On this historic day, whatever year it is, I’m proud to announce BEER mom and I made our 6th batch of beer.  It has also been 6 months since our first brew finished and a little over 6 months ago when I started this site.

Tonight, for our sixth brew, we went the unpopular route and chose to brew some bitter.  I mentioned last time that English Bitter isn’t very different than a pale ale, but it’s called bitter because of the amount of hops it contains.  I decided a while back that I would try brewing a lighter beer since almost everyone who tried the coffee beer said it was too strong.

We started this evening the same as all the other times we brewed beer, except this time BEER mom was having  good hair day.

We put the baby to bed and I sanitized everything while she kept an eye on all visitors we were receiving on that smith.  I worked on a new addon for Firefox this weekend and released it earlier tonight.

When everything was clean I warmed up my mixture of bitter and began boiling about 2 litres of water on the stove.

I was very close to picking up the bock beer sitting next to it at the homebrew store, but didn’t want to have to edit my last post.  We will be making bock next time.

Next we measured out just over 5 cups of corn sugar and prepped the fermenter.

BEER mom added the sugar to our boiling water and I began filling the fermenter with water to cool the wort when it was ready.

It took several cups of ice cubes to get everything cooled to a suitable temperature for the yeast, but it eventually got there and I was able to take the starting gravity after a few minutes.  According to our hydrometer, our bitter will be about 5% alcohol when fermenting and bottling is complete in a couple weeks.

I have 10 coffee beers left and hopefully they will last me until then.  A few of our Wichita twitter friends joined us yesterday for a beta beer tasting and their response seemed pretty positive.

We will be back next weekend with bottling pictures.