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Adventures in Home Brewing

About 2 months ago, I was garage sale’ing with the family and came across a “Mr. Beer” kit for $5.  I’d been contemplating brewing my own beer for a few years, but had always been a little intimidated at the expected complexity.  Well, for $5, you really can’t go wrong.

So, I diligently followed the instructions.  Seemed easy enough.  Bring about 1.5 gals of water to boil, add in the “Booster” pack, then the small can of pre-hopped liquid malt-extract.  Stir off heat.  Add to the cheesy, small plastic keg-looking container.  Fill the rest with water to the 3 gal. mark.  Sprinkle in potentially ancient dry yeast packet and stir.  Surprisingly, it worked.  After about 1 day, my wort (unfermented beer, pronounced “wert”) started to bubble and ferment.  But after bottling and conditioning for about 3 weeks, I was a little disappointed at the cidery taste and bland flavor. I wasn’t TRYING to make cider.

Luckily, I have a friend at work, Joe Bodnar, who stared doing the homebrew thing a few years ahead of me.  After fessing up to the Mr. Beer shenanigans (insert disdainful “hurumph!” here), I started getting some good pointers on what probably went wrong.

Turns out that using mostly sugar (which the “booster” pack mostly is, along with some malto-dextrin) does not a good beer, make.  Sugar should only be used for priming (adding a bit to the bottles before bottling to add carbonation), and not to add to the primary fermentation stage.  Guess most of the good beer flavor and complexity comes from the direct fermentation of the natural sugars present in the malted barley.

So I ended up buying a real starter beer kit ($99) at the local home-brew store.  It included:

• two large 6 gal. plastic buckets - with one lid
• a spigot - for the second, priming bucket
• siphon - to get the beer to the priming bucket undisturbed
• some tubing - see above
• 48 brown glass beer bottles
• bottle capper and caps
• Complete “Brewer’s Best” beer starter kit - Irish Stout variety
• White Lab’s Irish Ale liquid yeast bottle - strict instructions here to keep refrigerated

So last Friday, I invited my friend Matt over and we set to work.  Starting about 9:30, we finished putting the seal on the primary fermenter at 1:30 in the morning.

The Brewer’s Best Irish Stout kit included:

• 2 3.3 lb Cans of unhopped Malt Extract
• 3 different packs of steeping grains
• 2 different packs of hops - one big one to add at the start of the boil, and another ‘finishing’ hops to added 5 minutes before it’s done
• 1 dry little foil pack of yeast - didn’t use, as my starter kit came with the White Lab’s liquid Irish Ale yeast
• Malto Dextrin - Non-fermentable, but adds body and contributes to a good head on the beer
• 2 muslin grain bags

Instructions that came with the kit included here.

It’s wasn’t that hard, and truth-be-told, wasn’t all the different from the Mr. Beer kit.  There was an added step at the beginning where I had to steep the grains (in two little sock bags) for 20 minutes at 160 F.  Removed grain bags, added malt extract (liquid), first bag of hops, and the malto-dextrin.  Boiled (roiling) for 60 minutes.  5 minutes before the 60 minute boil was over, I then added last little bag of hops.  These are called ‘finishing’ hops; more useful for aromatics.  The ones I added at the beginning are referred to as ‘bittering’ hops.

One interesting step here, was the instruction to cool down the wort rapidly.  Rapid, huh?  Okaaayyy….  I put the big stock pot I bought at K-Mart in the sink with about 2 bags of ice and waited.  And waited.  This took almost a whole hour in and of itself.

When it got down to about 80 F., I dumped it into my big 6 gallon primary fermentation pail.  It was about 1.7 gal of thick black syrupy (sp?) liquid at this point.  Filled the rest of the pail with plain tap water up to the 5 gallon mark.

Measured to “original gravity” [1.53], sealed the lid and stuck in the little airlock.

Now it’s happily bubbling away in my basement.  Should turn out a lot better than the first two batches.

On a side note, I found a great little Mac OS X program to help me track all of the details (ingredients, temperatures, boiling durations, etc): BeerAlchemy.  Designed quite well, and stores all the possible information I’d need.  For me it makes more sense than keeping a brewing log book.  Should be easy enough to track my progress.

2 weeks now until I get to prime and bottle.  I’ll try and take some pictures along the way.  Click the “read more” for some good links.