The home brew experiment begins.

So, this is my first ever attempt at blogging so we'll see how it goes...

Home brewing is a hobby I've always wanted to get into, but never got around to it.  Mostly because I'm far too lazy and impatient to actually try to brew beer, then wait the 6 weeks plus for the beer to be ready to drink.  Who wants to do that when the beer store is just a few blocks away?  As it turns out, there are a whole lot of people who do.  Check out the bottom of this entry for links to some great sites for homebrew newbies like me.

Anyway, to get on with the story...my birthday was fast approaching, and my wife and parents were both asking me what I wanted, and that I needed to update my giftlist, since it hadn't been updated since Christmas (http://www.mygiftlist.com/ is awesome, btw).  Not having any ideas what to add, I did some Google searching for MANLY gift ideas, and one of them was a basic homebrew kit called Mr. Beer.  I figured, why not.  Not wanting to just grab the first kit I found online, I did some research and read some reviews and found the Northern Brewer Deluxe Brewing Starter Kit.  It had some great reviews, and looked to have pretty much everything I'd need to get started, including a recipe kit for my first beer.  It has 3 options to pick from (an American Wheat, a Session Beer, and an Irish Red Ale), but I didn't specify when I added it to my giftlist, preferring to be surprised.

Fast Forward a few weeks later to a few days before my birthday, and the doorbell rings.  After calming Enzo (our 4 year old English Springer Spaniel) down, I open the door to see the UPS man has left behind a large box with pictures of beer and brewing equipment on it (thanks, Mom and Dad!!).  I, of course, am very excited, but it's still a few days before my birthday, so I decide that I should be patient, and wait to open it until my actual birthday arrives (yes, I was acting like a little kid instead of a soon-to-be 37-year-old man, but I don't care).

NORTHERN BREWER DELUXE BREWING STARTER KIT

 

 After heading to College Station for the weekend to see the Ags BTHO Rice, and see Johnny be Johnny, I decided that a Sunday morning/afternoon was the perfect time to brew up my first batch of beer.  I opened up my kit and did an inventory.  Everything was there, so no worries there.  I found the recipe kit and read over the instructions and ingredients list.  Nothing seemed too daunting, but I did have one small problem...we didn't have a stock pot nearly big enough for my new hobby.  Our largest pot is 2 gallons.  As you can tell from the instructions, I'll be starting off by boiling 2.5 gallons.  I'm going to need a bigger pot.  So, it was off to Wal-Mart.  Believe it or not, Wal-mart didn't have anything larger than about 4 gallons.  I wanted something 5+, so I'd have plenty of room to expand and avoid boilover.  Off to Target we went.  Target had a much better selection, and after some impromptu Googling of the difference in hombrewing in aluminum and stainless steel, I went with an 8-gallon aluminum steamer pot.  I also picked up a small notebook to take notes on the process, so I can find what works and what doesn't for future batches.

Back home, I popped in my DVD that came with the beer brewing kit and watched the video on brewing beer, along with the one on sanitizing my fermentation equipment.  Confident that I now possessed the knowledge necessary to be successful in my first batch, I headed to the kitchen to get started.

Following the recipe kit instructions, I poured 2.5 gallons of water into my pot, and dumped the grains into a muslin bag to steep in the water.  With the thermometer that came with the kit in the pot, I steeped the grains for 20 minutes (it was right at 170 degrees at that point), then removed the grains and threw them away.  I then waited for the water to begin to boil so I could add the malt extract syrup.  And waited....and waited...and waited some more.  Tip to others considering this....heating that much water in a pot that big on an electric stove top isn't all that easy.  A turkey fryer burner (or other outdoor propane burner) would have come in very handy.  It will also allow you to do your brewing outside, and not prompt your wife to declare that you have overpowered the Scentsy and made the whole house smell like beer!

Anyway, back to brewing.  After finally getting the water boiling, I turned off the heat and added the softened-in-hot-water-in-the-sink malt to the water and stirred, thereby creating wort!  After another long wait for the wort to come to a boil, I added the first batch of hops.  30 minutes later, the second batch of hops went into the wort.  Another 30 minutes later, and it was done.  Now to cool the wort down to 100 degrees or so, so it could safely be poured into the carboy (glass or plastic 6.5 gallon water bottle, basically.  I have plastic ones).  The instructions, and most forums, will tell you to cool using an ice water bath in the sink.  Ok, sounds like a plan.  Oh, wait, my ginormous pot won't fit in the sink.  And, we have dinner reservations in a half hour.  Ok, I put the lid on and put the pot in our beer fridge in the garage, after clearing out some room.  Several forums said this shouldn't be a problem.  Next time, I'll have a better plan for cooling the wort (more on temperature control a little later).

After dinner at Pappas Brothers Steakhouse (yum!) for my birthday, it's back home and time to get the fermentation started.  While we were gone, everything required for fermentation was sitting in a sanitizer solution (the sanitizer came with the kit) in the 5-gallon bottling bucket (not used yet, but perfect for this purpose).  I siphoned the solution in to the 6.5 gallon primary fermentation carboy and let it soak for a few minutes.  After draining the carboy, and with the help of my loving wife, poured the now-cooled wort in to the fermentor.  Again following the instructions, I aerated the wort in the fermentor to get it ready for the addition of the yeast.  I pitched the yeast into the fermentor (brewing term for adding) and sealed it up with the airlock.  Moved it into the pantry to sit and ferment.

Now, the optimal temperature for fermentation of ales is between 60 and 70 degrees.  This being Texas, there's no way I'm getting anywhere in the house that cool without paying an outrageous electric bill.  The instructions said 78 degrees or lower, so I figured I was fine without any extra cooling.  Looking back, and for next time, I would have used a swamp cooler or similar setup.  From my research, I should be fine with this batch, it just may have some off flavors.  We'll see in a few weeks.

So, it has now been 8 days since fermentation began.  When I got home from work on Monday afternoon and checked on it, it was fermenting like crazy.  Lots of activity, with a good inch and a half to two inches of krausen (foam cased by the fermentation process) on top of the beer, and a bubble every few seconds from the airlock.  Looking good so far!  I've been pretty good about being patient since then, only looking in a couple of times a day.  Of course, my wife did notice that the pantry smelled like beer right away.  I'll be doing the fermenting somewhere else next time!  I'm working on a plan to get the fermenation temperate down, anyway, so it would have to move somewhere that I have more room.  After 3 or 4 days, fermentation slowed down considerably, and now there's pretty much no activity at all.  I have yet to purchase a hydrometer to check the specific gravity of the beer, so I don't know if it has stabilized yet.  I plan on making a trip to Homebrew Headquarters in Richardson this week, and that's on my shopping list.  I'll probably give it another week, and bottle next weekend.  Then I can start planning my second batch, learning from my mistakes as I go, all the while creating beer!  How awesome is that?

I'll try to keep this updated with my experiences as I continue along this great journey of beer making.  Of course, I have to thank my wife, Erin, for being such a good sport and supporting my new hobby as much as she has, even though I've made two parts of the house smell like beer now.  She's not much of a beer drinker, so hopefully I'll be able to make something that she likes!

Some links that I've found handy in this process:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum.php
http://forum.northernbrewer.com/
http://beersmith.com/