Brewing Element Ale Batch 3 (New Castle Clone)

This will be mostly pictures.
Brewing date was January 24th, 2010.
First step is cleaning.

The second step is measuring out water needed.

Third is getting the water up to a simmer (155 degrees)

Fourth, should have been step one, open a bottle of drinkable homebrew (thats EA-b2)

Fifth, add specialty grains to your grain sock and add to the simmering water.

Next, sanitization

I swear this isn't as borring as it seems

In the above image, grains have just been removed, now I put the spurs to it and bring it up to a full rolling boil. And add the hops:

After hops have been added it gets to be a weird green color:

I have been experimenting with when to add the malt extract. This batch and the last I added it in the last 15 minutes of boil, as all it needs to do is dissolve, and it isn't adding much flavor if any at all. 

At this point you add additional hops and then try and get the temperature down to between 75 and 80 Degrees. Not easy to take pictures of ice melting. Basically I have been taking my Wort (baby beer) and dumping it on ~7lbs of ice to make this happen. So far so good. Then you add additional water to get it up to 5 gallons, add the yeast and aerate. Seal it up and wait... For the most part, people will disagree with how I am doing the fermenting/storing. Most people use a secondary container after the first 2 or 3 days to allow for the beer to continue to clear. I simply leave it in the original bucket, seems to have done fine so far. 

After two weeks in the fermenter, its time to bottle. This time around I cleaned and sanitized my bottles using the new dishwashers NSF sani-wash setting. 

I racked the beer from the Fermenter to the bottling bucket then hung the bottling bucket over the front of the dishwasher and went to work.

Bottling went very quickly this way, I think it only took about 30 minutes. 

I think I lost more beer than I normally do, but not to much. 

After bottling, I generally leave the bottles in storage for about 3 weeks to let them clear further and for carbonation to be established. From there it is a pretty boring process, LOTS of cleaning. Cleaning of the bottling bucket and fermenter and long with the whole kitchen as it is a mess after bottling. 

Hope you enjoyed the very uncreative post, lots of information in this one. The next will be fun, I hope.