Number One: Brewer’s Best Red Ale

So we bought the equipment, I read a good portion of a book, and we were both ready and willing to try our hand at creating our first home brew.  Sometime around 6:30 on on the fateful, hopefully,  day of Sunday July 26, 2009 we started the process.  We could only hope that the beer would come out in the end as a success as we had no experience in what we were undertaking.

Now when I said “we” began I really meant that, although I had started earlier in the afternoon at boiling some water to try to make sure there was no possibility of infecting our not so soon to be beer or the addition of chlorine.  I probably should have realized just how long it would take to boil 4 gallons of water, but I guess I was just too psyched to be thinking properly at the time and Tom had not yet arrived to add his brain to the thinking.

Anyway…  We decided to start which meant putting the cracked grain into a mesh, sock-like bag and letting it steep for 20 minutes.  During this time we decided to enjoy ourselves some beer and a cigar while reading some Beer magazine.  Checking in from time to time we could smell a very intriguing smell wafting from the pot as tendrils of dark color floated away from the grains.  Soon after we had some very dark water with a pleasant aroma which we brought to a boil and added the liquid malt extract and dry malt extract.  At this point the pot almost began to boil over, but Tom noticed and we quickly took to stirring the wort.  In what appeared to be a work of magic, the addition of the bittering hops brought the foam down almost instantly.  I’ll have to read more but I am assuming the wort must have been pretty basic and the acidic hops countered and brought it to a more neutral state.  None-the-less it was pretty cool to see.

This led into a long period of stirring.  Seriously…. I mean it was an hour of stirring the boiling pot of wort as it boiled.  Towards the end we added Irish moss and flavoring hops.  The moss, which is actually a type of seaweed, to clarify the wort and the flavoring hops to add that wonderful floral aroma.  Once it was done we got to start the fun task of bringing the beer down to70 – 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  This meant placing it in a tub of ice to bring it down as rapidly as possible.  Now this would have happened more quickly had we read on in the instructions.  Unfortunately the instruction we were on said to bring the temperature down and that you could monitor the temperature by adhering the liquid crystal thermometer to the outside of the fermenter.  This made us think we were meant to poor the wort into the fermenter.  Now, the next direction said to poor the wort into the fermenter but since we were not reading forward at that particular point we changed containers.  For anyone who has any basic understanding of physics and materials it is understood that plastic is an insulator while metal is a conductor….  The fermenter is a 6.5 gallon bucket so it took much longer to cool there than it would have in the steel pot in which the wort was cooked.

One and a half hours later the temperature was finally down to 77 Fahrenheit so I decided to go ahead and prepare to add the yeast.  Following the instructions on the packet I hydrated the yeast, added it to the wort, and stirred it up.  I then got to place the top on the fermenter and put the airlock in place to prevent air from entering but allowing CO2 to escape, thus not creating a messy not-quite-beer bomb.  At that point I was pretty excited because in about 3 or 4 weeks I would have drinkable beer, so long as we did everything right!

When I finally got to bed around 1:30AM on a work night it took a long time to fall asleep after all the excitement.  I laid in bed wondering if we had done everything right, if the smell of the wort would ever leave my hair, and how the beer would taste when it was done.