I finally got around to brewing again about a month ago. This time I sort of made a beer by the seat of my pants. I like dark beers, and I don't like too much hops so I got a 2 cans of John Bull English Dark Malt Extract, one hopped and one unhopped. I figured together it would make for a mildly hopped dark beer. Also, since we keep it so cold in our house during the winter (57° when we're home, 53° when we're gone or asleep) I obviously had to make a lager since ale yeast won't function at those temps.

It turns out that there are a few styles of beer that are similar to what my taste and situation demanded (not a big surprise really). German Dunkel beers are dark, mildly hopped lagers, however they are also made with German malt and a process called triple decoction that's done during mashing. Since I'm just working from English extract and I doubt there was any decoction, never mind triple, going on in the making of the malt extract, this isn't really a Dunkel. There is also another style of German beer called Schwarzbier literally translated: "Black Beer" which does fit the bill for what I've created.

It really is quite black, as you can see in the photos, which is why I decided on the name Black Dog Lager. It also tastes really good to me already, I'm looking forward to completing this beer and having a glass. This weekend I plan on bottling it and it should be ready to drink by mid-late April. Of course I'll have to make a new label for this new beer as well.

More photos

Since I've been making wine, it's only logical that I try my hand at beer as well. Making beer is a lot faster than making wine, generally you can go from fermentation to bottling and ready to drink in about 6 weeks with beer. With most wines you want to let them age for at least about a year.

Making beer is also a lot more work, in my opinion, than making wine. Beer is made from fermented malted barley (or wheat) and hops. Malted barley is sprouted barley. Once the barley seed sprouts it's sugar content increases and we all know that you need sugar to make alcohol. So to make beer, you have to get a bunch of barley (or wheat) and get it to sprout by keeping it wet or something. Then you have to boil your malted barley or wheat along with a flavoring/bittering agent in the form of hop flowers. Basically you make a sort of tea out of it which is called wort (pronounced wert). After boiling for about an hour you then need to cool down your wort as fast as you can, apparently this helps preserve flavors vs letting it cool slowly. Once you have your wort sufficiently cool you have to add oxygen otherwise your yeast won't be able to reproduce and your fermentation won't start (boiling removes most of the O2 so you have to add it back). Finally you can add your yeast and let it ferment for a few weeks before bottling and aging for an additional couple of weeks before it's ready to drink.

Fortunately in this day and age the home beer brewer does not need to start by malting their own barley or wheat. You can buy malted barley and wheat extract syrup, essentially skipping the biggest pain in the ass step of the process. A few weeks ago I brewed up a big pot of water, added malted wheat and barley extract syrup, and hops. Boiled it for about an hour, cooled it in the sink poured it into my fermentation bucket added sufficient water to increase the volume to 5 gallons, stirred it up to add in some oxygen, pitched the yeast, put the lid on with a ferm lock and let it sit.

After about a day it hadn't started vigorously fermenting, I'm pretty sure this was due to how cold it had been and how that subsequently made our house rather cold as well. Yeast doesn't die when it gets too cold but it does go dormant. So to get my fermentation off the ground I employed a wool coat and applied a small space heater for about an hour. Soon after the ferm lock was bubbling away merrily.

The Original Gravity (OG) of the wort was 1.042, I checked it a few days ago and it was down to 1.020 so it still has a little ways to go to finish fermentation. It's been a slow fermentation probably due to the initial coolness of the house though thankfully it's warmed up recently. It tried it when I checked the gravity and it was pretty good; tasted like beer so that was encouraging.