COOKING
We are going to explain how we brewed 20 liters of beer, using a kit of Pils beer.
In addition
of the kit that we acquired, we also need a pot, ours is a 10 liters stainless steel
pot, one kilo of sugar, water and a thermometer.
*Wash and sterilize
all the equipment before use it.
We´ll divided
the process in three different steps: cooking, cooled and storage where it will be the first fermentation.
1- COOKING
Open the
can and heat it in a “bain-marie” during 10 minutes more or less to liquefy the
malt extract. Parallel heating up six liters of water in the big pot, in these
6 liters of warm water we put the sugar, mixed it slowly to avoid leave the
sugar on the bottom of the pot. After that we pour the malt extract. Stir the mixture
during 5-10 minutes and turn off the cooker.
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| First step |
2- COOLED
The aim of
this step is to drop the temperature of the mixture that we made in the pot less
than 25ºC. That´s because with higher temperatures the yeast doesn´t work.
This step is really important and also quite
complicated, we need to do it this step as fast as we can to avoid the contamination
of the beer.
There are
many ways to drop the temperature of the mixture. We have used a big bucket
with ice and water where we put the pot. Check the temperature with the
thermometer and when it´s below 25ºC, pour the mixture in the fermentation
bucket. Add water in the fermentation bucket till 20 liters.
 |
| Temperatures are really important |
WARNING! In this step we have found our first problem, we pour the mixture directly to the fermentation bucket and put this it in the big bucket with ice. The problem is that the fermentation bucket has a really good insulation, so we spent a lot of time in this step.
3- STORAGE
Now we have
20 liters of mixture in the fermentation bucket under 25ºC, now we have to add
the yeast to make the first fermentation.
Dissolve
the yeast in a glass with water and wait 15 minutes to activate it, then pour
the water with the yeast activated into the fermentation bucket.
 |
| Airlock of the fermentation bucket |
Measure the
density with the hydrometer before storage the fermentation bucket, in our case
the density of our beer is 1040.
And now we
have to leave the bucket in a dry place with a temperature under 23ºC during
ten days., put the airlock in the bucketwith some alcohol or water inside it. We left our bucket in the terrace with a temperature around 20ºC during
the whole process.
Do it
yourself!
DIY KIT
Finally we decided to start to brew our own beer, for this reason we want to explain how we started, our problems and difficulties before and during the process, to learn and improve our techniques and to be the stating point for future homebrewers.From now and in the next posts included in the section of "Como hacer cerveza casera" you will find out, step by step how to brew home beer.
 |
| DIY kit |
You will see that the starter kits are more or less the same, with the same equipment and almost all with a similar price, also you can take a look before buy it and see that maybe you have some part of the equipment at home.
We´ll start with a beer kit of Pils, we consider that is the better way to know how everything is going and become an expert little by little.
Here we give you a couple of links where you can find starter kits and local distributors where you can buy it.
From Belgium: BREWFERM starter's kit "DELUXE" this is our kit
http://www.brouwland.com/en/
Australia:
http://www.coopers.com.au/the-brewers-guild/brewing-products/brew-accessories/diy-beer
And from Poland: (cooper´s distributor)
http://www.biowin.pl/biowin/wino-piwo-destylaty/piwo/zestawy-startowe-mikrobrowary/mikro-browar-1
So, Do It Yourself!
STEJAR STRONG
 |
| Stejar can |
Origin:
Romania
ABV: 7 %
Type: Strong
Pale Lager
Owner: SAB Miller, Ursus
Stejar, oak in Romanian, official partner
of the rugby national team, strong and masculine taste is its slogan. With
these data we can get an idea about what is behind this “oak”, so let´s go.
Once you served it you can see a bronze color crowned
by intense foam that disappears quickly. Moderate aroma, hops and cereal and of
course its high alcohol level appears also when you smell it.
Talking about flavour, as its slogan says, “gust
puternic, character masculin” is really strong, alcohol tastes, but this
doesn´t means that is disgusting is strong but the aftertaste is quite good. Medium
body maintained its strength throughout the bottle. It gave us very good impressions.
To sum up, STEJAR is a beer to change the
routine of drinking lagers, which are dominant in the Romanian market, strong flavour,
because of its 7 ABV. It´s worth to taste it several times
Score:
NENEA IANCU
 |
| Nenea Iancu bottle! |
ABV: 4,9%
Type: Premium Lager
Owner: Memminger Brauerei
This beer was produced in
commemoration of the 160th anniversary of the birth of Romanian playwright Ion
Luca Caragiale, known by the pseudonym "Nenea Iancu" (Uncle Iancu)
and his love of beer.
Now there is a statue of Lenin with his name in
the center of Bucharest.
The statue, created by sculptor Constantin
Baraschi, was created to immortalize the figure of Lenin, he made it with an
uncommon image of Lenin, with one hand in his pocket and the other in the
jacket, it was too cheerful for the communist leader, so it was rejected and
the author placed it in his garden. When he was commissioned to make a new
statue, in this case one of Ion Luca Caragiale, he reused Lenin ‘statue, cutting its
head and placing the head of Nenea Iancu. Nowadays you can see this statue in Bucharest,
Strada Maria Rosetti and in the 100 lei bills.
Talking about the Nenea Iancu, the beer, is
really soft lager, with a light and crystalline golden color, where the foam is
almost invisible, it disappear immediately,
doesn´t matter that is bottle or draft.
Light body, with soft flavour quite sweet at
the beginning and just a little bit bitter in the aftertaste, but is barely recognizable.
Aroma like everything is this beer is soft.
 |
| Nenea Iancu at Mecanic, usually without the rose |
TIMISOREANA
 |
| Timisoreana in mid-afternoon |
Origin:
Romania
ABV: 5%
Type: Pale Lager
Owner: SAB Miller
Crystal and clear color, ephemeral foam and light-bodied, even it has 5% ABV are rarely recognizable in the taste. Soft flavour and medium bitter, but after drink it, bitterness comes. And this aftertaste when you are in the middle of the bottle starts to be quite rude.
If you drink it quite cold in a really hot day, it will be nice, for a while.
They are really proud to be the first brewery in Romania, the settled it up in the south-west city of Timisoara in 1718.
In 2001 the south African group SABMiller took over control of the brewery and then they started to use a new recipe, that changed the original flavor of TIMISOREANA, as the locals told us, they add also, than the actual recipe is much worse than the original one.
ABV: 5%
Type: Pale Lager
Owner: SAB Miller
Crystal and clear color, ephemeral foam and light-bodied, even it has 5% ABV are rarely recognizable in the taste. Soft flavour and medium bitter, but after drink it, bitterness comes. And this aftertaste when you are in the middle of the bottle starts to be quite rude.
If you drink it quite cold in a really hot day, it will be nice, for a while.
They are really proud to be the first brewery in Romania, the settled it up in the south-west city of Timisoara in 1718.
In 2001 the south African group SABMiller took over control of the brewery and then they started to use a new recipe, that changed the original flavor of TIMISOREANA, as the locals told us, they add also, than the actual recipe is much worse than the original one.
We would like to have the chance to try this old
version, because this new one, it leaves a lot to be desired
http://www.beretimisoreana.ro
Score:
AllBeerTo:
Fail
NEUMARKT
 |
| Neumarkt in La Cueva |
Origin. Romania
ABV: 5,2
Type: Pils
Brewery: Heineken
We started with this beer NEUMARKT a series of
quick and brief entries to present the rest of the Romanian market that we have
discovered around the country.
"gustul puternic amărui şi" strong
and bitter taste, sums it up nicely. For us is too much bitter and the strong
flavor doesn´t means that it´s good. But as they say in its slogan, that it´s
true, is truly manly.
This is a full-bodied beer, at the beginning with
a strong flavor and a pronounced hop aroma, they are proud of the various hops
they use to make it, for that reason it has a very bitter taste, which makes
the aftertaste long and not so nice. Its color is powerful amber and the foam,
is like bubbles that disappear as fast as you close the bottle.
It´s almost impossible to find NEUMARKT in bars
or restaurants, I´ve never seen it. We only find it at the supermarket, as format
of plastic pint, one liter and two liters, the one we had tasted is the 1 liter
bottle.
It is a cheap, battle beer, but in fact it´s
more like a nuclear war beer. After fail in our aim to finish the bottle, we
can say that the truly manly taste maybe appears a little bit at the beginning,
but at the end it becomes a bottle with water in a suspicious color.
NEUMARKT belongs to the Dutch group Heineken.
http://www.consumaberilenoastreresponsabil.ro
Score:
AllBeerTo: Fail
CHISINAU
 |
| Chisinau in Bucharest |
Origin: Moldova
The moldovan market is plenty of russian and ukrainian beers, the national beer is Chisinau Bere, which is owned by the Turkish group EFES, for this reason we can find turkish beers in the shop shelves.
ABV: 4,5%
Type: Pale Lager
Brewery: Efes
Really pale beer, clean golden colour with a foam soft and powerless, with a total lack of hop bitterness and quite tasteless beer. Very soft beer, also because of this volume, it could be good for summer, but if you drink it in December like I did, you will need help to warm you up.
This is the beer of Moldova, it´s name is the name of the capital, Chisinau, however is quite difficult to find this beer in the restaurants or bars in the city. For this reason the bottle that appears in the picture was purchased in a 24 hours shop, is also available in supermarkets and Chisinau draught in some bars.
The moldovan market is plenty of russian and ukrainian beers, the national beer is Chisinau Bere, which is owned by the Turkish group EFES, for this reason we can find turkish beers in the shop shelves.
Efes Vitanta Moldova Brewery S.A. is the biggest producer of beer in Moldava and the owner of Chisinau since 2003. http://berechisinau.md
Score:
Allbeerto: Pass
ZYWIEC
 |
| Zywiec at Poloca´s Palace |
Origin: Poland
ABV: 5,6%
Type: Lager
Brewery: Heineken
One of the best selling beers in Poland, is found throughout the country and is available on tap, can and glass format of 0.5 l. Is part of the national feeling and national pride even more, it could be considered as the beer of the country.
No lasting foam, fades quickly, but it doesn´t lose its body, something strange in an industrial beer of 0,5l format. Thanks of its 5,6% is good for winter time, always as a vodka chaser.
About the history of the brewery, Zywiec was founded in 1856 and in the '90s was bought by the Dutch Group Heineken. Was then when Heineken form the Grupa Zywiec in Poland, which also has others Polish beers brands such as Brackie, Lezajsk, Królewskie, Specjal, Strong, Tatra and Warka.
NA ZDROWIE!!
Score:
Allbeerto: Good
WYMEHCKO- SHUMENSKO
 |
| Wymehcko in the warm up |
Origin: Bulgaria
ABV: 4.8%
Type: Lager
Brewery: Carlsberg
Quite bitter at the first taste and dry at the end, and because of the typical bottle of this area, in cans or glass bottles of 0.5 L makes bitter beers too heavy to drink, and a even dull, becacuse of lack of taste at the end.
On the other hand, is a good beer for Winter, and to drink when the temperature is below 20 ºC, something really common by the way here.
 |
| Pic: Juan Zam, from Sofia |
We start here a new section on AllBeerTo, trying to know who is behind the beers we drink, who are the distributors, importers, main actors in the beer sector.
Following this idea, this bulgarian beer, is part of the Carlsberg group, since 2002. With the support of such a big group, nowadays Wymehcko is being distributed to the whole country and it arrives to Portugal and to The States in Chicago.( Source: Carlsberg official webside).
Score:
A. Ramos: 4.8
FABRICA DE BERE URSUS
 |
| Main door of the URSUS brewery |
New episode of our adventures in Romania, this time, our
target was the north-west of the country, where is located the city of Cluj-Napoca,
Cluj Nacopon.
This trip was in mid-March when spring begins to appear, no more ice in the streets, no more falls because nobody cleans the pavements and without have to fight with the cars for a space to go on the smallest streets so, is such a great feeling when you appear in a sunny Sunday afternoon at the door of the most famous Romanian brewery, that you forget the hard winter.
From our headquarters in Bucharest, it takes around nine hours by train till we arrived to Cluj, but it´s worth to visit, nice city where we met a lot of people, and the crucial moment in our last day of our trip, was our visit to the URSUS brewery.
The brewery is located not so far from the city centre, in front of the University of Medicine and Veterinary, in this factory is where the king of beers in Romania, produces and distributes their beers throughout the country. Only here is where you can taste a URSUS nefiltrata,
and by the recomendation of the locals, a mixing between URSUS nefiltrata and URSUS black, but this last one didn´t convince us so much. The bar-restaurant is really nice, plenty of lamps with a shape of beers bottles, some parts of the brewery process and of course, with a lot of bears motives:
The fact that in Fabrica de Bere URSUS is the only place where you can drink a jar of URSUS nefiltrate makes this place really recommendable in case you are close to Cluj-Napoca.
ALBACHER WINTER
 |
| Albacher Winter |
Origin: Romania
ABV: 7%
Type: Strong Lager
Special winter edition of ALBACHER, in fact, is the only Christmas-winter romanian beer you could find in this country.
In the Romanian market there are only a few special editions for Christmas, you can find six packs with some Christmas decorations where you can see "Crăciun Fericit".
But, when you open the pack, after buy them in the shop, go home as fast as you can, because of the weather, meanwhile you are thinking about the new beer you will taste, take one that it´s already cold thanks to the outside temperature,you start to turn it around, look the top, look the bottom, and yes, it´s just the same beer.
Just for this reason this Romanian Winter beer is worth to drink it.
Once you buy it and start to enjoy it, you can find that, as the original ALBACHER PREMIUM ,the taste is strong and the smell is powerful, with a long ending,even more because of the alcohol, 2% more in this case.
The colour is not so strong as other winters editions, it is quite similar as the premium edition of ALBACHER PREMIUM, really clear and clean, but with this powerful body that 7% of alcohol gives to it.
Score:
A. Ramos:6.5
ALBACHER PREMIUM
 |
| Albacher,in a typical Romanian train |
Origin: Romania
ABV: 4.8%
Type: Lager
Despite its low alcohol content, is only 4.8%, this beer is one of the most flavor of this area, full-bodied, strong and long aftertaste, but without the taste of alcohol that some beers with higher alcohol have. Beer with real taste of beer.
The picture shows us, a can of Albacher drinked in a tipycal romanian train in one of our many trips through the land of Dracula, this format is the only one available for this beer, also the plastic one, but we have not found glass format.
Albacher is a trademark belonging to the ROMAQUA GROUP http://www.romaqua-group.ro/ the group come into the romanian beer market two years ago to compete with the bigs groups that dominate the Romanian market.
At the moment is maintained by the powerful distribution channel of the group, that has specialized in water.
It´s quite different for the rest you can find over here and having a different flavor in the monotony is always nice.
Score:
A. Ramos: 6
URSUS
Origin: Romania
ABV: 5 %
Type: Pale Lagerhttp://ursus.ro/
"Regele berri in România" King of beer in Romania.
With this new post, from AllBeerTo concluded the year of our birthday.
We have here the most famous beer in Romania, this is the NAME of the beer in Romania. Ursus Brewery is still a national company, is not part of a biggest company like other beers in Romania, and in many countries as well.
Ursus, comes from Urs, Bear in Romanian, but is not as strong as it seems with this name, but it has body enough to be worth to drink it.
Like the majority of the east-europe countries, almost all the production is sold in cans, or bottles of 0.5 l, that makes you enjoy for more time this beers, in summer they getting warmer but in winter they getting colder, but remember is not allow drinking in the streets, unless nobody see you.
Is something you have to do if you come to visit Romania, drinking one or some URSUS, nice taste, good ending, and with 5% of alcohol gives you the chance of drink more than one without problems.
Pride of the romanian national feeling and good price-quality beer for foreigners.
Score:
A. Ramos: 6,5
ZAGORKA
 |
| IEC SOFIA |
Origin: Bulgaria
ABV: 5 %
Type: Lager
The most famous beer in Bulgaria.Nice taste,good ending and powerful body.With not so much alcohol, but strong enough to give a good impresion.Quite nice lager beer.Perfect for drink as much as you can.One of the battle beers that is worth to drink slowly.
Score:
A. Ramos: 5,9
BOLIARKA
 |
| Hotel Slavyanska Beseda, Sofía. |
Origin. Bulgaria
ABV: 5,6 %
Type: Wiessbier
Although the name is in cirilic, the translation into the roman alphabet is Boliarka, even in the label, under the name appears the word weiss, that gives you the confidente that is a wheat beer.
Although the name is in cirilic, the translation into the roman alphabet is Boliarka, even in the label, under the name appears the word weiss, that gives you the confidente that is a wheat beer.
Amazing weiss beer,the taste is like a great german weiss,the color is quite dark and the aroma is really nice.Awesome bulgarian beer,whose name in Latin is Boliarka.Totally diferent from the rest of east europe weiss beer.Really good.
This was the first beer we taste in Bulgaria, so I thought to myself, I will like this country.What a wonderful surprise!!
Score:
A.Ramos:7,5
BULGARIAN BEERS
 |
| Ready to play!!in Sofia |
здравей
Is a pleasure for us increase our range of beers of the world,with this new entry about Bulgaria.In the southeast of Europe, Bulgaria has around 7 million people.The capital,Sofia,has over 2 million of the total of population, and here is where we had set our headquarters.Comming next, we are going to analize these beers that you can see in the picture,nine differents beers that we had the opportunity to try in our fast incursion over the bulgarian country.
CIUC
Origin. Romania
ABV: 5%
Type: Pale Lager
Bună!!!
Let´s get start with this beer, Ciuc Premium, the analysis of the beer´s world in Romania, a new stage we began with hope and expecting that everyone who by differents ways, come to read this sentences watering by this great liquid called BERE, enjoy them.
This beer, is part of the Dutch multinational Heineken, and that we expect, make honor to the owner´s style, a light beer, very smooth with a slight bitter taste at the end of each drink, becomes litlle and little when we are near the end of the glass. But, on the other hand, after a hard day and if a nice local woman served it well, is worth to drink it.
Score:
A. Ramos: 5
Score:
A. Ramos: 5
ROMANIA
In addition, we are plotting a new project that we are going to develop here little by little when it becomes true, at the moment it´s just an idea...
Our intention is to try to analize as much beer as we can, not only from Romania, where nowadays is AllBeerTo´s headquarter, also from the surrounding countries. Eastern Europe has a lot of things for discover and we try to discover them with you.
Mulţumesc şi NOROC!!!