My First Brew !

So .. On to my first Home Brew adventure.

My neighbor who let me help him with his batch was supposed to be available to cook it with me, but the timing didn't work out.  Would have liked to have had him there, but I wasn't afraid to go it alone.  After all, the folks at my local home brew store, Mainbrew ( www.mainbrew.com ) had not only kindly enough sold me the ingredients, but had also given me written directions to follow that included everything from the boil of the grains to the hop schedule and how to bottle.

After pondering the many varied types and styles of beer .. I settled on an Irish Red for my very first batch.  This also meant going to my neighbors to borrow EVERY single piece of brewing equipment that I would need.

First discovery ... it is a PAIN to cleanse and sterilize everything, but that is what is required.  I bought some Straight A as a cleaner and Star SAN for the sanitizer.  The first step in prepping for my first batch was to stop recycling my beer bottles and begin saving them.  Darn the luck, I had recycled my bottles a couple weeks earlier, so a man's got to do what a man's got to do.  Time to get another Sam Adam's sampler case from Costco and make some empty brown glass bottles !!

The bottles need to be brown, do not use the clear or green bottles, and the darker the better.  Why ?  Because light can get to and ruin the beer.  The dark color filters more of the light out to help avoid making the beer go bad.  There is science behind all of this, but I will not bore you with it, plus I can't recall all of the various aspects of it, but it is available with a quick google search.

To clean the bottles, soak them in a bucket of water mixed with the Straight A.  After a couple hours the labels should fall off by themselves or with a very minor bit of effort.  Once the labels have been stripped free, you need to clean all the glue residue off the outside of the bottles and run a scrub brush inside of them. 

What I did, and your opinions and methods may vary ... I bought two 5-gallon buckets at Home Depot and wrote all over the side of them "BEER ONLY",  and fill one with Straight A and the other with Star-San.  I run all the equipment through each bucket before beginning the brew process, and leave it there with the lids on until I am done.  Then after the brew process, or transferring to the secondary, I simply remove the lids and use the cleaner and sanitizer again for the cleanup.  Before dumping the cleaner and sanitizer out, be sure to get the fermentation bucket, brew kettle, etc as well as all the small hand equipment. 

The brew took a while, and it isn't easy with 3 kids and a wife to find a few hours to do it all, but I managed, so can you.

All of my batches to date have been done with Extract, not all-grain brewing.   I also bought a special plastic fermenting bucket and a plastic Better Bottle Carboy from Mainbrew.  I was nervous but it went well.  I need to buy a thermometer as I didn't have one that went up to 180 so I used a meat thermometer .. after cleaning and sterilizing it.

The beer had a nice aroma and good red coloring.  I keep my fermenting bucket in the laundry room, as it is the most out of the way place for the kids .. if they pull the rubber stopper out, the beer may get contaminated, so try to minimize the risk.  It felt good to hear the beer gurgling away for a few days while it fermented .. the gurgling sound is from the air being forced out by the fermentation process through the water trap.  After a week in the fermenter, I transferred the beer back into the carboy for another week, storing it again in the laundry room.  After that, the next step is bottling.  The longest part of the bottling process was putting the bottles in the dishwasher for a wash cycle (NO SOAP !!!) and a sanitary rinse.  Once done, my neighbor taught me the tip of putting the beer in the bottles on the bottom tray (door) of the dishwasher so if there is a spill it just goes into the dishwasher and not on the floor or counters.  Before bottling, don't forget to add the mixture of corn sugar and water to create the carbonation in the bottle.

A couple bottles were consumed during bottling and a couple broken, but I still had a good couple cases of beer.  After aging and thorough sampling, the beer was ready to be drunk and shared after 3 weeks in the bottles, which I also stored in the laundry room.

The beer turned out very well, everyone at work liked it.

I knew by this point that I enjoyed this process, and wanted to grow and learn so I could make custom tailored brews to suit the tastes of the wife, friends and family.

                                                    The carboy aging in the laundry room. 
                                                    (Note:  As light is still the enemy, I leave
                                                    the box the carboy came in over the top
                                                    of the carboy to protect it.).  Notice the
                                                    water trap in the rubber stopper .. this is
                                                    to let the pressure relieve itself while
                                                    preventing contaminants from getting in.

                                                   Transferring the cooked brew from the
                                                   Brew Kettle to the Fermentation bucket,
                                                   sifting out the hops.

Step 1 - I like to Watch ! ;)

Sorry to dissappoint, but no sexy pictures or videos here .. I just know what guys like, and that's beer .. am I right fellas ?

To ease myself into the process, I asked my neighbor ..who sadly .. got rid of his boat before I could mooch some time with it .. if I could watch him and help him brew his next batch of beer.  This I did .. all the while peppering him with questions and sampling his previous batch.  It seemed easy enough.  Heat some water up, throw in this syrupy stuff called Malt Extract and cook it while periodically adding hops. 

It actually boiled over once, and you will forever see warnings that this will happen during the process of adding the extract to the water.  However, I have never experienced this problem.  Am I not getting it hot enough ?  After the 60 minute boil, You dump it into a special plastic fermenting bucket with a frozen gallon of spring water (making sure to remove the plastic container of course) to help cool it down.  Throw it in the corner to cool down further and when around 70 degrees F, add the yeast.  Air and open containers, and dirty equipment is the enemy.  You don't want any stray yeasts or other organic matter to get into your brew or you will end up with that infamous "Skunky brew".  You leave the beer in the fermenter until the "bubbling" is down to one bubble every 60 seconds or so.  It bubbles because you insert a water trap into the top of the fermenter.  The pressure in the fermenter is increasing through the fermentation process.  As the pressure inside exceeds the external pressure outside, a bubble of gas will find its way out and through the water trap and vent to the air.  As the fermentation process dies down, the pressure does also and the bubbling will slow down significantly. 

After that, you siphon the beer off of the residue/sediment on the bottom of the fermenter and into a glass or special plastic carboy.  A carboy looks like a 5 gallon water jug that you would place on a water cooler at the office or at home.  You typically leave the beer in the carboy for at least a week, then you keg or bottle it. 

When I went back to the neighbors to help him bottle it, more sampling was required.  It tasted alright , but not up to snuff to the sample of his previous batch.  The reason is this newly brewed beer is still "green", and had no carbonation as of yet.  While bottling I also managed to break 2 bottles.  It sounds worse than it is though .. basically the neck of the bottle fractured .. so we screened it for glass particles with a filter sock and had more "samples".  I could get into this !

Once bottled, you need to let the beer sit in the bottle for at least 2 weeks, but a month is far better.  It gets better with age, just like wine.  The carbonation in bottling results from boiling some corn sugar in some water and adding it to the beer just before bottling.  The sugar will ferment while it is capped and the beer will continue to get better.  a 5 gallon batch will make 50 12-oz bottles or so.  Not bad for around $35 in ingredients.  It will help to find your local brewing supply store.  They are all good guys that will help talk you through the process and help in creating your beer recipe til you know what you are doing.

I am definitely going to try this.

Why the blog ?

Welcome to my little corner of the world.  In this blog I will get sidetracked and talk about a myriad of things, but as the title conveys, the overriding theme, for now at least, will be to follow my entry and progression into the art of Home brewing beer.  How and why I got into it, my thoughts on equipment, beer styles, getting more involved and technical in the brew process, where I procure items, my experiences brewing and drinking, and how to share this fun new hobby.

I am a married dad of 3 kids living in the NW who is into many things, and, like most men, I can NOT resist those little shiny things that cross my line of sight to distract me from my reality.  After moving to the Bethany area west of Portland a couple years ago, I was finally able to buy a home and move into our new neighborhood. 

The first thing I noticed when looking at our future home was a neighbor who had a nice big shiny ski boat out in front of his house.  It called to me, and I instantly knew at least one neighbor I was hoping to get to know well ... as in how about we go to the lake and do some skiing, fishing, BBQ'ing and drinking !

During the moving and unpacking, I discovered the neighbor with the nice boat I coveted had a son who was the same age as my oldest son .. prospects brightening !  Fate then intervened, as upon meeting and talking with the dad, I hit on the fact that he is a successful home brewer who would be happy to help me learn about and get into the process, and share equipment while I "discovered" if it was something I would like to begin doing on my own.  He also told me he happened to get all his equipment and indoctrination into the fine art of home brewing from one of my other neighbors, who had progressed into larger, better equipment and all-grain brewing.

I claimed I was only going to "try" it out and make a batch to see if I liked it first, but my mind had already been made.