9-29-11 Little River

From a motorcycle ride to Little River State Park.

Home Brewing Beers

I have recently taken to homebrewing my own beer.  It is something one of my friends does and it intrigued me, plus the access to a local homebrewing store made it much easier to start.  The top container hold the beer which has been fermenting for about two weeks, in this case I am transferring it to another container to bottle.

This is my first beer, it looks much darker in the container that it was given it was a weizen (a wheat beer)

 These are the bottles, cleaned, label free and sterilized for bottling.  Unlike most beer manufacturers my beer has sugar added just before bottling to reactivate the yeast in order to carbonate it.

 Once the beer is pour carefully into the bottles it is capped with this thing.  Once sealed it will sit for a week or two to carbonated and the flavors to condition.

 Bottles now capped, waiting for labels.

 The first beer I made was a weizen, or a wheat beer.  There were some problems with the temperature in cooling the beer before adding the yeast which gave it some strange notes, but still palatable.  This was the label I made.

The second beer was a porter and it turned out much better, silky chocolate maltiness and smokey undertones.  The Green Mountain Boys Brewery refer to my home town of Bennington, VT and the militia from the Revolutionary War who got drunk at a tavern and then invaded Fort Ticonderoga with little planning an whole lot of luck.