Brew Day! My first batch. Brewer's Best IPA.

The day has arrived! My forray into homebrewing is about to begin. I start by organizing and cleaning my equipment and getting the kitchen set up for my day's work.


I have a pint and the latest issue of Beer Advocate. Nothing can stop me now!

I begin by reading through my instructions, which tell a few things. First, this isn't just a simple all extract kit I have bought. Much to my fearful delight, there are 2 packages of grains in the kit to go along with the malt extract. that means I'm gonna be steeping grains as step one. The grains came with little grain sacks, which look kind of like the socks they give you when you want to try on shoes at a shoe store and you aren't wearing real socks. Anyway, I'm told I need to put the grains in these sacks and tie knots in the top of them, then I heat up 2 gallons of water and let the grain sacks steep. It's like brewing up a giant pot of tea.

The directions say my life will be eaiser if I put my cans of malt extract in a pot of warm water. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.

The next step is to add my malt extract. As I open the cans, I take a moment to appreciate just how syrupy the extract is. I took a taste and it was pretty yummy. Pouring this into the boiling water is a bit of a pain, because the syrup is very thick, but I tough it out and scoop the bits still in the cans out with a spoon. It might be a pain, but it's still way easier than all-grain brewing.

Okay, now that that's done, I'm ready to go on to the next step. Before I do though, I should let you know that joining me in this historic process is my ever-faithful cat, Mr. Pants, aka...Madden. He seemed very interested in the brew process, and he's usually good to bounce ideas off of. When I become a capable brewer, I plan on naming a porter after Madden, who was named after John Madden, and if you plan on judging me because I named my cat after a sports broadcaster, keep in mind that my wife was totally on the same page as me on that one.

Now I have to stir the mixture constantly until it's boiling again. Here I learn that it takes a while for this to happen. All this stirring is making me thirsty. Fortunately, my Blue Point Blueberry Ale is within reach. Good thing I think this stuff through.

Okay...While the stirring and boiling and drinking is happening, I am now adding the bittering hops. This is as easy as adding that flavor packet to ramen noodles. The hardest part is tearing open the little package without sending it's contents flying all over the place...and that's not even that hard. Come to think of it, ramen noodles are actually a little harder than this, and (nothing against ramen) this smells much better.

The aromas of hops are now rapidly filling the air. My mother-in-law tells me that she can smell it from the front yard. I am so immersed in it, I can't appreciate just how powerful the scents of my hop boiling are. I reluctantly ask Mom if it's a good smell, and she gives an unenthusiastic yes. Then she asks me if she can get drunk from breathing it in. I explain that she can't, there's no alcohol in there until the yeast has it's chance to do it's magic. Yes...I refer to it as magic. She starts to wonder who this weirdo is that she yet marry her daughter.

After an hour of boiling and stirring (and adding some more hops right at the end of the boil) the time has come to cool my wort. See...the stuff in the pot isn't beer yet, us homebrewers refer to this as 'wort.' Perhaps in a future installment of this blog, I'll explain why that is. I know it's not beer yet because there's no fermentation...and as a result, there's no alcohol, but that will all come soon enough. In the meantime, I fill my sink with cool water and ice. the pot full of wort shall hang out there while the temp drops to about 70 degrees.

As the wort cools, I get my primary fermenter bucket sanitized and rinsed. Now it's ready to have the wort, and some more water poured into it, where it will then lovingly nurture the liquid and the pitched yeast until it's ready for secondary fermentation. Awww...it just warms my heart. Madden watches from his perch on top of the fridge. I believe he approves.

Sorry I didn't get any pictures of filling the bucket or my first hydrometer reading. The bucket part was a 2 handed endeavor and I'll admit that I was a bit worried about the original gravity reading from my hydrometer, so I didn't think to take a picture. I'll make certain that I take a picture of my next hydrometer reading so you can appreciate just what it looks like. For the record, the OG of this batch was 1.041. What that means, I'm still not quite sure.

That's all for now, true believers. When next I post, It'll probably be some drivel about cleaning bottles. I'm sure this won't get very interesting until next Sunday's scheduled transfer into my glass carboy for secondary fermentation.