore year at Berkeley I brewed my first batch of beer. I've since brewed a few more times, and this is the latest time. It was a California Common Beer (similar to Anchor Steam) and I was still using malt extract because I'm not experience enough to move to all grain brewing. Follow along...

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11/26/2000
Starting off the entire process by sanitizing everything the beer might touch.
Adding water to prepare the wort (beer). I'm using plain old bottled water
The 5-gallon pot with the grains soaking in it. The grains add the majority of the color to the final product.
Weighing out the pelletized hops. They kind of look like rabbit droppings
Pouring in the malt extract syrup, which provides the majority of the flavor to beer.
Stupid wort boiled over, and I ended up losing a lot of it!
Me pouring the finished wort (in the white bucket) into the fermenter (the glass jug) that my brother is holding.
The fermenter, where the wort sits for a week, and also a little sample of the wort to take a specific gravity reading, which will determine the final beer's alcohol content.




12/3/2000 (one week later)
Running the empty bottles through the dishwasher to fully clean and sanitize them.
I'm trying to suck at the end of the tube to start the siphon that is used to fill up the bottles. I swallowed too many mouthfuls of the uncarbonated beer, but it actually tasted really good at this point.
Just filling up a bottle...
All the beer I produced: 24 12-oz bottles and 6 22-oz bottles for a total of 420 ounces, or 3.3 gallons. I should have produced 5 gallons, so I obviously lost a lot in my earlier steps.
The bottling process. I now need to design a name and label for my beer. Any suggestions?
The master brewer himself with the good brew. Now I just need to wait 3 weeks for the beer to age.



[ Amir Schricker | amirs@csua.berkeley.edu | Amir's Home Page ]