Get a Brew on!

I've been making homebrew for about 6 years. For the last 4 years it has been a continous process. Meaning I've not been in a situation without some beers I've made ready to go. Over the years a few people ask me how it's done so I thought I'd write the process up. For this I'm going to be using a Coopers Stout kit. Coopers are an Australian brewery and have a selection of kits. Their Stout and Australian Pale Ale are two staples of my homebrew cupboard. In addition to the kit itself I need two other things for the recipe: -Brewing Sugar. (I could use normal sugar, but for reasons I'll go into in a future post brewing sugar is better.) -Dried Malt Extract (also known as DME). This is also additional and replaces some sugar 1:1.

Beer Kits, Sugar, DME

There are some bits of kit I'll also need: -a fermenting bucket. This is a 40 pint white bucket that the beer is put in to, er, ferment. -a kettle. -a spoon. I have a 'brewing spoon' but a wooden spoon will do. -access to clean water. You probably have this. -a Campden tablet. Again you don't need this, it's used for neutralizing the taste of chlorine in tap water. -Hydrometer and testing flask. Only needed if you want to know how alcoholic your beer is.
-Some sort of sterilizer. A good cheap one is called VWP. There are better ones, but VWP is a good start.

So, the first and most important thing is to clean and sanitize everything that will come into contact with the beer. It's also good to clean everything in the surrounding area. At some point you'll need to put your nice clean and sanitized spoon down, it's good to have a clean place to put it.
Now is probably a good time to discuss the difference between 'clean' and 'sanitized'. Clean means it looks clean. Sanitized means you've killed all the bacteria. When I'm brewing I clean with water and a sponge. I then sanitize with Star San, which is a 'no-rinse' acid cleaner. I just spray it on the item to be sanitized and leave it. It is the single best product I use for Homebrewing and I'll write a post about it in the future.

Cleaning

At this point I stick the kettle on. I need about 2 - 3 liters of boiling water. Then I pour the beer kit, 500g of Sugar and 500g of DME into the fermenting bucket.

Sugar, DME and Beer Kit

Once the beer kit is mostly poured into the bucket (it's pretty gloopy) I pour the kettle into the can. This dissolves the last of the extract.

Delicious Malty Drink

..and pour that into the bucket (I do this twice, wearing oven gloves as the tin gets hot!)

Bucket full of goo.

Then I stir. I stir a lot. DME takes some effort to dissolve. Stir, Stir, Stir. About 5 minutes of stiring. Once my arm is tired I top the bucket up to about 20 litres using cold water (beer kits advised topping up to 23 litres, but brewing short makes a stronger beer). Then I add a campden tablet.

Once it's topped up I take a sample for measuring the alcoholic content (ABV).

About 1.044 OG

And then sprinkle yeast over the top...

Finally, put the lid on and hide it in a cupboard for a couple of weeks...

It lives here to ferment. After a day or so it will kick off into really vigorous fermentation, and then settle down. I usually leave it for 14 days but anywhere between 7 and 14 days is good. Once it's fermented it will be bottled or kegged. So come back soon for a breakdown of the next bit of the process. 

Hello World!

So I've decided to start a Blog. Somewhere I can write about the stuff I'm interested in. Which means you can expect me to write about:
-Games
-Miniatures
-Miniature Games (that's games featuring Miniatures, not tiny games)
-Beer (mostly Homebrew)
-Tech (mostly Android)
-Interesting stuff I find in and around Norwich.
-The occasional film or computer game
-hopefully, some Sausage

In order to celebrate the launch of this blog and to make sure there is actually something here I'll be posting something new here everyday for the next 5 days!

That's 5 interesting things straight from my Brain to yours! You lucky, lucky people.

The Dark Angels

I thought I'd give a quick run down of the first of my current 40k Armies: The Dark Angels.

Everything on the left is painted, everything on the right is not.

I spent most of last year expanding my Dark Angels Army. The Dark Angels appear in the current starter set, called Dark Vengeance. As a basic force you get:
A Chapter Master
A Librarian
5 Deathwing Terminators
3 Ravenwing Bikers
10 Space Marines

Which is just enough stuff to make you realize you need more stuff, hence the Starter Set. Good Old Games Workshop.
I was able to do some rummaging through some old boxes of Rogue Trader era stuff my parents had in their loft and was able to bulk out the Marines. I also had a old copy of Space Hulk, which was missing too many bits to be playable, so I stole the Terminators from that. It's really interesting to compare the quality of the old miniatures to the quality of the new miniatures. They are barely recognizable. The miniatures produces now are amazing quality, with tons of crisp detail. Back in the early 90's, there wasn't really much detail at all.

So, over the past year or so I've managed (mainly through ebay purchases) to expand the force significantly. I now added:
25 Terminators (10 from Space Hulk, 15 from eBay)
About 27 Marines (Scavenged from old stuff, and one Devastator Squad that I bought)
1 Dreadnought (paid for with vouchers I won from a painting competition)
1 Scout Squad (that I bought legitimately, from a local games shop)
2 Rhinos (That a friend gave to me from his parents loft, and I've scratch built Whirlwind Missile Turrets for)
2 Predators (eBay)
1 Belial (a birthday present)

So now I just have to try and finish painting it all. In the picture above, everything on the right either needs to be finished or started. I'm pretty slow when it comes to painting, mainly because I'm too pedantic (what if someone picks up this guy and judges my painting based on it!). I need to get over that and speed paint through the Marines. I reckon I could get them all done on one solid Saturday. I need to finish one squad of Terminators, they're almost done. Finish the Scouts, again they're almost done. Start the Ravenwing Bikers (never painted a bike before) and start the HQ Guys. Most of them can be sped through, but the HQ's will be painted to a high level, so will take a while...

Hopefully I can get this all finished by, say, Christmas. As long as I don't buy anymore stuff...

I'll be posting painting updates, so stick with me and we'll see how far I get.

40k and what it is.

I mentioned previously that I play 40k. Or,  to give it it's full name. Warhammer 40,000. If you don't know it's a minatures game based around armies fighting it out in the 41st Millennium. First published by Games Workshop in 1987 it has built an insanely detailed and complex background. Currently the main rulebook is in its 7th edition and there are 17 main armies to choose from, with many ways of bolting on extras and variations to those basic armies.

Of those armies I play two: The Dark Angels,  a group of Space Marines who fight for the Imperium (Basically, humans) and Chaos Space Marines, who are the 'Baddies'. Although really in 40k, everyone is a baddie.

The reason I play these two armies are because they are what is available in the current 40k 'starter set' which is called Dark Vengeance. Which is the route I used to get back into 40k a couple of years ago. You can play games with Dark Vengeance out of the box, and it comes with a complete version of the rule book, but to progress further you will need an Army rulebook (called a codex) and additional models.

40k is really conceptually divided into three main streams. The Background (informally referred to as Fluff), the building and painting of minatures (called The Hobby), and the game (called, er, the game). You could enjoy one strand without needing the others, but I find its the interaction between them where the fun lies. Building and painting minatures is a hugely rewarding hobby in itself. The background, including what's in the codexes (that's how GW refer to codex in plural) and in the wider novels is deeply involving. And the game is rewarding, although there is a hugely steep learning curve and without the background playing it abstractly would not be as much fun.
Although I started 40k as a game,  currently The Hobby is where I spend the most time, followed by the game, followed by the fluff.

All three combine to form a universe which the players feel ownership over. It feels much more like a role playing game (where GW have their historical roots) than a board game. An RPG in which you don't play a single character but control an entire army fighting in the Grim Darkness of the far future. Where the is only war.

And dice, millions of the buggers.

The State of Boardgames

So, as you can see from the above I have quite an extensive board game collection it's currently around 115 games. I guess you could say I've been gaming since I was a kid. Apart from all the usual family games I first played Dungeons & Dragons when I was about 7 and soon picked up Cyberpunk 2020 and then moved into the Whitewolf Storyteller series. I role played right through my teenage years and into my early 20's, although I didn't really have a regular group and fell out of the habit. I'd still be up for playing a one off game every now and then. Very tempted to try and find a game of Paranoia.

During my teens I started playing/collecting Magic: The Gathering. It's still a great game, as long as you play sensibly and don't fall down the pay to win hole. I still have all my old cards and occasionally stick a deck together. 

I also used to play the Star Trek card game from Decipher, although not quite as much as Magic. Still an fun game and I don't want to part with my cards.

It was during the early 2000's that I picked up on the new 'Modern' board Gaming revolution (?). Typically my introduction was via the Settlers of Catan route. Followed by Carcassonne and various 'filler' games (mostly The Great Dalmuti).

For the last couple of years I've been distracted from the usual 'Euro' style game and have been focused on Warhammer 40k. Another game I used to play with my brother back in the early 90's. I ended up getting back into it when I started painting some of the minatures from our normal board game collection. It's a great game, long, complex and fairly unwieldy. I really like the seemingly endless choice of units and army builds. Models are expensive, but the store support is excellent. And there's always eBay!

I also really enjoy painting minatures and I'll be discussing painting in more detail in future blogs. 

So that's where I am at the moment. Playing the occasional Euro and even less frequently 40k. 

Get a (slightly more complex) Brew On!

So, hopefully you will have read my previous entry in which I made a straight up Coopers Stout kit.

The thing about kits is they work well as a base, but the condensing and storing of a kit means they lose a bit of edge. It's pretty easy to jazz them back up again though. One simple way is to introduce more hops. Coopers make a kit called "Australian Pale Ale" (APA), which is great for experimenting with. I quite often hop it up with this simple process.

Firstly you'll need to get yourself some hops. Generally these come vacuum packed in 100g pounches.

 
 100g is, however, a lot of hops. Given that the kit is already hoppy, we only need to use 25g in this brew.
The packing process means the hops are super clumped together so I break them apart into 25g clumps. I then bag these up and put them in a plastic container and stick them in the freezer. They'll be good for...I dunno how long, I've always used them up. 

I'm just weighing Hops, Officer.

So, after I've weighed out 25g I put them into a hop bag. It doesn't matter about it being sterilized as it's about to be boiled.

Once they're in the bag I tie it in a loose knot. It then goes into about 2 litres of boiling water, and simmers for around 15 minutes.

Now, the process for brewing is exactly the same as for the previous kit. However this time after I've put all the ingredients in the bucket, instead of just using hot water out of the kettle I use this "Hop Tea". Then stir, top up with cold water and ferment. Easy.