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In my last entry I discussed purchasing my brewing equipment and mentioned that I had brewed my first beer. I should again mention that I have brewed with friends before at their places but this would be the first solo attempt and first time with my own equipment. Even with that prior experience and the books I read and research I did as we started building this website, the first time, when it's just you and what seems like 5,000 different things to remember, while worrying about any possible source of contamination, it's a lot more stressful and difficult than you might assume (or at least what I had assumed). I shouldn't, and don't want to, scare anyone with the previous sentence. The truth is I thought I was an old pro and didn't prepare as much as I needed to. I hadn't brewed in 9 months and I haven't really brewed that many times at all (hence the whole journey to being a brewmaster) and reviewing something like John Palmer's How to Brew or writing myself a short cheat sheet would have helped immensely. Luckily I still managed to make a pretty good beer and it really wasn't that difficult.
Ok, onto the actual process of turning a box of ingredients into something (hopefully) drinkable. Brew day was actually unpack the brewing kit, figure out what everything was, put things together, and sanitize it all before actually doing any brewing day. From everything that I have read, I have heard over and over again that preventing contamination is of utmost importance to brewing and this was the refrain in my head on this day. I proceeded to unpack and thoroughly wash and rinse everything that would touch the beer in anyway and sanitize anything that would touch the wort after the boil with the C-brite that had been included in the equipment kit. As a note, I have also read that using a dishwasher to clean utensils is off limits as the soap can cause issues with head retention in the final beer, so I did quite a bit of washing and tried to be very thorough with the rinsing while fighting my urge to use modern conveniences (Note: you could use it to sanitize already cleaned items by running it without soap for an entire cycle and use the heated steam to kill most microorganisms living on your equipment or bottles).
The True Brew Oktoberfest kit that I had purchased had all the necessary ingredients for what was really a brown ale (with their generic, ferment anything ale yeast). Looking through the instructions it seems they might have setup them up a bit more for ease of following than for creating a premium quality beer (at least to my, ahem, brewmaster judgment). I decided that I wouldn't follow the directions exactly and made a couple changes on brew day. My first deviation was to steep the included grains at about 160° (or so, this is where my 400° thermometer decided to crack) for the 30 minutes as opposed to bringing water to a boil, adding the grains, and allowing them to soak in the cooling water for 30 minutes. Through reading I had learned that it is important to not go over the 170° with grains during steeping as it can cause tannins to be extracted. I had also seen in various places that you should keep water volume while steeping to less than a gallon per pound of steeping grains. This kit came with 8 ounces of grain so theoretically I should have steeped it in less than half a gallon of water. The recipe called for using 1 - 1½ gallons of water and I did end up using a volume closer to that as with the 20 qt pot I had purchased, a ½ gallon of water isn't very deep once its spread that wide. I had trouble as it was trying to prevent the grain bag from resting on the bottom and yet being completely submerged. I think in the future I might steep the grains in a smaller pot and then transfer that to the brew pot for the boil. Any thoughts or warnings on doing that? Would there be too much oxygen exposure when transferring from the smaller pot to the larger pot?
The second deviation that I really made from the directions was to not put all the included hops into the boil at the beginning. They had included 2 ounces of Liberty hop pellets and called for putting them all in for the entire 60 minute boil. Being a fan of hops and wanting at least a bit of their delicious taste in the beer, I decided to save ½ an ounce for 15 minutes left in the boil (at this point I had decided not to worry about style guidelines necessarily - heck the recipe was using an ale yeast for what is traditionally a lager). I believe the general rule of thumb is that hops put in at 60 minutes left create the bitterness, 15 minutes left creates hop flavor, and hops right at the end or after the boil (dry hopping) create hop aroma. Of course if you want to be really hoppy, follow the Dogfish concept of continual hopping, and I assure you it will be bitter, taste like hops, and smell like hops, in other words: it will be amazing.
Overall, I believe the boil went pretty well. I don't believe I caught myself making any mistakes - other than realizing afterwards that I may have used too much water for steeping the grains although I was well within the recipe's instructions. It was nice to have a large boil pot so that when the "hot break" did occur it didn't result in my having a mess all over the stove.
After the boil, I moved the boil pot to my kitchen sink (careful not to move it too fast as to avoid any bubbles, splashing, etc that might allow oxygen to get into the beer and cause oxidation with the beer being that warm) where I had ice and water. The idea being to cool the beer as rapidly as possible to room temperature and I thought this might not be a bad idea. However, even with a stainless steel pot, which I figured would be pretty good at transferring heat from the brew to the ice on the outside of the pot, it took forever to cool. I didn't track the time but looking back now it seems like it took a couple hours to cool and even this first time it made me realize that a wort chiller might be a good investment (it's on the Christmas list).
Once the beer felt close to room temperature, I transferred it to the brewing bucket included in the kit. Let me tell you, it is fun trying to hold a strainer while pouring a 5 gallon brew pot into it without missing. As I can't convince my non-beer-drinking girlfriend to help me brew beer, "it's your hobby", I ended being pretty ingenious with some string and was able to tie the strainer to the handle of brew bucket and get it to stay in place as I poured the beer through it. So, next time I brew, I have three options 1) redo my MacGyver magic, 2) find a larger strainer that would fit over the top of the entire brew bucket, 3) convince my girlfriend to help. I think 1 or 2 is much more likely and I will probably look for a new strainer in the next week or so.
Once the beer was transferred and enough water was added to get to the O.G of 1.042 (the top end of the range the recipe called for), I left it to ferment in the bucket for a week. I anticipated that True Brew's "Active Brewing Yeast" might result in a very active fermentation compounded with the warm 72°+ we keep the apartment at, but I was surprised and never saw the water lock going completely crazy. After the first week in the bucket, I racked the beer to the glass carboy for secondary fermentation. In the process of racking, I did commit an error and used my own suction ability to get the beer to flow through the siphon tube from fermenter to fermenter. Of course afterwards I heard about using water to prime the tube so that wasn't necessary and I heard about these things called "auto-siphons". I used the former when transferring to the bottling bucket and will be looking to acquire the latter before the next batch. Either way, if there was going to be contamination introduced at some point - this might be a possible source. I was also a bit surprised by the amount of air space that was left in the carboy after the transfer and was a bit worried that all that oxygen might lead to oxidation. In the primary any oxygen would have been forced out by all the CO2 produced during fermentation but I'm not convinced that much occurred in the secondary.
After leaving the beer for 5 weeks in the secondary (didn't need to be that long but I had trouble finding time to bottle before then), I had the fun of bottling day. I say that with more than a bit of sarcasm - it isn't really that much fun and even though the beer is so close to being done, it still isn't carbonated or chilled so it's a bit of a tease. I started the day by washing out the bottles I had acquired the previous weeks (hard to force yourself to have a good craft beer or two every night to build up a stock pile of non-screwtop long necks) and then following the advice of BeerNard, I put them in the oven to sterilize them. Leaving the labels on, I neatly put all of the bottles into the oven, and set it at 350° and left them in there for about 2 hours. Of course, it seems weird putting glass beer bottles with paper labels still attached into the oven but being the materials scientist that he is, BeerNard promised it would be fine as paper needs to hit 450° to start burning. The appeal of using the oven versus available sanitizers is that it sterilizes the bottles (kills everything) as opposed to 99.9% of organisms and it does it without chemicals.
Up to the point I had the bottles cooking in the oven, I thought I was doing pretty well, but that was about to change. As I was preparing to do the bottling (after the bottles were allowed to slowly cool in the oven as to prevent them from breaking due to a sudden temperature change) I had gone through and thoroughly cleaned and sanitized the bottling bucket and other equipment. However, wanting to avoid the mistake I had made when transferring from the primary to the secondary fermenter, I decided to use the trick of filling the siphon tube with water beforehand and then it starting without requiring suction. However, I didn't think about it and I used tap water straight from the faucet to fill the siphon tube. Now, I had worked hard to make sure any water in this beer had either been boiled or put through a Brita filter, but now I had just introduced City of Rochester water, complete with chlorine, directly into the beer. To make matters worse, I accidently held the one end of the siphon tube too high in the source carboy so I lost suction, and actually did this twice. The chlorine added could form chlorophenols which result in a clove-like flavor in beer which isn't desirable.
After the bottles had cooled to room temperature and I had mixed in the boiled priming sugar, I proceeded to begin bottling the beer. I hadn't even thought about it before, but how full was I suppose to fill each bottle? I didn't want a lot of air space in each bottle to prevent oxidation but I also didn't want to leave too little room and have the bottle explode. I ended up filling the first 6 or so beers too low - not that it really seemed to affect the flavor - and then realized that using my auto-flow bottle filler, if I filled it to the top and then pulled it out, it was about the right spot - based on the levels observed in the store purchased craft beers currently in my refrigerator at that point. Once filled, I used the kit included bottle capper and gave the beer about 2 weeks to bottle condition.
The result of my efforts? I was able to take a case's worth home over Thanksgiving and with an audience including BeerNard, svossler, vossymag, Vossybrew, clgridley, and TurboSteviej455, get some reactions. Overall, everyone seemed to think the beer was pretty good with maybe a bit of a yeasty flavor. With my worries about possible oxidation (tastes like cardboard and smells like old paper) or the production of chlorophenols, I was overall pretty happy. I think the yeasty flavor might have been due to the generic "Active Brewing Yeast" and that it was fermented at a rather warm temperature. And of course it was from a brewing kit - so I cannot attest to the freshness of the ingredients.
So my parting thoughts? I will definitely be planning my own recipe for the next beer and will use yeast made for the style I choose but more then that, I now have a list of things to improve upon in the future, and a list of new toys that will make the process easier and better. It was definitely fun and rewarding to make a beer on my own and have others drink and enjoy it but I think the feeling of accomplishment will only grow as I move to creating my own extract + specialty grain recipes and then on to all grain recipes - as each step involves less and less using others work to make your beer! Of course, each step also involves more skill, work, and offers more spots to screw up in!
