Today was the first day of class and we brewed our first batch of beer (well my first batch of beer). Keith and I brewed a Saison beer, which is typically brewed in the French part of Belgium. The whole brewing process was fascinating and exciting. The boiling stage of brewing was somewhat tedious, but it was interesting because you could smell the different elements including the specialty grains and the two different types of hops. The odor developed over the course of the boil and seemed well rounded by the end of this stage. The one aspect that I did not enjoy about the boil stage was that I burned my fingers on the pot, but that was my fault so I can't really complain. I also enjoyed measuring the original gravity and then adding the yeast. It is pretty amazing that a billion yeast cells will help convert the sugars from the wort into alcohol over the course of several weeks. It will also be interesting to see how much alcohol is produced throughout the fermentation process because our original gravity was lower than expect. I can't wait to finish the beer when we return from our trip.
I am so looking forward to tomorrow morning because we will embark on our journey through Germany and Belgium. Hopefully I will get the chance to taste some great Saison beer in Belgium. This will give me the chance to compare our beer to the experts!
Hey, I am a previous student of Brian's and am excited to follow the classes blogs as you all tour Europe. Of course I don't know anything about brewing beer so I have a question which is this, what is "original gravity", specifically what are you measuring when you take this into account and what is its significance in the brewing process?
ReplyDeleteThanks and have a great trip!
Verina
Hey,
ReplyDeleteThat's so awesome! Well hopefully we will have some awesome adventures throughout the trip. We travelled to Berlin today which was a long trip but it has been great so far.
Original gravity is referring to the specific gravity of our beer. This is basically a comparison of the density of our soon to be beer to the density of water. The original gravity of our beer was greater than one meaning that it is denser than water. This makes sense because there is a bunch of sugars in our solution. As the beer ferments the yeast cells will consume the sugar which will reduce the density of our beer. We will measure a final gravity when the fermentation is complete. This final gravity should be closer to the density of water.
We will then use both of these numbers to determine how much sugar was converted to alcohol during the fermentation process. This will help us find the percent alcohol of our beer.
This is all pretty interesting stuff! I am excited to see what happens and how the final product will taste.
Thanks,
Lindsey