Another brew in the works

My roommate from college is getting married soon, and he's coming to Austin in February for a bachelor party. I have been wanting to make another batch of beer but just never made the time to do it until now. Today I spent a couple of hours in the kitchen making a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. It's not really one of my favorites being that it's quite hoppy, but I'm going to have a lot of help drinking it when all the guys come to town.

I didn't take any pictures this time, but the process was visually similar to my first brewing experience. There main difference this time was that I used a mini mash recipe rather than an extract. Instead of steeping the grains in the water for fifteen minutes, I did it for forty-five minutes. The guys at the beer store said this would give it a fuller flavor.

Things went very smoothly except for one point where I left the kitchen for a little too long and the water boiled over. This was before I had added the malt extract so cleanup won't be too bad. The final specific gravity of the wort, 1.058, was just what the recipe called for. I will revisit the beer in another week to transfer it to a secondary fermenter.