Our first brewday! There’s been so much preparation and planning to start this microbrewery it’s hard to believe it's finally happening.

We brewed our first batch (it was actually a double batch) at our friends at Strandlida Bryggeri. They have a 300 liter system so we had to brew a double batch in order to fill both barrels.

The recipe is fairly simple: pilsner malt, raw wheat and 8-10 IBU of East Kent Golding hops. We were afraid that the raw wheat would mess up the lautering so we only used around 10% in the first batch. As it turned out, lautering was not a problem so for the second batch we used more raw wheat.

The reason to add raw wheat is that we want to get more complex sugars and proteins to the wort. The raw wheat comes from a local mill. They crushed it for us and it looked and smelled really nice.

We put the worth in one fermenter that could hold both batches. Then pitched a belgian yeast strain that will ferment most sugars. This yeast will get a week to ferment. After that the wort will be split even between the two wine barrels.

What an awesome day! We would like to thank the guys at Strandlida for their time and effort.

Will post another update once the barrels are filled.