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 I figured it was a little bit out of date, but 25 years seemed a long time.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.