Home-Hop Stout

And now a little photo-documentary of our most recent adventure in homebrewing, The Home-Hop Stout. The dream of The Home-Hop Stout began with a trip to the Sunshine Herb Farm in Commerce this Spring when we saw that they had some Cascade hop plants for sale. We took two little hoplings home and planted them by our door. First-year hop plants don't usually produce much in the way of hops, but ours put out a little crop that we thought just might do nicely to flavor a batch of stout.


We began with a pound of chocolate barley malt in the big vat. After it had been soaked and sparged we added a couple of large (1.5 kg) cans of dark barley malt.


Boil, boil, toil and trouble
Brew a stout with darkness double!

The next step was to add the bittering hops. These weren't actually from our home plant, but were instead pellets that I bought from a local homebrew supply shop. We boiled them in the wort for about an hour.

Homebrewing involves lots and lots of cleanup, here demonstrated by our lovely model with her lovely sponge.

Here we see our home hops. We divided them into two batches, one of which we added with about 15 minutes left in the boil, then added another batch just before the end, so as to infuse lots of delicate aromatics to our mix.

Into the pot they go! I have no idea why I look as if I'm trying to tame lions here. I usually don't look like that until after I drink the beer.

After the lovely home-hoppiness was properly infused, into the cooling tub went the wort vat. Once it was cool enough...

... we put all 5.5 gallons of wort in our brewing bucket, pitched the yeast, added the top and airlock, and set it aside, so that the little yeasties could work their magic.

Then John got to contribute his share to the cleanup.

About a week later, the little yeasties had indeed done their work. We were ready to bottle!

Monique is the true hero of the bottling. She cleaned and sterilized all the bottles while John was off running errands (among which, in my defense, was fetching more bottle caps.)

We added a bit of corn sugar to prime the beer, so that it would carbonate in the bottles. Then we racked the brew out of our fermentation bucket and into Mr. Beer. Mr. Beer is our little 2-1/2 gallon brewing vat, but it's handy for bottling because it has a spigot on the bottom.

Monique filled the bottles with some help from Katie the Beagle.

John capped the bottles ...

... and the next thing you know, slightly more than two cases of stout were bottled and ready for just a smidge more aging until they're ready to drink.

The preliminary uncapping comes Thursday night when we carve pumpkins for Halloween, though we expect to save most of it up for Thanksgiving week. The preliminary sampling was extremely yummy, so waiting until then might be the biggest challenge of the whole process.

Hopes are high for the home-hopped hooch!