Brew Ha Ha, where I get my brewing supplies. I feel like the guy in the picture whenever I walk into the store. It's strange...

This is a standard beer brewing kit. The only unusual thing about this kit is that it has double the malt and double the hops of regular beer. The kind of beer I am brewing this time is called India Pale Ale. The story I was told was that British soldiers stationed in India were entitled to a daily beer ration. In order to allow the beer to last during the ocean voyage from England to India, they brewed a special beer with a higher alcohol content (the double malt allows this) and with more hops (which is also a preservative). This special beer was India Pale Ale. Some people developed a taste for it, and so it is still made today.

I don't store my water jugs under the most sanitary conditions, so the first step when I actually get down to business is soaking in bleach.

Then I rinse the bleach out with dish detergent, and rinse the dish detergent out with plenty of water.

I'm sure my neighbors were happy when I brought home my chiminea, hopeful that I had finally embraced the suburban lifestyle. You know what they say: "You can take the boy out of the country..." Besides, cooking beer produces alot of heat, and in southern Louisiana any heat you introduce into your house has to be (expensively) pumped back out. I have hung three U bolts over the rim of the chiminea to allow smoke to escape around the bottom of the pot.

You have to leave enough room in your pot for the later addition of malt.

Back in the house, you put the grains in the giant teabag. I have young boys, and so I also have dinosaurs.

Steep the teabag in the hot water for some length of time approximating half an hour. Note that the bag is suspended from a stick. This makes everything easier later on.

Pull out the teabag and squeeze as much of the nearly boiling water out of the bag as you can.

Add half your hops, being careful to avoid the giant finger of death that seems to be attracted to incompetent photographers.

Add any malt you have.

Add more malt if you have it. (hee hee hee!)

Enjoy the tail end of your last batch while you let the brew boil for half an hour to an hour. Be careful, your brew will try to boil over at least once while it is cooking. You might also have to go back and add some more hops to your cooking pot.

Fill your water jug half full of cold water. Then pour your beer concentrate in on top of that. If all goes well, the resulting mixture should be about body temperature. This is the perfect temperature for yeast, and now is when you add it. The green thing on top of the jug is the cut off top of a soda bottle I use as a funnel. I have found that the less my cooking supplies overlap with my wife's, the more peace there is in my life.

Once everything is in the jug, you top it off with an airlock. Notice that there is a good bit of airspace in the top of the jug. It is important to leave some room because the beer will foam once it starts fermenting.

The next day you can see that the beer has a pretty good head of foam from the fermentation. If this foam gets up into your airlock system it can cause a giant mess or, worse, a blockage. It was just such a blockage that caused my fermenting operation to be moved out of doors in the first place. Imagine someone standing in the middle of your kitchen holding a quart beer and then spinning around as fast as he could. That was many years ago, but females have long memories.