Keg

Shockingly, I appear to have failed to record this: about a fortnight ago, I started a kit of beer. Nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, just a kit-in-a-can of lager. The beer kits eliminate a lot of the intricacies of beer brewing (steeping, boiling, cooling, and a balancing of malts, wheats, hops, and so on), which adds to the effort and expense. I'm not a great beer connoisseur, though I enjoy the occasional glass, so the kit approach is one I prefer. It lets me brew it myself, but scaled-down complexity from the complete experience.

So: on (I think) Tuesday 31st, I poured the contents of the can, and 1.5kg of sugar, into my fermenting bin, added some boiling water, and topped it up to 5 gallons. Once it cooled to 30ºC, I added the yeast, and sat it on the landing (which has been nice and warm for the last fortnight).

Yesterday, I drew off a pint, and checked the specific gravity, which had fallen to 1.002. The beer is ready for bottling when the SG falls to 1.006, and so this morning I added 2oz of sugar to my barrel (newly cleaned of (rather cloudy) cider remnants), and syphoned in the beer. The added sugar will secondarily ferment, carbonating the beer, which should clear over the next couple of weeks and be ready to drink. The pint I drew off for testing was (although flat) tasty, and I'm looking forward to a proper pint in a fortnight or so.

The yeasty dregs, meanwhile, have gone as bait in the slug traps.