10 Steps to Brewing Beer
Every time I start a new book the first step is research. With Whispers in Colorado, I spent hours learning about the fate of the wild mustangs in old West. Throughout my writing career, I’ve learned many various things that don’t interest most people, but that I find it rewarding to integrate into stories. I’ve learned about female fire-fighters, event planners, construction plans and even that beef cattle are more aggressive than milking cows (because they don’t come into contact with people as often).
Today I set out to learn more about brewing beer. The internet can be a scary place with so many videos and how-to tutorials that you usually don’t know where to begin. But as I dig into Drake’s story (Saddleback Ridge #3), I knew I needed to know more about beer.
To simplify it (as in beer for blondes,) this is what I learned. If you want to learn more, visit this video by Pro Home Cooks, they explained it in a way even I understood. You can head over to YouTube by hitting this link.
This is a very simplified way of explaining the process and not detailed or accurate to use as guide to brew your own beer. There are various recipes and brewing techniques but for Drake, this is the simplified process I used.
-  Crush Barley or Buy Barley mix that’s already crushed
- Boil Barley and Hops to create WORT
- Cool off boiled WORT and add YEAST
- Ferment for 2 weeks
- Test Alcohol level
- If your recipe mentions dry hopping (adding hops to the fermenting process) that would be now.
- Add flavoring (You can add fruity flavors, just remember to sanitize (boil) and put it in a muslin bag
- Ferment for another week
- Time for priming sugar. Boil and once cooled add your wort
- Bottle in sanitized bottles and leave to ferment further for two weeks.
