For xmas Soph got me a beer brewing course at Brockley Brewery.

I’d got Soph a beer making kit for her birthday, but we hadn’t got around to trying it out, partly due to feeling we didn’t know what we were doing, so this course was the perfect solution to that.

However the ber kit is just mix and brew lager, but this course makes proper IPA from scratch, starting with a mix of grains.

Hot water gets mixed with the grains  to extract the sugars and starches.

The hot water if filtered through to extract all those sugars and starches.

This extract is then diluted and boiled with hops, one of which smells exactly like Sierra Nevada.

This is then rapidly cooled in a heat exchanger…

..and put into large bottles to ferment.

A test of the original gravity tells us our beer should be about 4.2% ABV.

The beer is supposed to ferment abotu a week, but our place has been cold due to new kittehs not bieng able to work out the cat flap: so it’s been taped open and so the beer was colder than it shuold have been. So it fermented for two weeks, untill it stopped bubbling and the yeast fell to the bottom.

We used the beer bottles from the beer kit I’d got Soph, steralised them, and popped on our new bottle tree from the London Beer Lab in Brixton.

We then siphoned beer into our brew tub and added suagr.

Then botled up!

The leftover yeast I’ve saved and will use to make superbowl pizzas next week. I shall call them IPizzaA – did you see what I did there? :D

We’ve really enjoyed making this beer. Hopefully it’ll taste good because we’d love to do it all again. So in anticipation of this being our first batch of many, we’re christening this Bulmer’s Ichigo APA.

• That’s Bulmer’s with an apostraphe, so different from that commercial Bulmers lot
• Ichigo as in Japanese for ‘first child’
• And APA for ‘American Pale Ale’

I’ll post again when it’s ready to drink, which will be in a couple of weeks’ time.