Birth of a Beer...

[Boone]

You probably mean to cool the wort.... The one piece of equipment I would invest in is a copper coil wort chiller you can hook to a garden hose...you can cool your wort in 30-40 minutes.

 

[HOF44]

I'd be getting one of these if it wasn't for the damn revenuers!!!

 

[Lanky Livingston]

You probably mean to cool the wort.... The one piece of equipment I would invest in is a copper coil wort chiller you can hook to a garden hose...you can cool your wort in 30-40 minutes.

Yeah, sorry...to cool the wort. Jumped into the discussion out of turn, my bad.
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[tshile]

I am hardly obsessive about cleaning. I've never had an infection. It's pretty hard to screw it up - swear. One other key, once you get the basics down, try and do a 'starter' (basically, that's where you put your yeast in a 700-1000mls of sterilized wort and double or triple your yeast count in advance. Getting the wort cooled quickly and the yeast multiplying as soon as possible are both good things. It's easy to do and I can talk you through it when you're ready.

Yeah. I'm going to do my first batch next weekend. This kit is showing up to my house today - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002BU7CVM/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I have a 7.5 gallon stainless steel pot showing up Tuesday. My office is actually directly above a HBS so I'm going to pick up a recipe kit next Tuesday when I'm up there, and I'll be ready to rock on the weekend.

My plan is to do an extract with steeping grain, doing just a primary fermentation and then bottling as my first go around. I've done it before with friends, I'm solely interested in making sure I can handle the basics on my own.

As long as that goes well I'm going to look into all grain brewing. I'm getting ready to start that section of the book today - so it depends on what all I learn about as to how soon I'll start.

I imagine I'm going to do another extract or two but try to do it with liquid yeast and a starter wort like you said.

By the time I've done two or three of those I imagine I'll be ready for the full-blown all grain brewing, at which point I'll invest in a copper chiller.

I'm asking for a 5 gal carboy for my birthday at the end of the month and a burner to use outside.

 

[Boone]

Chime in anytime you want Lanky!

Hey Travis, couple quick things. You can order unbelievably great kits online at www.northernbrewer.com . Can't recommend them highly enough, great kits and great customer service. You'll probably pay a little more but it's worth it. Just a suggestion.

I would also recommend ALWAYS transferring to a secondary carboy. It's the best way to get good, clean beer and leave all the primary fermentation garbage behind. The 3-2-1 rule (3 weeks in primary, 2 in secondary, and at least 1 in the bottle) is a good rule of thumb. You're going to be impatient with your first batch, but my experience is, to make a decent beer, you have to have 5 weeks.

Oh - and you may have better luck than I have, but I have just gotten to a point where I always use a blow-off tube for primary. I don't think I've ever had an initial fermentation that didn't end up pretty much blowing beer and foam (and lots of it) through my airlock. It's a big mess and you end up needing to insert a blowoff tube anyway, so I just do that by default now and would recommend that.

One of my favorite parts of homebrewing is seeing the violent initial fermentation stage. It is pretty impressive and I think most folks would be shocked to see the roiling action of beer in full fermentation. It's a beautiful thing

 

[Lanky Livingston]

Oh - and you may have better luck than I have, but I have just gotten to a point where I always use a blow-off tube for primary. I don't think I've ever had an initial fermentation that didn't end up pretty much blowing beer and foam (and lots of it) through my airlock. It's a big mess and you end up needing to insert a blowoff tube anyway, so I just do that by default now and would recommend that.

LOL. My buddy has a pretty funny story involving fermentation & a closet full of his wife's clothes.

 

[tshile]

the rack and fill kit that came with my order was broken because UPS is a **** company with **** drivers.

thanks UPS.

 

[Lanky Livingston]

the rack and fill kit that came with my order was broken because UPS is a **** company with **** drivers.

thanks UPS.

Sorry man. Nothing more disappointing than being excited about something and it shows up broken! That's the worst!

 

[tshile]

Yeah. It's a cheap part that's broken and one of the owners of the company I work for is just going to give me one of his. I may actually just buy my own, they're like $3. It's not worth sending the whole ****ing kit back over a $3 dollar part.

 

[Lanky Livingston]

Yeah. It's a cheap part that's broken and one of the owners of the company I work for is just going to give me one of his. I may actually just buy my own, they're like $3. It's not worth sending the whole ****ing kit back over a $3 dollar part.

The company you ordered it from may just send you a replacement part if its cheap. Worth asking about, anyway.

 

[tshile]

The company you ordered it from may just send you a replacement part if its cheap. Worth asking about, anyway.

You're right. I actually had already called them.

me - 'Hi, I ordered your kit from amazon and <blah blah blah>. I was hoping to just get a new rack and fill kit instead of dealing with returning the whole thing'

her - 'Let me look up your order'
<5 minutes go by>

her - 'Yeah, you ordered through Amazon so unfortunately you'll have to go through them'

*sigh* You couldn't gather that from my opening statement? the first thing I said was I ordered it through Amazon - because I thought that might be the case and I didn't want to waste my time.

I just left Amazon a nasty note on their 'rate our delivery' page. I'm assuming nothing will come of it. I'm not waiting 2 weeks in return/exchange hell over a $3 part.

I just wish I was there when UPS delivered it so I could yell at the bastard. They seriously just don't care about your stuff.

 

[Boone]

This is why I use Northern Brewer. They'd have sent you a new one no questions asked, and probably thrown in a nice gift certificate for your trouble

 

[Lanky Livingston]

I've actually had the opposite experience - UPS is great, but FedEx has always been terrible. Never had anything show up broken though.

 

[tshile]

This is why I use Northern Brewer. They'd have sent you a new one no questions asked, and probably thrown in a nice gift certificate for your trouble

I will definitely keep them in mind going forward.

they came up when I was looking for kits, I almost got one from them (before I started talking about here).

 

[Neophyte]

While I'm with Boone in my love of all things Northern Brewer, I also recommend finding your local Homebrew Shop and both giving them your custom (shop local!) and cultivating a relationship with the staff there. My local place is run by a guy who has been winning awards in homebrew competitions for 2 decades. He has seen and done it all. A 5 minute conversation with him or one of his staff members is usually better than 30 minutes with best books out there for me. While the gear they sell is often a bit more expensive than I could get from NB, their advice is free but invaluable so I try to buy some stuff there when I can just to help out the owner and to make sure they will continue to be there when I need them.

Today I am brewing for the first time in 11 months. Yeah! Doing a batch of my "house brew", Two Penny Honey Pale.

 

[tshile]

got the rest of the supplies and everything for the recipe. going to make this tomorrow - http://www.jaysbrewing.com/Amber.pdf

 

[Neophyte]

Is Jay's your local homebrew shop? The place looks brand new in the photos.

 

[tshile]

It's one of a few, it's the closest one to my house. The rest are about an hour away, give or take.

They've been in the area for 5 years, but apparently only at that location for a year.

I've only been in two shops, but this one seemed a bit less commercialized than the other I was in. Their malt extract is in barrels, unhopped, they had about 3 isles of grain bins with two rows on each side of the isles, a fridge full of hops and a fridge full of yeast.

The other place I was at had kits and everything was in cans and premeasured packages.

Their equipment is a bit pricey, but not outrageous. The recipe prices didn't seem too bad, but I don't have much to compare it to.

 

[Boone]

Great points Bob. Only thing I'll say about NB is that their kits, especially their extract and partial mash kits, are better than anything you're going to find at a local homebrew store. They are fantastic! And although I do frequent a homebrew store near me, they often can't provide specific ingredients called for in recipes, forcing me to 'substitute'. The resulting beer, although always good, is never quite what it would've been if I'd been able to follow the recipe exactly. But I do agree with you - and will add that you probably have a local homebrew group/club near you that does group brews. I have never taken the plunge on that, but I have heard great things about those kinds of groups in terms of being able to learn from folks that have been brewing for years, sometimes decades. And happy brewing Bob

 

[tshile]

I should start my own thread and title it 'Death of a beer'

What a disappointing day for me.

To start off, what I used to measure gallons appears to not be correct but rather be 1/2 gallons. When I poured the post-boil wort into the fermenter I realized I had 1/2 the wort I expected. Checking with a 3rd device confirmed that instead of steeping and boiling 3 gallons with my specialty grains and extract I was doing it with 1 1/2 gallons.

So, when it went into the fermenter I had to scramble to boil, then cool, an additional 3 gallons to bring the total up to 5 gallons (this is in addition to the extra water I set aside at the start, which was supposed to be used to bring it up to 5 gallons)

On top of that, I hydrated my yeast then proofed it and I'm not sure it was alive. So... between not boiling the extract in the correct amount of water and the yeast not looking very lively I'm wondering if this thing will even ferment at this point.

The specific gravity at the time I pitched the yeast was 1.044, according to the recipe the target was 1.049.

We'll see if it even ferments. Half of me is hoping it doesn't so I can finally justify dumping it and starting over. I thought long and hard when I realized the water screw up and added the yeast issue to it, but decided not to. Rather, my wife convinced me not to. Not fermenting would convince me to dump it instead of getting new yeast and pitching it.

Very, very disappointing day. Even if it winds up being ok I'll be disappointed that it could have been better if I didn't make such simple mistakes on such fundamental parts of brewing

Oh well - it was my first time doing it and I definitely know where the screw-ups were. Looking forward to trying a second batch in a week or two after this has been dumped or moved to a secondary carboy.

edit; Oh and when I first started I dropped my floating thermometer and broke it. I had to ghetto-rig another thermometer to suspend so it was in the water w/o touching the bottom of the pot.