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Lessons I Learned
By Mike | August 12, 2007
Now that my first brewing experiment is all but completed, here are a few of the lessons that I learned.
- Watch your boiling wort. - I allowed the wort to boil over in the very first stage of the process, which caused quite a mess. It could have been avoided if I had just been paying attention.
- Get a hydrometer flask. - My beginner’s brew kit came with a hydrometer, but no flask to use with it. If you purchase a hydrometer, make sure you have a flask or graduated cylinder.
- Buy lots of ice. - It takes quite a while for the wort to cool after your initial boil. You can either wait hours for the temperature to drop to a point where you can add the yeast, or you can buy a lot of ice to prepare an ice bath to help cool it. Or buy a wort cooler or other equipment, but have some cooling plan in place.
- Buy a cleansing/sanitizing product. - I had heard of no-rinse cleansing products, but thought it would be better to use chlorine bleach as the book suggested. It is a huge pain to use bleach because I have after using it I feel like I have to rinse the object out many times. With a no rinse cleanser, I would still probably rinse off what ever it was I was sanitizing, but I wouldn’t have to worry about rinsing over and over.
- Get a bottle washer. - The book recommended purchasing a bottle washer to make cleaning and sanitizing easier. My kit came with a bottle brush which I assumed was the same thing. Yeah, not so much. A bottle washer hooks onto your faucet and shoots jets of water into your bottle or carboy, which is way easier than washing by hand.
- Don’t Worry - As they say. . . Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Home Brew. I had plenty of things not go as well as I planned or expected, yet in the end, everything turned out OK.
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