Since the removal company didn’t allow alcohol on their transport, we have been without our trusty home brewed beer for a bit of time now. Now that the dust has settled on the move, it was time to address that.
Preparations
As we also ran low on ingredients, we first had to figure out what beer to brew, and where to source the required ingredients. As we first wanted to get our “staple” beers stocked back up, we picked our four next brews: Make That the Cat Weiss (a German weizener), Outdoor Season (a French saison), Illegally Blonde (a Belgian blonde), and Naughty (a milk stout). Of course all of these recipes are on our site as well!
With those brews picked, we did some comparing and ended up at Sr. Cervejeiro. Apart from lactose sugar (which we’ll need once we brew the Naughty), they had all the ingredients available at a reasonable price. After ordering it on a Wednesday, it already arrived on Friday the same week. That was some excellent customer service and made sure that last weekend we could immediately start brewing!
The brew
The frist brew we’re doing is Make That the Cat Weiss. It’s a wonderfully light and fresh beer, so we want this one to be ready for when the temperatures are really starting to pick up (or at least compared to what we were used to!). Since the weather was excellent, and the brewing process itself expels quite a bit of water vapour, we did the brew outside underneath the sun shelter.
The shelter has a small wall as well, which conveniently helped us with positioning the water heater for the sparge process. As is clear from the photo, we clearly need to make a better platform for it, as it didn’t have much room to spare. And we also had to use some books for increasing the height just that bit to get the perfect height.
The brew itself went without a hitch though. We are looking forward to tasting it, but as always, we will have to be patient for a few more weeks before it’s ready.
There are some improvements we would like to make to the setup though. We need to make a more stable platform for our sparge water heater that also gives it that little bit of extra height. We also had to run a hose all the way from our shower to cool the wort after the boil. There is a tap right there next to it, but since it was a different size than any of our existing connectors, we will have to get an adapter for it. Otherwise we were quite happy with the location and general setup.
Ready, set, action!
Aside from brewing, we also wanted to make a video of our first brew in Portugal. We have filmed a few things before, but those just some casual attempts at getting used to the equipment without much of a plan to go with it. This time we wanted to take it a bit more serious. So we’ve made an effort to actually talk to the camera, explain things, and generally capture the process.
This clearly takes a lot of getting used to if we want to do it more often. But it did feel like we became a little bit more natural at it as the day went on. The editing process can take a while, so we don’t have a video to share just yet. All in due time!