The meeting of the minds! Last weekend Clare and I headed up to Mike and Michelle’s to brew another batch of beer. Mike and I headed out to Steinfillers in Long Beach to pick up a new set of ingredients. This time we went for “Red Ale” (scroll down the page to see it).

While out, we also hit up Lowes to buy the materials needed to build a Wort Chiller. After over an hour looking for the right parts, and getting little help from their employees (save one), we headed to the register, and found that we were set to spend about $7 more than if we bought one pre-built at Steinfillers. So, we wrote off the hour, headed back to Steinfillers, and bought one pre-assembled.

The brew went pretty well. The chiller worked *great*. Instead of waiting an hour for the wort to chill, it was down to the appropriate temp (90 degrees), in about 10 minutes! Apparently this will also help keep the beer a consistent flavor. We only had two mishaps during the process… the first was that the second packet of yeast was hidden in the box. Luckily, Mike found it at the last minute so we quickly dumped it into the carboy and gave it a good shake. The second problem was that the cork nearly pushed itself all the way through the neck of the carboy! There wasn’t much we could do, so we left it there.

Fermentation went nicely for about 3 days. At which point Mike pushed the cork the rest of the way into the carboy (er… not exactly on purpose), and siphoned the wort out into a secondary fermenter (a second, 5 gallon carboy). He was then able to extricate the cork from the inside of the primary carboy.

I look forward to trying this beer out! With this batch we had to steep some included grains and drain it into wort. Definitely a new step for us, but tons of fun! This was also the first time we’ve tried out the secondary fermenting step. Seems that this step will help the flavor of our beer as well.