« First Attempt Underway | Main | Hydrometer Reading »
1st Brewing Attempt Play by Play
By Mike | July 23, 2007
My first attempt at home brewing is now officially underway. There are happy little bubbles throughout my fermenter as the yeast fulfills its most noblest of duties, converting that sticky brown liquid into sweet sweet beer.
So how did go you ask? It was much more complicated than I expected, but all-in all I think it went fairly well.
The first obstacle I encountered is that I have a rather small kitchen. There isn’t nearly as much space as one would like for moving gallons of liquid around and organizing all of the various equipment that I need. 5 Gallon carboys and buckets don’t fit in my kitchen sink, so all washing/sanitizing of equipment had to be done in the basement.
I should also point out that I’m using the uber simple beginner’s approach as recommended in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition. I figure its better to just do the basics at first so I can get my first batch out of the way with as few complications as possible. I can get to the fancy stuff later. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend following my approach, but perhaps some of the things I did wrong will help you if you too are a beginning brewer.
So I’m using a pre-hopped extract, with no other fancy grains, or finishing hops or flavors or anything like that. The first step is to boil the malt extract with two gallons of water and a pound of light dried malt extract. You are supposed to soak the can in hot water to loosen it up a bit so it comes out of the can more easily. If you’ve never seen a can of malt extract before it has the consistency of honey.
I did soak it for a bit, but obviously not long enough as I spent about 10 minutes holding the can upside down to drain the remaining contents.
From there it has to boil for 45 minutes. This kills any bacteria that may have gotten into your mixture. It took a lot longer to get it to a boil than I anticipated. I had planned to start sanitizing the rest of my equipment while the pot was boiling, but it was taking so long to reach that point I started early.
It must have gone from almost boiling to boiling over in a matter of seconds. I was checking on the progress every few minutes, but as I was heading up the stairs for the fifth or sixth time I could smell something was wrong. It was like a burnt sugary smell, and sure enough the pot had boiled over spilling the incredibly sticky contents all over the stove, and floor both of which by wife pointed out she had just cleaned.
Guess I should have paid more attention.
After the boil you have to get the temperature down to around 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit. I poured a gallon of cold water into the wort which brought it down to 120 or so. I then soaked the pot in some ice water which dropped it another few degrees, but I didn’t have a lot of ice, and I couldn’t completely seal my sink, so the ice slowly melted and drained from the container.
You’re supposed to get the wort into the carboy as soon as possible to minimize the chance for contamination, so I decided to pour it into the carboy then. First I added two gallons of cold water to the carboy. Then the wort. I was worried about spilling since I wasn’t sure how well I could control the pour and I wasn’t sure how quickly the liquid would go through the filter and funnel. It actually went fine right up until the carboy was full and started overflowing over the top. The book said that I would be adding a little more water after this process so I couldn’t imagine that I would have overflowed the carboy at this point, but I did.
At this point I took a sample to use for a hydrometer reading. Its supposed to be a simple process, just float the hydrometer in the liquid and take a reading of where the upper meniscus reaches. Sounds easy enough, but getting the hydrometer to float in that cylinder without touching the wall, and with it facing me so I could take a reading was rather difficult. Finally I got an reading as accurate as I could which was 1.035. According to the book that was in the expected range, so that that was somewhat of a relief.
Now the temperature was at 90 degrees and I had no way to get it down any further. And my wife was getting impatient as I told her I would have been done an hour ago and we were do to go shopping and to a movie. I ended up having to go to the store to buy bags of ice to make another deeper ice bath in the basement. Finally, after another 20 minutes or so I got the temperature down to 75 degrees which was the in the range of temperatures recommended for the yeast.
I added the yeast, stuck in the blow off tube and headed out the door.
According the the label on the yeast I should start seeing activity within 5-15 hours, so when we got back from the movie some eight hours later, I was hoping to see some action, but there was nothing. I was a little concerned the next morning when there was still no sign of life, some 20 hours after I dropped the yeast in.
Had I done something wrong? Did I kill the yeast? The extract came with a packet of dried yeast but the book says you don’t usually have good luck with those so I didn’t use it. Maybe I should try it since the first bottle obviously wasn’t working. Can you do that? Do I have to scrap this batch and start over? Where had I gone wrong?
Fortunately, when I got home from work I could see bubbles starting to float up to the top of the carboy and by the time I went to bed there was bunch of froth bubbling at the top and working its way up the blow off tube.
So here we are. No I’m waiting for the fermentation to subside before moving on to the next step. Needless to say, I’m very excited.
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.
