Day 1

Starting to get into brewing my own beer.

Beers 1 and 2.

First time out. Used a Mr Beer kit that we got on sale from woot.com.  The standard kit comes with a pale ale malt extract. The beer is getting ready to mature. Should be an ok tasting beer from the taste of the wort. I have a feeling the yeast in the kit was old since the wort was on the sweet side.

I had been thinking about brewing beer for a long time. Then I looked at the kits and read up. Three things held me back: cost of entry, access to quality materials and deailing with yeast. Cost of entry is pretty steep. Even though the standard kits are about $100 bucks, these only come with the bare essentials. I tend to like the specialty brews (porter, IPA's Belgian, stouts, bocks, etc) and their process takes additional equipment. I also envisioned having a couple of beers going at the same time, which means even more equipment.

My wife found a guy in Holt, MI getting out of the hobby. I picked up a lot of equipment pretty inexpensively from his Craigslist posting:

• Buckets for primary fermentation
• Carboys for secondary fermentation
• Auto syphon
• Capper
• Pot
• Utensils
• Thermometers
• Hydrometers
• Flavorings
• Priming Sugars
• Copper Wort Chiller
• Cooler Lauter Tun (grain Extraction)
• and enough bottles to store them all in.

Cost of admission came down so now I'm in the hobby. Let's just put it this way, you should have seen the smile on my face when I found out I had all the equipment I needed for an IPA and belgians etc. I smiled so hard my lips got stretchmarks.


Today I'm calling my day 1 though technically it's my second beer. Today, however, is my first attempt at an all grain batch as opposed to creating a beer from malt extract. I found a recipe online for a clone of the Newcastle Nut Brown Ale. I'm pretty stoked.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f67/aberdeen-brown-ale-newcastle-clone-ag-36912/

I went to a place called Adventures in HomeBrewing.

http://www.homebrewing.org/

And picked up these ingredients.

Picked and milled Right in the store.

Finally on April 14th my niece, Jen, came over and we began to brew.

We put the grains in the cooler lauter/mashing tun. Poured in about 3.5 gallons of 165 degree Farenheit water. Let it sit for about an hour checking it every 15 minutes to stir and make sure the temperature stayed above 155. After the hour was up we drained it and closed the ball valve. Then we poured in and additional 3.5 gallons of water for the sparging (rinsing). We stirred it and and let it sit for 15 minutes, then drained it.

We took the pot of wort and boiled it 60 minutes as the recipe described.
Cooled it with chiller.
Pitched the yeast
Put the lid and airlock on.

This one we are going to call Berkshire Brown.