1 pkg. Wye Yeast Laboratories 1028 London Liquid Ale Yeast
1 c. dry malt
6 1/4 lb. cracked pale 2-row (British) barley malt
8 oz. cracked English crystal malt
10 oz. Demarara sugar
2 oz. Fuggles hop pellets
2 oz. Kent Goldings hop pellets
3/4 c. corn sugar
6 gallons of water
Garbage can of ice

EQUIPMENT REQUIRED:

1 lg. pot sufficient to boil 6 gallons of liquid
1 or more food grade plastic containers sufficient to hold
5 gallons of liquid
1 thermometer
48 qt. picnic cooler with drainage system
5 gallon glass carboy, sanitized
1 qt. glass or clear plastic pitcher
2 cases glass bottles
1 bottle capper
1 clear plastic siphoning hose

(I can show you how to construct the system.)

Two days prior to tackling steps 1-10 you should boil the dry malt with 2 cups of water and cool the resulting liquid to between 68 and 75 degrees and then add the yeast. The result of the yeast and malt mixture is called a "yeast slurry." Put the yeast slurry in a pint jar covered with tin foil. DO NOT SCREW A CAP ON IT AS IT WILL EXPLODE.

Heat 9 quarts of water to 158 degrees. Add water and the cracked malts to the picnic cooler. Check resultant temperature of water-grain mix (called the "mash"). Its temperature should be between 150 and 153 degrees. If it is more or less, add cool or boiling water to raise or lower temperature. Mash the grains (i.e., close the cooler and let them soak) for 1 1/2 hours. Drain off 1 quart of the sweet liquid (called the "wort") into the pitcher and pour it back over the grain bed evenly. Repeat this process until the cloudiness begins to disappear from the wort. This should take 15-30 minutes.

Heat the remaining water (about 4 gallons) to 168 degrees. Pour it evenly and gradually over the grain bed and, at the same time begin draining the wort into the food grade buckets so that at all times there is about 1/2 inch of water over the grain bed. This process is called "sparging the wort."

Pour the entire drained wort into your pot and bring it to a boil. Subject the wort to a good rolling boil for 1 1/2 hours. 15 minutes into the boil, add the sugar, the fuggles hops and 1 oz. of Kent Goldings hops to the boiling wort. At the end of the boil, turn off the heat; add 1/2 oz. of Kent Goldings hops; stir the wort and let the hops dissolve into the hot wort.

Pour the heated wort into the 5 gallon food grade container and immerse the container in ice. I use a plastic 20 gallon garbage can full of ice. DO NOT ADD ICE CUBES TO THE WORT. When the temperature of the wort has lowered to between 68 and 75 degrees, siphon the wort from the food grade container to the glass caboy. It may take several hours for the temperature to lower. Add the yeast slurry to the sanitized carboy and mix the slurry with the wort. Cover the mouth of the carboy with a blow off tube which will allow CO2 to escape during primary fermentation but prevent harmful bacteria from reaching the wort.

After primary fermentation (about 7 days), add the remaining 1/2 oz. Kent Goldings to the carboy. This is called "dry hopping." After secondary fermentation (another 3 days), add and stir the corn sugar into the wort. This is called "priming the wort." After priming, add the wort to the bottles and cap them. Let the bottles sit for another week. Then chill the beer. Open your first bottle. Decant the beer into a glass being careful not to pour in the yeast sediment. (The breweries have complex machines to drain the yeast sediment, resulting in no sediment in the bottles you buy.)