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.
(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.
Brew Kettle to the Fermentation bucket,
sifting out the hops.
http://threepanelsoul.com/2011/11/14/on-brewing/
ReplyDeleteThat was a good one ! I can relate
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