Brewing Beer with Mr. Beer - Part 4

Bottling our home made beer

We have been blogging about the Mr. Beer Premium Brew Kit, the steps we did in preparation to brewing our beer and watching it brew over the past 2 weeks.  Check out our previous posts here and here. This past weekend we bottled our Classic American Light.


Mr. Beer

We checked our brew and gave it 2 additional days because it was still a bit cloudy.  When we checked it again there was still a few 'yeast parties' going on but the brew was clear so we went ahead with bottling it.  We took our sanitizer and sterilized both our beer bottles and the caps.  All of this was included in our Mr. Beer kit. 
Once your bottles are sanitized, just pour the cleaner and water out of your bottles.  There is no need to rinse the bottles again.  Don't forget to clean your caps too.  We took a bowl, filled it with the cleaning solution and dropped the caps in! 

Once our bottles were clean we added the recommended amount of sugar to each bottle.  Right now we have flat tasting beer.  Adding sugar will complete the process and carbonate our beverage.


Adding Sugar

Filling the bottles was easy, we just needed to remember to tip the bottle so we didn't have a lot of bubbles in the bottle. 









After all of our bottles were filled, we carefully put the screw caps on the bottles.  If you just keep turning, they will lock in place.  Once everything is nice and secure, we gently turned the bottles over to mix the sugar in.  Don't shake them.

We are conditioning our beer in the refrigerator and it should be ready for a taste test in about a week.  Mr. Beer recommends letting it condition for a longer period of time to improve the flavor of the beer.  Our plan is to taste test one a week and see when we like it the best.  We'll let you know what the results are!  In the meantime, we started a new flavor brewing!

Bottled American Light

Brewing Beer with Mr. Beer - Part 3

Brewing beer at home using the Mr. Beer Premium Brew Kit 
The final week in our brewing keg!

We wanted to check our yeast party in Mr. Beer's brewing keg and let you know how everything is going.  Remember we can't open the keg to check our beer until it has completely finished brewing, so we took our handy little flashlight and peaked through the keg wall.  There are still some yeast floating at the top but not as much as there had been. This means the brewing process is slowing down and coming to an end soon.  We can also see sediment in the bottom of the keg now.  This week-end our Classic American Light Beer should be finished and ready to bottle but that will be our next blog!  If your looking for the first blog in this series, you can find it here.

See you soon and keep brewing!

Brewing Beer with Mr. Beer - Part 2

Welcome back to brewing with Mr. Beer!
Part 2 Brewing your beer

Last week we blogged about the Mr. Beer Premium Brewing kit and the steps we took in preparation for brewing our beer.  You should have cleaned and sanitized everything you are working with. 

Cleaning everything

If you missed that blog you can read about it here.

We took our can of American Light Beer malt, removed the top and took out the yeast packet before placing it in a pot of warm water.  This makes working with the malt easier.  While it was warming, we boiled the specified amount of water in a pot.  Once the water boiled we removed it from the heat.

Warming the malt

Open the bottom of your can of malt.  Yes, the bottom!  We opened the wrong end and it does make a difference.  Do you want very sticky malt all over your kitchen?  We didn't either!

Opening the wrong
 end of the can

Pour the malt slowly in the hot water, mixing as you pour.  Make sure you completely stir the malt and water.  Here is where we used the spatula to scrap all of the malt out of the can.

Stir in the malt

Using cold water we poured the indicated amount into our keg and then added the malt water mixture to it.  This was topped off with more cold water. We didn't add the water slow enough and ended up with it bubbling over the top so be sure you add the water very slowly.  Also you don't want to use distilled water.  The mixture needs the minerals that are in the water.  For that reason, we didn't use filtered water either.  We used refrigerated tap water.

Malt mixture

Foaming up

Once everything was in the keg, we sprinkled the yeast on top of the mixture and put the lid on the keg.  Don't mix the yeast in, just let it sit there.  Our keg was moved to a room that is about 68 degrees and covered it with a cloth for darkness.

Ready to brew

The DVD said we could check for a yeast party after a few days to see if the beer is brewing.  We did and the yeast are partying!  The mixture is hazy but will clear up when the yeast have done their job.  We can't open the keg but can peek inside and check with our flashlight.  

We will blog when our beer finishes brewing in the keg, how we carbonate it and bottle it.  That should be around March 19th.  See you then!