After getting all the ingredients together and finding 3 hours to devote to paying attention to a pot...I decided to brew! While I'm not going to go into all the chemistry and biology that is occurring step by step (unless you want to drop a question into the comments about it) I will summarize the process.
First I began by steeping the specialty grains I mentioned in the previous post in water held around 160 degrees. While you can extract sugars from these, this time I only wanted to get their flavor out.
After steeping the grains (much like tea) I brought the mixture up to a boil and threw in the light malt extract (for the yeast to feed on later) and let it dissolve. After doing this I put in the first hop bag (called the bittering hops). Let that boil for 50 minutes. Put in the second hop bag (called the flavor hops) and let that boil for 10 minutes. Then I took the pot off the heat and added the third hop bag (called the aroma hops).
After adding the hops the pot was put in the sink, surrounded by cold water, to cool down the wort to 70-80 degrees so that when I pitched (fancy brew talk for adding) the yeast they all wouldn't die. Once the wort had reached around 70-80 degrees I poured it into my primary fermenter and added the wet Scottish yeast and sealed it!
This will ferment in the primary fermenter for 1 week and then will be transfered to the secondary fermenter. This allows me to clear the dead yeast from the primary fermentation giving me a clearer beer. Hopefully I sanitized everything correctly and I won't get any wild yeast growing in my beer!
Oh, yeah, making beer in a small apartment kitchen can get a bit cramped and tricky...
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