Our First Batch ....

One of the good points I've read about home brewing is that a good brewer takes notes on what he's done. For most, that would take the form of a notebook, but as a computer nerd, well, the obvious solution is to use my blog.

Our first attempt worked a bit like this:

• The day before:
• • Started by cleaning and attempting to sanitize our gear (including our fermenting bucket (an Ale Pail), spoon, measuring cup, thermometer and various other tools)
  • We also boiled about 3 gallons of tap water in an attempt to kill the chlorine and any other weirdness in the DC water system
• Today:
• • We took the cleaned and sanitized Ale Pail and added the 3 gallons of water prepped the day before.
  • Added 1.5 gallons of fresh water to the stock pot and brought it to a boil, leaving it for about 10 minutes before adding any ingredients.
  • Following the instructions in our True Brew German Light kit, we heated the malt extract (to make it easier to pour)
  • We then took the pot off the heat and started pouring in the ingredients (malt, hops, rice syrup solids and sugar), mixing it properly
  • Put the liquid back on the stove (perhaps not exactly following the instructions regarding what to do when the beer foams over -- take if off the heat, and repeat the process until it stops foaming)
  • We then left the liquid on the heat for about 25 minutes (give or take)

At this point we were basically done with the mixing and brewing. Then it was time to start the fermenting:

• We did so by pouring the hot liquid into the bucket with the already added 3 gallons of water.
• To bring the final quantity up to basically 5 gallons, I added 1 additional gallon of distilled water (as I didn't really want to add chlorinated tap water)
• We let it cool to about 84 degrees (not the 75 we were supposed to, but hey it was time for bed)
• At this point, we stirred in the yeast, sealed the container and are letting it ferment.

Now all we can do is wait and hope. But to recap, here are the ingredients we used

Unhopped Light Malt Extract	1 can
Corn sugar	1 pound
Rice syrup solids	1 pound
Hop pellets	1 oz
Boiled tap water	4 gal
Distilled water	1 gal

Original gravity readings (at about 140 deg as I didn't have a sanitized hydrometer as it got cool enough to be valid) were about 1.03(ish)