Three Hearted Ale

My beer I keep coming back to again and again is Bell's Two Hearted Ale. Now I have been looking to get back into homebrewing ever since we moved into a house with a car hole and a hose hookup. So after a few weeks, maybe months of whining about not homebrewing, I order two 5 gallon kits from Northern Brewer, the kit you ask. I ordered their Three Hearted Ale kit.

The Kit included

Grain:
23 lbs. Rahr 2-Row
2 lbs. Briess Caramel 40
1 lbs Wheat Malt (I added)

Hops:
1.5 oz. Centennial (60 min)
2 oz. Centennial (20 min)
4 oz. Centennial (5 min)
2 oz. Centennial Hops (dry hop)

Yeast:
Wyeast #1084 Irish Ale Yeast

Mike, Brian and I started around 11:50, I remember this, because I felt it was important to drink a beer in the morning.

Started out heating the mash water to strike temp, 164 degrees, while that was going on, we crushed the grains. Mike did a few hopper fulls and then looked at the remaining 23 lbs left and we hooked up the drill.

Mashed in, temp lowered to 154 degrees, right where is was suppose to be! So now it's time to heat the hot liquor tank to around 190 degrees or so. The mash sat for an hour, we rinsed the grains of their delicious sugars and started to boil.

Let me interject here, so far, we are about 3 hours into this and Mike is hanging around. We'll all pretty well injected with beer. Not to mention the 5 liter mini keg of Bells Two Hearted Ale that we are drink along with the MGD, that helped too.

Hop addition

I notice that we are getting close to a boil, I grap the hop bags and start to cut them open, enjoying the magnicifcent aroma hitting every hair in my nostrils! It's so great! I am using whole leaf hops, it works well with my boil kettle and the false bottom. So I didn't really pay too much attention to the hop bags. What I'm getting at here is I thought they were 1oz bags when in reality they were 2oz bags. So who over hopped his beer? I did. I realized that I used all my bags of hops when I go to put the last hop addition into the boil and I have no bags left. I then look at the bag to realize my mistake. What to do? should I just stop making the beer and dump it in the lawn? No, as any hop head would do, I say sweet, refilled my beer and order some more hops for dry hopping.

So my revised hop schedule to look a little something like this.

3 oz. Centennial (60 min)
4 oz. Centennial (20 min)
4 oz. Centennial (5 min)
2 oz. Centennial Hops (dry hop) I had to buy these afterwards.

Man, I hope it's not too hoppy..........just kidding!!!!

So then after the boil, everything is sanitized and ready for some chilling! We hook up the pump, the chiller, the hose and start to chill the beer! Now that we got the beer to come out of the chiller at a good temp, it's smooth sailing. I took a SG reading after the beer was cooled, I think it was 16.5 brix, which turns out to be 1.064, which turns out to be 75% efficiency! I'll take it! Aerate the wort with some o2 and some healthy shaking. Add the delicious yeast, and then off to asexually reproduce! Wait, the beer, the beer!!

So here is a picture of the brew crew (not affiliated with the Milwaukee Brewers)















Here is a picture of the freshly made beer, maybe just hours after the brewing.
















Here is the beer in height of primary fermentation.
















Krausen anyone?
















Last but certainly not least! This beer would not be the same without the help of Mike and Brian, thanks fellas! Thanks for the memories, I remember this, the question is, DO YOU?
















(click to enlarge)