On Saturday afternoon, with my wife dozing off a cold, I decided to combine a cupboard-stocking shopping trip with a visit to Leeds' own craft brewing shop, Abbey Beer and Wine in Kirkstall. It's a tiny shop seemingly marooned in the middle of Kirkstall lights, and as such it requires some dedication and planning to get to, including traversing an unfortunate encounter between a bus and a 12-reg Audi A5 which must have made the owner very happy indeed.
Once across the sixteen sets of pelican crossings, I introduced myself as a newbie to Ian the owner and he happily started pulling together a starter kit in a well practised way. For an hour's chatting and working out what I wanted to do I walked out with the all the tools and ingredients I need except bottles - got plenty of those. Slightly uninteresting and probably obvious list follows :-
- Electrim 25l brewer's mash bin
- Mash bag
- Fermenting bucket
- Fermenting valve
- Hydrometer
- Siphon piping
- Bottle siphon
- Bottle brush
- Stirrer
- Bottle capper
- Bottle caps (red - the most difficult choice of the lot)
For the beer itself, Ian gave me an easy starter set following my vague requirement of something between original Boddingtons and Leeds Pale although I swapped the proper mash for extract (and two days later I'm not quite sure why I did - to make things a little bit easier but probably not that much):
- 2 x 1.5kg Brewpak light pale malt extract
- 100g Styrian golding hops
- 1 x packet Safale S-04 brewing yeast
- 50g Irish moss
As I have Graham Wheeler's Brew Your Own British Real Ale, which the shop sells, Ian suggested finding a recipe from that that fitted my requirement and adapting it, so I've found one, and had another revelation about how brewing works: it's maths (and a bit of chemistry), so with the aid of the charts in Wheeler's book and the probably unnecessary use of Brewzor, I've come up with a recipe that should produce a light, slightly bitter pale ale of around 4% ABV. So now, I have to get on with the washing and try and make it.