Home Brewing - stage 2: making a beer drinkable

So following on from yesterdays blog, where i had prepared a brewing kit and fermented it, today was time to take the fermented beer and move it into a pressure barrel where it can be primed and conditioned. So firstly, lid of the fermenting vessel and have a look at my creation. Looks like a dark murky mess at this stage. However, that's what the next stage is for - turning the beer into something clear, crisp and drinkable.

In preparation, i placed the fermentation vessel, on top of my chest of drawers and my barrel below it on a chair - this make it easier for the liquid to travel through the siphoning tube to the the barrel. The instructions with the kit ask fora spraymalt to be used at this stage. This is an ingredient that wasn't included but it also suggested that sugar could be used instead. So i had a little look online to see how much and which type of sugar would be needed for my 23 litres of beer. The consensus seemed to be anything from 70-100g of sugar and that any type of sugar can be used, though different sugars would impart different flavours.

 This in mind, i decided to go with a mixture of 40g granulated sugar and 35g muscavado sugar. The idea being that a darker brown sugar would impart a more toffee-ish flavour and add more depth of colour. So i prepared the sugar by dissolving it in a little boiled water to add halfway through filling the barrel.

Siphoning the beer from the fermenting vessel was pretty easy. I just had to put one end of the tube into the vessel and like it was a straw, suck on the tube until the liquid started to flow. One thing to keep in mind during this process was to keep the end of the tube in the fermenting vessel off the bottom of the tub, so a to not get any of the sediment into the barrel and therefore into the finished product. With 11 litres left to transfer, i got my glamorous assistant (my wife) to help by pouring the sugar solution in with the beer.

The sugar at this point helps condition the beer by being consumed by the yeast to produce carbon dioxide. This essentially lifts the lifeless beer into a fizzy concoction that you would expect. To aid this process the barrel is kept warm for a couple of days before being left in a colder environment to condition into the final product. So my barrel is back in the cupboard with the rug around it. It'll be another 2 weeks and a 2 days before the beer is finally ready to drink and bottle up. I could've bottle the beer now and done a bottle conditioning but i feel that it's going to be easier to do in the barrel. For bottling i've kept several bottles from beers I've drunk recently and plan to sterilise them before filling with my own beer.

So, in the meantime, there'll be more beer reviews, before we revisit the home brew and see whats been acheived.