The Brewing Process

So, here is a summary on how my brew day went. I tried to take step by step pictures, and keep a mental documentation of everything I was learning and any surprises I found during the process.

First step was opening the beer kit, and going over the contents.

 

The yeast I chose, I went with the smack pack instead of the dry yeast, as it was recommended to me by my friend. This picture was right after activating the inner pouch. This was 8pm.

Here you see my brew kettle setup. I just went with the Wal-Mart special, as I want to save up a bit and buy a nice quality big one. I figured this one would work for now, and it really did. Heat distribution was nice, only once did I near a boil over but I solved that with heat adjusting. The thermometer on the pan was extra, and nice to have. I read in a few places that multiple thermometers are good to have, so I  ended up with a few for different stages of the process.

Ahh, this was my first surprise.  Measuring the gallon increments and marking them on my carboys was something I didn't realize I should do, and took a lot longer than I had realized. From now on any time I get a new carboy I will do this before a brew day. On the bright side, I combined this task with sanitizing them, so I may have saved a few minutes.

Once I got most of my items sanitized, I started to boil my water. I wanted to wait until most of my equipment was sanitized as I was not sure how much time it was going to take to sanitize everything and how long it would take to boil that much water. I timed it pretty well, and I didn't realize the amount of time it was going to take to sanitize everything. 

Here I have everything in the bucket of sanitizer. I think I may try to keep a bucket of this pre-mixed from now on, for smaller items. It seems handy to be able to do a quick sanitize on items on short notice.

So after about 40 minutes or so I finally got to a rolling boil, and added my malt extract syrup first. I had removed it from the burner for this process.

After the syrup was mixed in well, I added the bag of malt powder, stirring until absorbed well. 

And back on the heat again.

 After longer than I was expecting, we got back to a rolling boil, so it was time to add the hops. I think the malts cooled it off more than I was expecting, so maybe next time I reduce the heat instead or removing it.

Time to start the 60 minute timer.

At the half hour point, the temperature is holding steady at about 220 or so.  

 At the 60 minute mark, you can see the hot break happened, the temperature is still up there but the foam is all but gone.

Into the ice bath. I used a lot less ice than I though, only a 20lb bag. I had bought 60lbs thinking I was going to need to keep adding more to the bath. But the ice held up, and the temp dropped very fast, until it got to about 110. Then it stalled pretty bad, but I was expecting that as I have read several articles about the cooling process. Soon I hope to invest in a chiller of some sort.

Here we are just barely under the 100 degree mark.

Finally to the 80 degree range, so I pour it into my 6.5 gallon glass carboy and add water up to the 5 gallon mark. Got lots of foam doing this, and I also shook it up as best as I could to aerate it as well as I could. 

 I took a hydrometer reading, and it came up in the 1.050 area, hard to read because of the foam on the top. The kit instructions indicate an OG of 1.049, so I figured I was pretty close.

Just a picture I took while taking the hydrometer reading.

I meant to take a picture of the fully inflated yeast pack, and it was fully inflated. But here I am pitching it into the carboy.

I took the bung and the airlock out of the sanitizer bucket I had everything soaking in and put them in place.  At this point I was pretty excited about how well things had been going. I was also tired. It was 1am.

In the basement closet where the carboy will spend its time waiting, I have a thermometer hung. 67 degrees in there, which is a good temperature for this yeast. 

I also have a temperature strip on the side of the carboy, it was showing 68 degrees when I put it in its resting place. 

All in all, I had a blast. My wife helped me out as well, and both of us can't wait until we get the the next stage so we can free up our fermenting carboy and brew another batch up. It will be 6 weeks or more until we get to taste our product. I am looking forward to more brew days and more tasting days. But if we do it right, this 6 week period will be the only long wait we will have, as long as we keep a rotation brewing. Things I learned, cleanliness is everything, and time consuming. I knew there was going to be a lot of time cleaning and sanitizing, but it doesn't really hit you until you get there yourself. All in all, it was about a 6 hour job, but with planning, I think I can get the process down to 4 hours or so. But we'll see. It's not like its a tedious process, and was a lot of fun.

I just hope it tastes as good as I imagine.

Happy Brewing!