All right, what are we looking at here? In the first picture are the Bavarian candi sugar crystals. Don’t they look just like beveled gems? It’s astonishing, and I tasted one and it tastes just like regular sugar! Imagine that. Second picture: prime ingredients for the wort, bourbon and sugar. The sugar will contribute to the malt extract (which I did not know I was making until I did) and the bourbon is ‘cos this is a Belgian bourbon dubbel. Or it’s supposed to be, until I prove how badly I’ve screwed this up in two weeks.
In the third picture, I’m sanitizing all the equipment in my bathtub. StarSan is awesome: you soak everything in it for a couple minutes and you don’t even need to rinse it off, just start using it. It’s organic! And the fourth picture reveals how I decided that, if I don’t want to ruin the wort by having it sit in its own gases in a 5 gallon carboy, I had to transfer the mix to a (hastily sanitized) 1 gallon carboy instead. The tube is leading to a small tub of sanitizing liquid, as well, just in case the yeast activates too enthusiastically and foams up and creates a mess. In three days I can place a normal airlock on the lil’ jug and then wait eleven whole days to start bottling. This is the boring part.
