Well, today I had the time to do some very basic brewing to make some simple but extremely delicious beer for my friends. As you guys know, my first brew was the Australian Pale Ale and a lot of my friends love it. So, I will be making the same beer but with a little more kick. The complain they have is that the beer is a little too weak and watery. So, this brew will be stronger than the previous one.

The recipe for the APA is as follows:

1. Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale Beer Ingredient Kit (1.7kg)
2. 1kg Dextrose
3. 500g Cooper’s Light Dry Malt Extract
4. Pride of Ringwood Hops (12g for 10 minutes)
5. Cascade Hops (12g for 10 minutes)
6. Nottingham Yeast (from the previous batch)

You might have noticed that I am using the Pride of Ringwood hops which was not purchased from iBrew. I got this from another supplier. iBrew doesn’t have this hops, which is too bad. The Pride of Ringwood hops will really be great with this brew. Just imagine the flavour from those Australian hops complementing the flavours from the kit!

All the ingredients necessary for brewing the beer. The green can is the Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale 1.7kg kit. The picture of the beer on the label looks very very nice indeed.  You can see the Morgan’s Pride of Ringwood hops (Green foil bag) and the other Cascade hop bag which I made myself. I had used a normal tea bag and used a string to tie the opening shut. Not really a fine demostration of sewing, but then who cares? The one stuff is the 1kg of dextrose and the other whitish stuff is the 500g of Light Dry Malt Extract. The small bottle is full of Yeast nutrients. However, we will be using about 2 teaspoon of this stuff. The main reason of using yeast nutrients is because I am using a good amount of adjunct (the dextrose) which may not contain enough nutrients for a healthy fermentation.

And yes, I have placed the can on the wrong side. No matter, I will be using hot warm to rinse off any excess liquid malt from the can anyway.

Oh, don’t forget to sanitize the equipment (fermenter, spigot, airlock and fermenter cover) first before brewing. I am using Iodophor to sanitize all the equipment. You probably cannot see it from the picture above but I have sprayed the Iodophor solution on every surface of the equipment to ensure that all the bacteria is wiped out! We don’t want any bacteria to come into contact with our wort or the brewing equipment.

That’s me boiling the water. I have used only 4 litres of water and then when the water is boiling, I added the hops to the boiling water without any malt extract. I am aiming for a lighter beer, so by using this method, the malt extract will not spend too much time being boiled which would darken it considerably.

That’s what is inside the pack of Morgan’s Pride of Ringwood hops. That’s just a normal teabag which is sealed with hop pallets. Note that for both the Cascade and the Pride of Ringwood hops, I will be boiling them for 10 minutes together. I will be attempting to add a little more aroma and flavour to the beer, instead of bitterness. Hope that this will turn out okay.

The can of Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale kit. I have removed the green label because I need to use a can opener to open up the can. I don’t want any green label getting stuck to the very sticky goo in the can, which will definitely happen if you don’t remove the label first. This time, I didn’t heat up the can first as I don’t want to darken the goo in the can. Not sure whether this will help or not, but I was told that the malt extract in the can will darken if you heat up the can.

Yes, that’s the nice smelling wort after adding the yeast (removed the hop bags), dextrose, malt extract and the can of beer goo. Looks pretty dark in colour but from my experience, the colour should be lighter after fermentation is finished.

That’s the Nottingham yeast slurry. I have added some cool water from the Ice Mountain and stir them up. This will be then added to the wort after the water has been topped up to 23 litres.

That’s 3 bottles of 1.5litres bottled “pure” drinking water from NTUC and it cost about S$1.45! Cheap. I have cooled them in the fridge the previous night. So instead of using some ice sink to cool down the wort, I am using cold water from the fridge. I often visit our local supermarkets to check out all the offers they have. You can also see 3 500ml bottles of Ice Mountain mineral water.

So, all done. I have added the yeast slurry to the wort and placed the airlock on the cover. Now, all we have to do is to wait till the fermentation is complete and we can then bottle our (hopefully) delicious Australian Pale Ale. I will leave this to ferment for about 3 weeks. See you then!