Richmond Beer Brewing Society in Action
12/11/2008
Richmond Beer Brewing Society in Action
This past weekend RBBS started their brewing operation, making four different batches of beer. Each of the groups used a combination of four ingredients: water, malt, hops and yeast. As this was most of the club’s first attempt at brewing, three of the batches used a base pre-hopped liquid malt extract, cutting out the long and complicated process of measuring and boiling the hops while the others followed a recipe and allowed more room for creativity and experiment.
On Friday, the first batch was started by club officers Alex Koehler, Bethany Warner and Colin Sabia. Roughly following a recipe for a Cincinnati Pale Ale, they used some creativity to produce something more to their liking. This ale will be named Nancy Pale Ale. Nancy, France is one of the sister cities of Cincinnati, and as the new recipe involved the substitution of one malt for its opposite, the name change seemed appropriate.
On Saturday the club members began their brewing. The second batch was brewed by Iain Padley and Aga Switala. They started with Coopers Real Ale, a pre-hopped liquid malt extract but added Cascade hops for extra aroma.
The third batch, a Coopers Dark Ale, was brewed by Hernan and Cathy. Although they experienced a few problems during the brewing process including a boil-over and some spillage, the dark ale seems to be fermenting at a quicker pace than the others.
The final 5 gallon batch was a Coopers English style bitter, brewed by Lucas Ungaretti with the help of Colin. Because they both don't really enjoy bitters, but only had that liquid malt extract, they added a significant amount of aroma hops to hopefully enhance the boring taste of English bitters.
The brewers will now wait a period of 2-3 weeks for the wort to ferment into beer before they will bottle and keg their product. While in the bottle, the beer will condition for a period of 2 weeks up to 3 months. At the end of the semester the society will display their beer for students to sample.
Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/620.aspx
