First Brewed

So I thought I would ask Santa for a home brewing kit. So my wife, um, I mean Santa came through with a kit from a place called More Beer.

The kit included a glass fermenter and a plastic bottling bucket. My biggest complaint so far (other than the kit showing up under the tree sans glass fermenter, or carboy) was the lack of instructions on how things go together.

I headed down to the store on the day after Christmas to collect the carboy, and selected an ESB as my first attempt at brewing. I have been enjoying Fuller's ESB, and the yeast they carry comes from Fullers. At this point if it doesn't taste like urine, I'll be happy.

As chance would have it, my friend Frank was visiting from Mexico for the first time in a couple of years or so, and so he agreed to stop in and assist with the intitial boil. I enjoyed the aroma eminating from the malted barley as the color of the water changed to a light and then darker caramel. Then the hops. Strong, but floral.

Finally, we got the wort into the fermenter, cooled it down and added the yeasties to the mix. This is my third attempt. The first was a brew-in-bag, done with Frank, who is a chef. That was surprisingly good. The second attempt was with a mini brew kit, and the yeast did not show up for the party. For this attempt, I managed to destroy my wife's fancy thermometer during the boil, rendering it useless when trying to measure the temp of the cooled wort. So for the first day or so, I was in a panic, sure that I had killed the little workers.

But after a day, the top was bubbling and the brew was roiling. The party was on. Again, with the lack of instructions, I had the wrong top on the carboy. But a quick trip to the shop, for supplies for a root beer bottling practice run, yielded the correct stopper. The airlock was bubbling almost right away.

The main concern at this point was that we failed to put the lid on the kettle while the wort was cooling, which opens the door for airborne nasties to crash the party. I won't know for sure if we are OK until the beer is ready to taste.

I am a week into it, and have about a week to go before bottling. Two days ago I was 26 seconds between airlock gurgles, then 30 seconds, and 33 today. I also did not know how to use the gravity tester to get a starting gravity reading, as we were not bright enough to figure out how it works on brew day. I have it down now, so I will take a reading in a day or two when the length between gurgles slows down. Aiming to bottle next weekend.

In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to get the boys (6, 4) involved, so we all brewed a batch of root beer. I stuck with the recipe for a baseline, and will then experiment with different sugars (agave syrup, turbinado, evaporated cane juice).

I also got to practice washing bottles and learned the joy of siponing without the agony of gas.

So I have 26 bottles of root beer on the counter, waiting to test (or explode if I forget). I will check them tomorrow evening for carbonation, however they will probably not be ready until Monday. Rather than create labels that I will then have to soak and wash off later, I am just coding the bottle caps. So the first batch of rootbeer will be lableled with: "RB1". 2 1/2 gallons, with 5 cups sugar, 1 T vanilla extract, 2 oz root beer extract and 2.5 gallons of water. Used Champagne yeast at the recommendation of the More Beer guy.

I will post the results for the root beer as well as the status of the ESB as I go along...