Scottish Ale for Spring

For the first beer brewed in our new home we chose a Scottish ale. Scottish ales have always been a personal favorite of mine. They are a smooth malty ale with a settle hop flavor. This particular recipe called for honey malt, caramel malt, pale chocolate malt, black patent and finished with Willamette hops (What's not to love!). In brewing there are three main stages: making the wort, fermentation, and bottling. We had our little hiccups along the way, but the next beer will be that much better because of it.

Making the Wort
This is were is all begins. Your equipment is sterilized and ready to go and you are throwing all your ingredients in a large boiling pot of water and following your recipe very carefully to make your wort (wort will become beer after the fermentation process). At at the end you cool your pot very quickly in an ice bath and then pitch your yeast.

This is where we went wrong. We forgot to activate the yeast! This caused about a two hour delay as we waited for the yeast to activate. Always activate your yeast before you start to brew your wort.

Fermentation
The fermentation process is the easy part. After you pitch your yeast into your wort you seal it up in a 5 gallon bucket and put in the closet for a few weeks.

No problems here!

Bottling
After 3-4 weeks or so you take your beer out of the closet and add a sugar mix (we used honey) and siphon  the beer into sterilized bottles.

We were able to fill 22- 22oz bottles before we had siphon issues. It didn't help that Lyra was screaming with all her might at us from her pack n play in the corner as we bottled as fast as we could. Can't have the baby chewing on sterile bottles! We decided that 22 bottles was enough and we capped them all and away they go in the closet to carbonate in the bottles for another couple of weeks.

Cody capping the beer

 

 Ready to go into the closet for another couple weeks

  We tried some of the beer before bottling and to our relief it tasted exactly like it should!