American Red Ale

Over the holiday break, I made a batch of beer from a kit. The "ReadyBrew" kit was manufactured by craft brewer Paddock Wood Brewing, Saskatoon (Hey, that's almost local for me!). According to the manager of the store where I bought it, Paddock Wood Brewing prepares fifty 23 L kits from every batch of their own beer. That's kind of cool!

The "kit" consisted of a boxed bag of 23 L of wort. That's all. (But, frankly, I didn't mind because nothing says 'serious' like a kit consisting of only one raw material. "You need to select your own yeast, buddy.")

A couple of days before Christmas, I started the fermentation. Within a day, there was quite an accumulation of foam - enough to push the lid off the bucket:

Uh oh!

While I didn't bother to take a picture of what happened next, I can assure readers that the foam created quite a mess, especially when it dried out. Fortunately, I put the entire primary fermentation bucket in a large plastic tub, which contained the mess. The excessive foam production did not last very long. Another day, and the foam had collapsed to a manageable level.

On Christmas Day, I took a few minutes to transfer the beer from into a sterilized carboy, and installed an airlock. And, today, January 2, 2017, I added priming sugar and bottled. I'm really looking forward to enjoying a bottle in a couple of weeks.

Happy New Year!