Time to kick things off! For our inaugural brew day, we purchased an ESB kit from Morebeer.com. Even from the get-go, we already felt like we could easily follow a recipe on our own without a kit, having done so much reading and having watched Steph and Tim brew, but just to be really sure that we know what we’re doing, we decided to use kits for our first two brews, allowing us to concentrate on the process without being burdened picking ingredients.

ESB, or Extra Special Bitter, is a sub-style of Bitter, a British session beer that is slightly sweet, slightly bitter, and generally just very unassuming and subtle while still being capable of some interesting complexities. It is traditionally served at room temperature from a cask, but naturally, ours will be bottled. Extra Special Bitter tends to be a little bit more alcoholic (above 4.8% ABV), with a bit more malt and hop complexity than the standard bitter. Done right, this should be the sort of thing you can spend all day sipping. Great for a summer afternoon!

Here is the recipe:

7 June, 2008
Extra Special Bitter
5 gallons

7 lbs Ultralight Malt Extract

8 oz Crystal Malt 40L
8 oz Honey Malt
4 oz Special Roast

1 oz Magnum Hops (60 min)
2 oz Kent Goldings Hops (5 min)
2 oz Kent Goldings Hops (1 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, and add malt extract while stirring.

Bring to a boil. Add remaining ingredients as indicated above.

Chill wort to ~70°F. Pitch yeast. Allow to ferment to completion at ~72°F.

With this blog, we’re trying to target inexperienced homebrewers, and so to those of you who have never brewed before and might not understand all of that, apologies. We’ll address you in depth soon. Suffice it to say, those few lines are basically all that you need to know once you know the process.

In future posts, we probably won’t have much more to say after the recipe, but because this was our first brew, we felt the need to chronicle the day in photos! Here are some highlights from the gallery:

Keeping the water at 155°F while we were steeping would have been a ton of trouble were it not for our gas stove. Electric is a pain to deal with.

We had a bad hop bag. It was either already ripped, or it ripped while we were handling it (probably the former). Either way, we ended up with a lot of Kent Goldings hop pellet goo left in the wort at the end. At least it settled out during fermentation.

Hello! We thought it would take longer, but not even 18 hours later, the yeast had gotten to work in full force!

There are a dozen-odd more shots in our Picasa Gallery.

We had accomplished homebrewers Steph and Tim supervise us. By the time we were finished, all four of us (myself, Mel, Steph, and Tim) agreed that Mel and I could have managed the process on our own, but it was good to have had my sister and her husband nearby, especially since they did so well keeping a couple of neighbors who dropped by distracted during the more intricate tasks. We’ll definitely be able to handle our next brew day solo.

We actually did this several weeks ago. We just didn’t get around to getting the blog running until today. The yeast was pitched on June 7th with an Original Gravity of 1.054, and primary fermentation was done by the 12th. We racked the beer to a secondary fermenter on the 15th, finding the Final Gravity to be 1.017, giving us an ABV of about 4.9%. Perfect (enough)!

We’ve tried the uncarbonated beer a few times now, and it is delicious. It fits the ESB style quite nicely, but with a slight American touch to it (a little more hoppy than one would find in England). There is also a slight fruitiness to it, from the slightly warm fermentation (about 75°F, when it should have been 70-72°F) that we really dig. We’re not ready to pass judgment just yet, but if we were to make any changes, we’d add just a little more late-boil hops to tick the nose up a notch or two. We’ll wait until it’s carbonated before we decide, though.

We’re bottling this beer today. We’ll try one bottle every weekend until we’re satisfied with the carbonation, but at this point, I think we can easily declare Brew Day #1 a rousing success!

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