Bananas Bunny has returned to his hosts, Seb and Fairy Jo, and last weekend he was let loose with brewing equipment. Over to Seb and Jo…
Bananas Bunny is proud of his love of beer and partying, but he’s also quite the creative little chap, so he decided to commandeer Seb’s brewing apparatus for the weekend, and try his hand at home brewing, a hobby which combines his love of beer with his love of creativity.
We asked him what beer he was making, and he told us he was making “An IPA Cascade SMaSH”. We told him if he didn’t stop talking nonsense we’d take the homebrew kit off him. He sulked for a bit, and then told us it was basically a pale ale using Cascade hops.
He cordially invites you to join him in Bananas Bunny’s Brewing Bonanza.
Bananas Bunny starts off by inspecting his ingredients. Maris Otter Malt, Cascade Hops in both pellet and leaf form, and yeast. He’s particularly excited by the malty and hoppy smells!
On a whim, he decides that he fancies his beer a bit stronger, so he weighs out another kilo and a half of malt from the industrial sized malt sack he bought.
He put the malt into a cooler (he kept calling it a ‘mash tun’ until we threatened to take the homebrew kit away again) and ran in 18 litres of water at 72°c. He kept muttering about the importance of mash temperature and enzymatic starch conversion until the third threat of homebrew kit withdrawal.
He was very excited when the weird porridge he had made was exactly 65°c. He started to explain why, but stopped before we had to make any more threats.
He had to sample some of his previous work to pass the time while he waited for the barley and water to turn into wort. Apparently it’s extremely rude not to.
Then, an hour and a half later, he rigged up some weird contraption that looked suspiciously like a sewage treatment plant. Apparently this is a ‘sparge rig’ but he knew better by this point than to try to explain what it did.
27 litres of wort later he was a very proud bunny, but there was still more to come.
He took the whole lot outside, and set it up on a gas burner. Fire is another of Bananas Bunny’s favourite things.
While it came to the boil, he weighed out his hops. He was a bit worried that the police might get the wrong idea if they spotted him weighing dried leaves out on a digital scale, and that he might have to spend another night hiding from police helicopters.
When the wort hit a rolling boil, he threw his first lot of hops in, and sat back to wait. He chucked a load more in at various points in the boil and muttered things about bittering and aroma hops but we gave him a meaningful look and he stopped.
When it had finished boiling he decanted it into a sterilised fermenting bin. He had a copper coil with cold water running through it which looked like a still. He said this cooled the beer down faster and reduced the denaturing of certain proteins which cause hazy beer. It was a bit late by this point to remove the brewing kit from him so we suffered his explanations with stern looks.
He checked the gravity of the beer using a hydrometer. It was apparently 1.060. This somehow allows him to calculate the final alcohol content. He seemed happy and we didn’t ask any more questions.
Finally, he pitched his little sachet of yeast in before sealing the whole lot up with an airlock.
Bananas Bunny is VERY excited by all the cool bubbles in his airlock!
He has been a very busy bunny! We’re sure he’ll share the results of his labour when it’s ready. He does seem to like to party in company.
Travelling Monsters 