New Year...2022

It's been awhile...but, Covid has really given us a drive to brew more beer and perfect our craft. Mike and I love to carouse and miss spending quality time with our friends and family enjoying laughs, beers, and stories. So, here's a start to us blogging more and explaining the brewing process we love so much. 

The BASICS:
There are really only two types of brewing--extract and all grain. All grain brewing is more advanced and allows brewers to be more creative with their recipes. Essentially, the brewer extracts sugar from the grains which produces a liquid called wort. The wort is then separated from the grain bed (called lautering) and boiled. Hops are added at various times in the boil for flavor and/or aroma. Extract brewing involves purchasing extract which is concentrated wort. Basically, a company has already extracted the sugars from the grains and concentrated the liquid. An extract brewer adds water to the extract, boils the liquid, and add hops.

Within these two types of brewing are various brewing styles. At 2JBC, we are all grain brewers; we create our own recipes and use a 3 burner propane system with a RIMS tube (more on that in a future blog). Our brewing process involves the use of 3 large 50 gallon pots (or kettles)--a Hot Liquor Tank (heats water), a mash tun (for steeping the grains), and a boil kettle.  

Our general brew day has only a few steps:
1) Prepare your ingredients and equipment. 
2) Brew (Hot Side)--steep grains, boil, and add hops.
3) Ferment (Cool Side)--chill the hot liquid, add yeast, dry hop. 
4) Kegging--transfer from fermenter to keg, tap the keg, and drink.

Obviously, this is a very oversimplified list of steps, and our actual process is much more involved. But, you have to start somewhere, right? Besides, the teacher in me doesn't want to overwhelm anyone with too much information at one time. 

Some Brew Vocabulary:
Mash Tun--a large pot that grains are steeped in to extract fermentable sugars; the process of extracting sugars from the grain is called mashing.
Hot Liquor Tank--liquor in this case means water, so the HLT is a large pot that heats up water
Strike Water--heated water you add to the grains to extract the sugar
Wort--the liquid extracted from mashing (i.e., sweet liquid with fermentable sugars)
Lautering--separating the extracted liquid with fermentable sugars from the grain bed
Wort Chiller--used to cool down the hot wort to a lower temperature so that you can pitch yeast. If the temp is too high, you will kill the yeast. If the temp is too low, the yeast will be sluggish. 
Fermenter--the vessel you put the chilled wort and pitch the yeast; this is where the liquid changes from wort to beer (i.e., alcohol).
Keezer--a freezer turned into a kegerator to serve beer out of.

Next week's blog--a walk through of what we do on a typical brew day (hot side). This will have pictures, an explanation of  the steps, and a breakdown of the equipment we use.

​Happy Brewing! :)