The Brew-in-a-Bag Red

The Blonde rebuilt my confidence and after carefully looking at the remaining two courses, I decided to scratch the very last tutorial (all-grain batch sparge brewing) due to the cost, equipment and time investment. Thus, the hybrid Brew-in-a-Bag (aka BIAB) tutorial would be my final. You couldn’t pick a better final project to showcase what you’ve learned then this recipe. Enter Irish Red, stage left.

All grains, albeit in a bag and shortened version of the lengthy, gold-standard all-grain batch sparging brewing method, should result in a mouthful of flavor. That’s right, no beer syrup or powder this time. Just grains, water, hops and yeast. Not even spices.

After a visit to my potions shop brewer supplies store, leaving with a large bag of grains, some more yeast and hops, I was ready. I gave myself ample time since despite the BIAB being a shortened version of the trad all-grain, it still required hours, yes, hours to steep and boil and brew.

First up, strike water. Technical term, thank you very much. 

Some time and some degrees later, mashing in. Translation: I added the bag of grains and stirred the open bag to ensure complete saturation. And then we mashed, for an hour.

Once thoroughly mashed, the grains were removed and the boil commenced. The hops were added at the appropriate time. Yes, I am proud of that accomplishment, why do you ask? And then we boiled, for another hour. Meanwhile, the grains were cooled, rinsed and dried before being stored until I could make spent grain flour. 

After the boil, it was time to cool, pitch the yeast and ferment. Easy peasy. The hardest part was waiting during the heating, mashing and boiling. Some beer was drunk. 

And how did it fare? Jake loved it. Granted, he loves red ales so I think the bar was fairly low, but he still drank almost all of them himself.

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