Home Beer Brewing

In case you haven't guessed, the change in my blog is to reflect my new hobby. Beer Brewing!!! So here are a few pics to reflect my experience of my first home brew.

Here is some of my equipment. Bottling bucket, bottle brush, capper, raking cane, siphon tube, etc.

Fermentation bucket, metal spoon, airlock, bottle lid, a device to measure gravity (which name escapes me), and the container it all is sitting on will be where I put the bucket during fermenting in case if overflows.

Here is everything I need to for my first extract brew. Yeast, hops, specialty grains, dark malt extract and muslin bags. You can also see the caps and the priming sugar, but I won't need those until I bottle.

Here is my five gallon brew pot where i will brew my beer or wort (beer term).

Here is the specialty grains in the muslin bag to be added to the pot before I begin boiling.

I keep the grains in here until just before it starts to boil.

Once the boiling begins, I take out the grains and add the extract and the hops.

After the 60min boil, I put my brew pot into an ice bath to chill the wort. The quicker the better.

Two weeks later, I am ready to bottle. I forgot to take a picture of my fermenting setup, but you can get the just of it from this pic. I had the hose in the top of the fermenting bucket that ran into the pitcher of sanitizer you see to the left.

This step is called racking. I use my racking cane to siphone the beer into the bottling bucket.Before I did this, I added the priming sugar and a bit of water to the bottling bucket. The extra sugar will be consumed by the remaining yest once in the bottle. This will carbonate the beer.

Here is Shannon helping me siphon to the bottling bucket.

After bottling, here is my loot. About 50 bottles of beer. They will need at least 10 days in the bottle to carbonate. Though I'll give it some extra time in the bottle to condition. After about two weeks in the bottle, I'll probably refrigerate and start drinking a few.

The beer I brewed was an extract recipe called Beartooth Stout. Its suppose to be similar to Guiness, which is my favorite beer. So it was an obvious choice and it came with the beer brewing kit. Overall the process was fun, but it was a lot of work for a few hours to get it brewed. Everything the beer touches needs to be thoroughly sanitized. Which is kind of a pain in the ass.

I should also note, I screwed up on my first batch.

The first thing I did wrong was when I poured my wort in the fermenting bucket, you need to top it off with water to reach the five gallon mark. I used tap water. I heard that's a no no since the chlorine in the water can cause off flavors in the beer.

The second mistake I made was using the wrong line to fill to. Instead of using the clearly marked five gallon line, I add about an extra gallon or so. The result will be a weaker tasting beer with less head retention and a lower ABV. This was immediately apparent when I took my original gravity reading. It came out to about 1.042, it was suppose to be about 1.050. My final gravity reading once fermentation was done about a week later came out to about 1.012. Do the math and that's about 3% ABV. So yeah, its pretty weak beer. My Bad.

The third mistake came when I was putting the airlock on the lid. I accidentally pushed the rubber grommet into the buck full of beer. I had to stick my arm in it past the elbow to find it. I sanitized my arm first, but that is still gross.

At least it was fun and I learned a lot. My second batch will go much smoother (actually it already did, I did it last night and it was a piece of cake. I'll post pics soon.). On top of that, the home brewing motto is at the top of my blog. RDWHAHB - Relax Don't Worry Have A Home Brew. The essence of the motto comes from the fact that you never know how the beer is going to turn out until you crack open the first bottle and give it a taste.

Anyways, I'm realizing that I could go on and on about this so I am going to stop now before my post gets any longer. Feel free to ask questions.

Stay Classy.