Tony Cordova

After two weeks of aging we opened a few bottles and tried our brew.

I was very impressed with the look of the beer, it was very clear and a very nice brown.  There was very little head but a very nice carmel-like smell.

Unfortunately the problems we ran into during the brewing process were apparent in the taste of the beer. The initial flavor was very good, you could really taste the brown ale style. But the back end is what makes this beer hard to drink.  There is a sour/bitter taste that follows the sweet ale part, you can just tell that the beer is “off.”

Since our first brewing attempt we have already brewed and bottled our second batch.  This time we chose an IPA.

For this brew we fixed all of the problems we had with the last brew.  The pictures look very similar to the Brown Ale pictures.

This beer needs to age 6 months before we can drink it. I think we are going to try a bottle or two in February just to see if we did ok.

I had been thinking about making my own beer for a while and finally my roommate (Justin) and I bought a beginners kit. The kit came with all the tools we needed (except a large brewpot) along with the ingredients to make a Brown Ale. This is the kit.

When we got started we took inventory of the ingredients and set up our “brewery” in the kitchen.

1. First we filled the brewpot with water (about 4/5 full because we needed room for the other ingredients) and started to heat it up. During this process we put the specialty grains in a cheese cloth bag and let it steep until the water reached 170 F which ended up being about 15 min. The specialty grains were Roasted Barley and Chocolate Malted Grains.

2. Then we turned off the heat and added the malt extract and dissolved it all into the wort, which is now what our mixture is called. Once dissolved we heated up the wort again to a boil. At this point we were having trouble getting the wort to boil and finally decided to put the lid on for a few minutes and it started boiling right away. Putting the lid on is a great way to heat up the wort faster but be careful of boil overs and remember to constantly stir the hops from the malt extract back into the wort. You are supposed to boil it for 1 hour. Be sure to continue to watch the time because you are supposed to add the Irish Moss or the clarifier that we used 45 minutes into the boil. 5 minutes after that you need to add the Flavoring Hops and 8 minutes after that the Aromatic Hops. All during this time you should be stirring and scraping the sides of the pot. We screwed this part up a bit because we were not watching the time carefully enough and added the hops about 10 minutes too late.

3. Next comes the hard part. After we turned off the heat we needed to cool the wort to 75 F as quickly as possible. A popular method of doing this is by using a wort chiller. Since we are poor we did not have that and thought it would be easy to just put ice and water in the sink to cool it. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough ice because it all melted before we got it to 75 F. It took us way too long to cool the wort and we only got it to about 83 F before we put it all into the fermenter. Be prepared to cool the wort!

4. When we siphoned the wort into the fermenter we had to fill the fermenter to 5 gallons with cool water. Another mistake we made was we didn’t have any boiled and sanitized water ready to pour into the fermenter with the wort, so we had to use filtered water.

5. Once the fermenter was filled to the 5 gallons we sprinkled the yeast on top of the wort, sealed the fermenter with the lid and put on the airlock. The airlock basically lets the CO2 out while not letting any air in. The yeast consumes the sugars in the wort and produces CO2 and alcohol. Here we took our first hydrometer reading.

6. And now we wait.

7. After 3 days the fermenter stopped bubbling and I took a hydrometer reading. I noted the reading and left it for a few more days. I took another hydrometer reading, saw that it was consistent with the last reading and decided it was about ready to bottle.

8. I asked a bunch of friends to save and wash out their bottles for us so we could use them for our beer, they were happy to oblige.  When you get bottles from friends make sure you do not get any twist off bottles, the capper will not work with them. We sanitized the bottles with the sanitation solution that came with the kit and started to siphon the beer into the bottling bucket. While siphoning we added the sugar that came with the kit  which creates the carbonation when we bottle. We made another mistake here: we were supposed to dissolve and boil the sugar into some clean water and pour it into the beer as it was being siphoned into the bottling bucket but we just dissolve the sugar straight into the beer.

9. Finally we started filling the bottles. We set the bottling bucket on the counter and a hose coming from the tap that attached to a device that allows you to fill the bottles from the bottom up. Make sure that your friends really rinsed out those bottles. There’s nothing more disgusting than seeing a cigarette at the bottom of your brew.

10. During that process we also started capping the bottles with the cool capping device that came with the kit.

11. Once all the beer in the fermenter was gone and the bottles were filled and capped we put them all in a cupboard to sit for 2-4 weeks.

I am writing this during the second week of waiting and am very interested in tasting our home brew. My next update will probably be about what it tastes like, I hope you enjoyed this writeup!

You can see all the pictures we took here.