A while back I made several batches of beer using a Mr. Beer kit that Mom gave me for Christmas. Eventually Mom made a batch and so did Jeb and one of them gave me back the keg, so now I have two kegs, but only one set of bottles. In the Spring, Mr. Beer had a sale on their cans of beer syrup and I bought four of them. Adding water and yeast and waiting for fermentation, the result is 2 gallons of beer with a 3.2% alcohol content. The ones I bought this time included “booster” which is additional sugar that adds 1% to the alcohol content and they sent two packs with each can. It doesn’t affect flavor like adding malt, just gives extra food to the yeast who generate more alcohol.
After a very hot October, the house is now cool enough to ferment beer, so I decided to do a batch this weekend. One of the cans was for a Marzen style of beer, which is German, but I thought I would still add stuff to it, including extra hops (even though Marzen isn’t that hoppy usually) and some malt. So I drove to Ale Yeah and was told they hadn’t sold homebrew stuff for 6 years (bought some beer anyway). So it has been a while since I did this. But they told me a place that is actually closer to my house and I went there and picked up 1 oz. of Mosaic hops and a pound of Golden Light dried malt extract, plus a reusable bag to put hops in since adding hops makes such a mess. So an extra $8 in ingredients and $4 for the bag plus each can plus booster was $9.
I had to go back and check out the process that had gotten the best results, which is what we did at Jeb’s house. I pretty much repeated that, but only used half of the malt since I was still adding the two booster packs (hopefully the opened pack of malt will keep) and used Mosaic instead of Wilammette hops. I boiled the malt and half of the hops for 25 minutes and added half of the hops with about 15 minutes to go. The hop bag made things a lot better and I was able to reopen it and add more hops to it partway through. The bag can be washed in the washing machine, but it is stained green now. The yeast started working right away and I am getting trub, but not that many bubbles yet. 4 weeks of fermenting puts me bottling on December 7.
