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First attempt at brewing

Costco trip count for January: 4

After picking up a box of ingredients at my local brew store on Sunday, I decided I was going to be brewing on Monday. All I needed to pick up was a big metal pot (16qt+), a big metal spoon, and 5 gallons of water. Easy, right?

I started out by leaving work at 4 and heading over to Harbor Freight, as they had a big aluminum pot in their catalog for cheap. No luck, but I picked up some wobble extensions I wanted to try. :-P On to Pay n Save next, a similar type of store, and similar lack of a pot. Fry's grocery store was next - no pot to be found, but they had the water. Next up was Sur la Table, a kitchen gadget type store. They actually had two things that would work, an 18qt steel pot and a 24qt aluminum pot, both marked at $60. I wanted aluminum, but I thought the price was a bit high, plus it was way bigger than I needed. The salesperson suggested trying Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, or even a sporting goods store. All of these were located right across the freeway on Ray, so that's where I went.

JC Penny was on the way to Target, but nothing there. Get to Target, check it out, nothing there either. While I'm at Target, Evan calls me up to tell me about a kitchen supply store. I call them, they have a 20qt aluminum pot for $27! Computer says they have it in stock. They close at 6, it's 5:30 now, and they're near 32nd st and McDowell, while I'm at Ray & I-10. I make my way up there, and show up 5 minutes before closing. Ask the guy behind the counter where I can find this pot, and he says "I'm sorry, but after you hung up we went to check in the back, and we don't have any." >:-O Great. So now I need to had back south at 6pm, just about the worst possible time.

On my way back I take a short detour to the Smart and Final. They had large pots, but way too expensive. At that point I resigned myself to going back to Sur la Table for the big aluminum pot. It rings up as $45 though, not $60...probably cheap enough I would have bought it the first time I was there. :-P I finally get home at 7pm, three hours after I left work, having finally purchased the pot at a store five minutes from home. Nice.

And here it is:

On with the brewing!

The bucket with parts being sanitized, and the plastic carboy ("Better Bottle") where primary fermentation takes place.

Evan helping.

Evan helping, for real this time.

Ingredients for an Irish Stout:

Go beer go!

The cooling wort, waiting to be added to the rest of the water in the carboy.

Evidence of fermentation! The airlock is bubbling away. There was no activity Tuesday morning when I left for work, and I came home to this. :-)

The last time I checked, that foam was coming up out of the airlock. :-O I might have added to much water to make up for losses from boiling, I don't know. I made the mistake of not checking to see where the 5 gallon mark would be in the carboy. It should be in the primary fermetor until next Monday or so, then moved to a secondary fermentor (a 5 gallon carboy) for two weeks, then into bottles to carbonate for three weeks.

Even if this batch doesn't turn out that great, I learned a number of things and found out that I made several mistakes.

The first step is to put the grains in a grain bag, let them sit in hot water for 20-30 minutes, then remove them. Here I actually did two things wrong. First, I didn't realize that it was supposed to be 160° water at a maximum, and I put it in right after it had started boiling (though off the heat, so it was cooling for those 20-30 minutes). Apparently getting the grains too hot is a bad thing, though that wasn't in my instructions. Two, I squeezed water out of the grain bag, and I guess you're not supposed to do that either!

I added all of the hops at once, rather than adding some at the beginning and some at the end. It's a minor point, but I'll fix that next time.

A strainer on the funnel is more than worthless. It got clogged up so quickly that it took me 10 minutes to transfer from the pot to the carboy. It would have been just fine for all of that stuff that clogged it up to go in the carboy, as it doesn't make it in to the final product, but whatever.

Finally, I was worried that I had somehow killed the yeast. I followed instructions for checking the yeast - add it to some 95-100° water, then add a small amount of sugar water to test it. If it foams up, then it's still good. I did all of that...and no foam. :-( I was not optimistic at all, and fully expected to not see any fermentation after a day or two. Of course, I was quite happy when I saw the above picture!

Now I wait. Six more weeks until a have a fridge full of beer. I think I'll be ordering up another kit to make as soon as my fermenting bottles are free.

As soon as is reasonable, I think I'd like to get my beer into kegs, rather than bottles. Five gallon kegs are readily available, and it's only one storage container to clean, rather than 50. ;-) It also cuts the carbonation time down from three weeks to about three days, so it can be enjoyed that much sooner.

Slightly larger photos than what are linked above can be found here.

Posted by Ben at January 10, 2007 08:55 AM