Day Number 1

Today we began our journey into home brewing greatness. It has been our desire to pull the trigger on this endeavor for quite a while. This past weekend we decided the waiting would end and we bought our first home brewing kit from Reno Homebrewer in Reno Nevada. The staff was extremely helpful and informative and their prices reasonable, they also had a wide selection of micro-brew beer. The kit includes all the ingredients for your selected brew type, two 6 gallon buckets (one for fermentation and one for bottling), two spigots, an air lock, bottle filler, 5' of tubing, bottle caps, bottle capper, Byron Burch's "Brewing Quality Beers", and printed instructions on both how to brew the selected brew and how to use the equipment. The following will be the step by step process we followed to brew our first beer. Right or Wrong, these are the steps we followed and I will share all triumphs and failures with you in hopes that we become better brewers.

Step 1/2. Sterilize all equipment you are going to use in this process. We used Iodophor, 1 cap full per 5 gallons of water.


Step 1. Boiling the water in a large pot. This is pretty self explanatory, we used a large stock pot and filled it to within 2 inches of the top and boiled the water. Be careful on this step, it's easy to underestimate how much space your ingredients will take up, you don't want this to boil over on your stove, it wouldn't be pretty.

2. After we brought the water to a slow boil we added the 6 lbs. of amber malt extract. If you are using a large jug of the extract like we did you may want to set it in a sink or bucket full of hot water to make it more viscous because this stuff is really sticky. We waited for the malt extract to mostly dissolve before we started adding other ingredients. I'm going to include adding the other ingredients into this step because we added them one after another. I will however include a list of the ingredients we used.
6 lbs Amber Malt Extract
1 lb Black Malt
1 1/2 lbs. Dark Dry Malt Extract (powder)
1 lb Flaked Barley
2 oz. Cascade hops (pellets)


3. We let the wort "boil" (I use the term boil lightly because it wasn't actually boiling) for an hour at about 200 °F. During the boil we watched the wort go from having a very thick frothy "head" to having almost no head at all. I don't know what causes this but I think it has something to do with hitting the "heat break".
















4. After the boil we took the wort and poured it through a strainer into the sanitized bucket. We had a semi-hard time with this because we had a pretty small stainer and the wort is pretty thick so it wasn't easy to get all of the liquid out.


4 1/2. We poured enough sanitized water into the wort to bring the temperature down to below 90°F. This is the temperature that is safe for the yeast.


5. We put the yeast in the wort. In order to do this I simply spread the yeast over the top of the wort and left it. We put a lid on the fermenter and stuck the air lock in the lid. The air lock had a splash of cheap vodka in it per the instructions. I'm assuming this is to protect the wort from contamination. We then stuck the fermentation bucket in a corner of the house that stayed between 60 and 75 °F again, according to the instructions.

Failure #1. Tonight we realized that we did not read the side of the bucket and although we thought we were filling it to 5 gallons we actually filled it to 6 gallons. We aren't sure what this will do to the brew but we are hoping it will still turn out all right. I'll let you know what happens.