The First Brew

Today I’m going to talk about my first home brew adventure, which I actually embarked upon last spring. We opted to make a brown ale that went by the name ‘Summer Stout’. It was an extract beer which I picked as our first quite by accident. In retrospect an extract beer was exactly the right way to go, but I didn’t realise it at the time. I just picked a recipe that seemed tasty and hoped for the best.

First stage of the process was to do setup. Figure out where to put our equipment, get our chiller working (we got an immersion chiller), set up the garden hose for it, etc. After this was all done we started the process of brewing, namely, filling our boil pot.

Then we had to wait. It took basically an entire hour for the water (which went in cold) to come to a boil, but then we were able to add all the ingredients (everything went in up front, no late hop additions).

Now we boiled the whole wort for an hour, at which point turned it off, immersed the chiller and started cooling the beer as quickly as possible.

Then we transferred the wort to the fermenter (a food grade bucket) and pitched the yeast. (we filtered that beer, something we haven’t done again)

And that was it for brew day. We waited two weeks and bottled the beer, and another week before sampling the first one. The brew turned out fantastic and is something we’ll do again sometime, but probably not until next summer.

We’ve since moved into all grain brewing and are enjoying that a great deal more than extract, and it is unlikely that we’ll do another extract recipe any time soon (except this one). The all grain brewing can wait for another post though.