First Batch of Home Brewed Beer

I finally decided it was time to use the nice homebrew equipment that Cendy bought me last Christmas...not 2010 Christmas, 2009...better late than never, I guess.

She bought an English Brown Ale kit by Brewer's Best at How Do You Brew in Newark. After spending most of the weekend reading the kit's instructions, standard instructions from the store, the book "Home Beermaking" by William Moore, and visiting www.homebrewtalk.com, I felt I was ready.

Luckily, the beer ingredients were still good for use, even though they were a year old. The kit includes (starting clockwise from the can):

-3.3 lb Can of Amber Liquid Malt Extract (LME)

-2 lb Amber Dried Malt Extract (DME)

-Willamette Aroma, Flavoring and Bittering Hops Pellets

-1 Sachet of dry Nottingham Yeast

-5 oz of priming sugar

-50 bottle caps

And in the middle of the table, the Specialty Grains:

-8oz Crushed Crystal Malt

-4 oz Crushed Chocolate Malt

-6 oz Crushed Carapils Dextrine

This is considered an "extract" brew, since pre-made malt extracts are used. This saves time and makes things easier on the beginner brewer. "All grain" brews don't use extract, but instead use actual grains which add steps and complexity to the procedure. Using extracts is like baking a cake using a cake mix instead of starting from scratch - it saves time, and in the end the final product is just as tasty.

Here's some equipment that I will use from the starter kit.

-6 gallon bucket for fermenting, with lid and airlock

-Thermometer

-Auto-siphon and tubing

-Plastic stirring paddle

-Hydrometer

-And of course, instructions!

There are four basic phases in the home brewing process: Brewing, Fermenting, Bottle Conditioning & Drinking. The blog focuses on the first phase.

Brewing beer really isn't complicated, but your beer can easily be ruined if precautions are taken. The brewing phase includes sanitizing the equipment, steeping the crushed grains, boiling the wort, adding hops, cooling the wort, transferring the wort, adding water and finally pitching the yeast.

The first and most critical step in the process is to sanitize all equipment that will be in contact with the beer. Any bacteria that finds it's way into the beer could infect the batch and ruin the taste. I used the LD Carlson Easy Clean that was provided with the kit to soak all equipment for 30 minutes.

Next the crush grains are steeped. First the grains are put inside the provided grain bag.
Two and a half gallons of spring water or poured into a 5 gallon stainless steel pot. The proper steeping temperature is 150F-165F.
Time to dump the grains into the hot water.
With this one step, it already starts to look like beer. This recipe calls for a 20 minute steeping time.
In the meantime, the wife requested brownies. Here's some of my pre-bake handywork with the provided caramel topping.
While the grains are steeping, the LME is placed in warm water. Its consistency is similar to thick syrup, so warming allows it to be poured easier.
Let the steeping bag drain into the pot, but don't physically squeeze the water out. We now have 'wort'.
Kick up the heat to bring the wort to a gentle boil. Then add the LME...
and DME...
After adding the extracts, be careful of boilovers. Blow on the foam or spray it with water to knock it down.

Literally two seconds after I took this picture, the foam nearly boiled over which would've created a huge mess. Thanks to the wife for the helping knock it down and avoiding disaster.
Return the wort to a boil, and add the first round of hops. The bitter hops go in first, and the wort will be boiled for 45 minutes. Next the flavoring hops for 10 minutes, then aroma hops for 5 minutes.
Once the boiling is complete, the wort needs to be rapidly cooled. There was still lots of snow outside that came in handy.

This too way longer than expected, for a couple reasons. First, I should've taken the lid off the pot to let it cool faster (I was paranoid about infecting it, especially with all the sneezing going on in our household). Secondly, I couldn't find a stopper for the sink, so I couldn't give the pot a proper ice bath. I tried putting the pot outside in the below 10F temperatures, but even that was slow to cool the pot.
The next near disaster happened when I decided it was time to bring the pot inside to try something else. The handle slipped out of my hand, and some wort went flying. Luckily, it wasn't too much and the brewing could continue.

After a couple hours, I finally decided the lid had to come off, and I used our recycling bin to give the pot an ice bath. The wort needs to cool down to below 70F.
The wort is cooled and I can now transfer it to the fermenting bucket. The handy auto-siphon makes this easy.
I wonder what it tastes like...
After the transfer is complete, water is added to bring the mix up to 5 gallons. During this process, it's important to monitor the original specific gravity (OG) of the beer using a floating hydrometer. Looking back, I should of taken a small sample of the beer and placed it into a smaller sampling flask or something to test. The bubbles tend to alter the readings. Either way, I read an OG of 1.045, which was on the lower end of the scale for this beer recipe. The OG is used along with the final specific gravity (FG) to determine the alcoholic content of the beer.

Finally the yeast is 'pitched' onto the wort, and is mixed in. Now the lid and airlock are placed tightly on the bucket, and the wort is ready to ferment. After ready stories of messy fermenter leaks and bottle explosions, I decided to put the fermenter in the bathtub. I've wrapped it in a sleeping bag to keep it warm and prevent any light entry which would skunk the beer.

Now the hard part: waiting! After about a week of fermenting, the beer is transferred to bottles so that the yeast can add carbonation. This will be another three weeks.