First Brew of the Year

Well I finally broke out the brewing equipment this year. I decided to try something simple and basic in order to get my method down. I chose a TrueBrew brand German Continental Light. I'll have to get rid of my last too brews which are still hanging around. I messed something up with them and couldn't get myself to finish the 90+ beers I made. After talking with a guy at Beer Crazy in Urbandale, IA (I think his name was Randy I'm terrible at remembering names), I think that the problem was pitching the yeast at too high of a temperature. We'll see if this helps out. Alright I'll break down how I whipped up this beer.

Cleaning and Sanitation
Cleaning and sanitation is one of the most important steps in brewing beer. You don't want to have any nasty bacteria hanging around. Not really because of health reasons (alcohol in beer will kill almost anything that will hurt you), its because the dirty stuff can creates off flavors in the beer. After talking to Randy I decided to change from Chlorine Bleach to a cleaner called Five Star: Star San.

Sanitizing Solution

Its a cool product because you don't technically have to rinse it off when you are done. Also it actually becomes nutrients for yeast instead of creating those off flavors. Very cool. I soaked all of my equipment in a 6.5 gallon food grade plastic bucket. A lot of my equipment came from a TrueBrew starter kit. Here's the equipment that needed to be sanitized.

Brewing Equipment Part 1

Brewing Equipment Part 1 (from top to bottom):

1. old siphon stick -- came with the kit
2. new auto-siphon -- new purchase and what I used for this brew
3. floating thermometer
4. hydrometer -- for checking specific gravity and estimating alcohol content
5. large plastic spoon

Brewing Equipment Part 2

Brewing Equipment Part 2:

1. Top is the cylinder for using the hydrometer
2. Below that is the bung for stopping up the carboy
3. Next is the two chamber air-lock, I usually use a one chamber lock
4. Left is the sanitizer described above
5. Right is the transfer hoses

In order to clean the hoses and auto-siphon, I set the 6.5 gallon bucket on the counter and the 6 gallon Better Bottle on the kitchen floor. I set up the auto-siphon in the 6.5 gallon bucket and siphoned the water and cleaning solution into the 6 gallon carboy like so:

Cleaning hoses and siphoned

I repeated this process a couple of times in order to make sure I accomplished the three minute contact time minimum for the cleaning solution.

Brewing

In order to brew up this German Continental Light I first had to make sure I had the necessary ingredients. This included:

1. Top Middle - 1 oz. U.K. First Gold hops
2. Left is the Light Malt Extract Syrup
3. Top Right - 1 lb. Corn Sugar
4. Bottom Middle - 1 lb. Rice Syrup Solids
5. Bottom Right - Yeast

The brewing process starts by boiling about 1.5 gallons of water in a big brew pot. It's a lot of water to get to a boil and it takes about 10-15 minutes to get the water hot enough. While the water is getting going it is important to warm up the Light Malt Extract. The easiest way is to boil a smaller pot of water and put the can in it until the syrup softens up and is easier to pour. When the water began to boil, I took the pot off the boiler and slowly stirred in the ingredients in the following order: Light Malt Extract, Rice Syrup Solids, Corn Sugar, and Hops. The order really isn't important. After all the ingredients were dissolved it was time to bring it all back to a boil. Once at a rolling boil the mixture was boiled for an additional 25 minutes. Very simple no problems.

Boiling up the brew

Fermentation

The first step in starting fermentation is cooling down the wort (unfermented beer). The first three times I brewed this step by far took the longest. Sometime several hours. That was because I was being stupid. My method was to pour the wort mixture into cool water in the big plastic bucket then put that in a bigger bucket and pack ice around it. Turns out plastic holds on to heat quite well. This time I got smarter. I put the brewpot in the sink and packed ice around that instead. Then I poured in the extra cooling water. It looked a little something like this:

Cooling Method

This method cooled down the wort in minutes rather than hours. A temperature drop from 100+ degrees to approximately 76 degrees. At this point I took the opportunity to check the specific gravity of the brew using the hydrometer. To do this I scoped out some wort using the cylinder and threw the hydrometer into that. It turns out my specific gravity was a little higher than advertised. We'll see how it turns out when its all said and done.

Hydrometer Reading

I was able to get ready to put the yeast in within about 20 minutes. MUCH easier. The thing to remember is to be careful not to introduce to much air into the wort. So keep splashing to a minimum. Next I auto-siphoned the wort from the brew pot into the 6 gallon Better Bottle carboy. To pitch the yeast I opened up the package and sprinkled it into the carboy and let it sit for 10 minutes. When the ten minutes was up I put the bung in the top to cover it and rolled the carboy a little bit to move the yeast around. I then put the carboy in Jenny's bathroom because:

1. she isn't here
   
2. there is no direct sunlight
   
3. easy to regulate the temperature

Finally, I put the airlock in through the whole in the bung. The airlock allows the air produced by fermentation to escape without allowing air to enter back into the bottle.

Fermentation in Action

Well I hope it all turns out this time. I have my fingers crossed!