We decided to start with a stout because the ladies at the homebrew store said it was a good starting beer and because we really enjoy stouts. We bought a starter kit but, upon opening the box, were a bit disappointed that there was nothing to explain what each piece of equipment was nor were most of the items labeled. After getting the water up to the proper heat to put the grains in, we realized that we'd neglected to buy a grain bag. That was fine, though, thanks to my cheesemaking adventures. We improvised a 'grain bag' out of a 2 foot by 2 foot section of cheesecloth. First crisis, adverted!!
So, we steeped the grain for half an hour, added the malt and boiled for an hour. At the end of that, you're supposed to add a bag of ice to the fermenter before adding the hot liquid... but we seemed to overlook that step:). So, we put the whole thing outside to get it cooled down to 65 degrees so we could add the yeast. In the meantime, we'd had a few beers, had friends over for dinner and movies, had a few more beers... and were totally ready for bed. The fermenter had only cooled to 80 degrees but our homebrewed experienced friend assured us that we could just deal with it in the morning and nothing bad would happen...
True to form, Ty woke up at 3am, hungry, and added the yeast, sealed the fermenter and inserted the airlock... or so he thought, anyway. Remember, before, where I complained that nothing was labeled?? Well, the directions call for the airlock to be inserted and then add water to the fill line. In our equipment, there was only one thing that could be filled with water but it had no fill line. It was weird but we were able to get it into the grommet in the fermenter lid so we thought, this must be the airlock!
We had so much fun brewing that first batch and we decided that we wanted to start our second batch this weekend. Which meant that we needed the ingredients as well as a few duplicate pieces of equipment... which meant a trip back to our local homebrew store. And, lo and behold, what we were trying to use as an airlock was actually the bottle filler and our kit was completely missing an airlock!!! I'm sure you veteran brewers out there will have a great chuckle at that... but it is super confusing to an newbie!!
The lady there said to just go ahead and transfer to our secondary and add the airlock to that and we'd be just fine. Of course, Ty did this without reading the directions so he just poured it in rather than syphoning it. Hopefully, though, it'll be okay.
At this point, I'll just be happy if we get something that's tolerable to drink. As I'm typing out this blog post, I'm waiting for the water on our second batch to heat to 165 degrees. So, we seem to be hooked on this new hobby of ours. I'll leave you with two pictures - our kit and the malt, improvised grain bag and my brewing beer for batch #2.
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