Round 1: Pale Ale

 After getting all of my brew stuff home, I realized that it needed a little love. This stuff had been in a shed collecting dust, dirt, and whatever else got in the shed. So I spent about a couple of hours cleaning it up, making it look all shiny.

With the equipment came a book, The Joy of Brewing by Charlie Papazian. A classic in beer making from what little I understood of it. I read it back to front and back again. I figured it was a little bit out of date, but 25 years seemed a long time. But I still soaked it all up. Relax. Dont worry. Have a homebrew. The book suggested starting with extract because of ease and the fact that most starting brewers dont have the funds to be able to start all grain right away. All grain seemed more adventurous to me and I certainly had the gear for it! So I figured I'd start at the highest difficulty setting.

The consensus in home brewing circles seems to be that sanitation is the biggest investment you can make in any beer you make. After all, why invest time and money into the craft if you end up with nasty beer? There were all kinds of products and methods to sanitize the equipment. I chose the easiest in my opinion. Star-San by Five Star Chemicals and Supplies, Inc. seemed to be the easiest sanitizer to use. Add to clean bucket, carboy, keg or tub, spray water to foam sanitizer, let whatever is sanitizing sit for at least a minute or 2, drain into bucket or dispose. Done. I can deal with that. I know that's probably not the most efficient use of it, but I dont brew more than once a month or so. There's also a distinct difference between clean and sanitized. Clean means free of debris and stains, sanitized means free of any bacteria or wild yeast that may find its way into your fresh wort.

Having sanitizer now, I had to figure out what kind of brew I thought would be good to start with. A pale ale seemed pretty simple and I love pale ales. Originality is important to me. So I looked at the ingredients generally involved in a pale ale and what kinds of hops I had on hand. I decided to use pale malt, light crystal malt, and chocolate malt for a sweeter type of profile. For the hops I chose Cascade for bittering and Saaz for a bit of spice finish.

Brown Pale Ale

8 lbs Pale malt
1 lb Crystal 15L Malt
1/2lb Chocolate Malt

2oz Cascade Hops (6.8%AA)
1/2oz Saaz Hops (3.6%AA)
1/2oz Willamette Hops (4.7%AA)

1pkg Saf-ale US-05 Yeast

As one would expect, being a new brewer and just going by what I've seen and read, I made a ton of mistakes. I used enough strike water but no where near enough sparge water. I ended up with about 3.5 gallons of beer at the end of it all. I also mashed at far too high a temperature for the type of beer I was trying to get. So I didn't get very good starch conversion. It didn't stop the yeast from working their magic, but it inhibited the alcohol content quite a bit. I ALSO mashed far too long in an adventure to try to find iodine so that I could check starch conversion. I ended up mashing for 2 hours instead of 1. Not to be outdone, the weather was sitting at a toasty 92 degrees at about the time I was trying to cool my wort to pitching temperatures. No idea how much hose water I used running it through my chiller, but it was a ton. Lessons learned. Sort of.

As the yeast went to work, I noticed that it was a little bit hot in the house, so warm in fact that the temperature wouldn't register on the strip that goes up to 80 degrees. Fantastic. It's going to taste like hard alcohol was my first thought. But after 2 weeks in the fermenter, I kegged it and let it condition a week or 2. It turned out well. So well that at the Independence Day celebration on my block, the neighbors liked it so much that the majority of it was gone at the end of the day. My buddy and I finished it off the following weekend.

My first adventure into home brewing was not a rousing success. But it was successful in that I learned things about brewing that I hadn't known before. I provided the neighbors a great session beer that they and I enjoyed. I could not really complain about that. After a few months of hiatus due to a wedding that was coming up (my own) I picked up where I left off.

Welcome to the New Brewer Chronicals!

One of the first things I want to do is welcome everyone reading to an adventure I've been on since June of 2010. Exploring the home brewing of beer is arguably a very tough task. First, you have to decide where you want to be on the scale of difficulty. There are three in the case of home brewing. Extract brewing, which uses a concentrated malt powder or liquid to achieve a wort, partial mash brewing which uses malt extract and a combination of special grain steeping to get the style of beer you are going for, and lastly all grain, which uses whole malt grain steeped in water of a certain temperature for a certain amount of time and rinsed with water of a certain temperature to make the wort.

Before I reveal the one that chose me, I have a story behind it.

I've been a drinker of beer since I was very young, far too young to be drinking. It's been about 10 years now. I met beer for the first time like most youth discover beer, in dad's refrigerator! Honestly, it tasted like piss to me, like the most popular brews did at the time. We had an off and off relationship. I'd have one, and not like it very much, then have one again the next month. I'm sure there were great craft brews, but they weren't in the fridge and I didn't have a license that said "21" on it.

When I got to college in 2004, I didn't expect debauchery and parties because it was a small business school. Not much can really happen. But there I met new styles of brew that I hadn't known before. Granted, I was still too young to drink, but not all of my college buddies were. That and a less than strict pizza place ended up being a sweet key to awesome new frontiers in brew for a guy like I was. Pitchers of pure greatness were met with new appreciation of beer and how it can vary in taste. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (a very established craft brew by many standards) was one of the first I drank beyond the big three (Coors, Miller, Bud). Amazingly hoppy and a wonderful light orange color introduced me to what beer could be. After graduation, and finally being 21, I started expanding my horizons into new craft brews. Microbrews that somehow ended up at BevMo pushed me to taste them to see how good brew could really be. Coworkers would steer me toward certain regional beers like Belgian, Russian, and German. I tasted the goodness that was Duvel, Affligem, Old Rasputin, Stone, and Stella. I gained more appreciation for different beers than I ever had before.

I had always thought of what it would be like to brew the beers I loved, but never thought it was within my capacity to really brew them or even my own for that matter. I didnt have the equipment or the time to wait or the money to afford the hobby.

Just when the thought was out of sight out of mind, a coworker told me he was moving out of state and needed to offload his brewing setup. We're talking thousands of dollars in stuff here. After sleeping on it, I took the offer, with a small stake put in by my mom. Neither of us really knew how much stuff it really was. It took up half of the garage and more space on the back patio. There was a mash tun, a hot liquor tank, boil kettle, carboys, cooling coils, kegs, carbon dioxide tanks, ingredients, bottling setup, anything and everything for home brewing great beers was sitting at my lap for a pittance of what it was really worth. Sometimes I even regret taking it all for such a small price, almost like I ripped him off or something.

So when I say the brewing style chose me and not the other way around, I'm serious. I was chosen by all grain brewing. All I kept hearing from most people was about how hard all grain brewing was. I think most of that difficulty comes in the form of money being put into the hobby, not the pure difficulty of the activity. I realize that I'm probably the luckiest guy on earth to own what I own for the price I got it for. So be it.

My next post will be about the first brew I ever did, a pale ale, 1 week after I got all the stuff home.