He's gone and done it - Jeff is brewing at home

"Most work I've ever done for 9 beers."

On Wednesday night, Jeff bottled his first batch of home brew. Here's his take on the experience.

I've been meaning to start home brewing for some time. I’ve acquired various things for my home brewery – grain mill, mash tun, some burners – but I had yet to pull the trigger on actually brewing. Kate took away my excuses by buying me an all-grain home brew kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop. The kit promises to contain pretty much everything you need to make a 1 gallon batch in your kitchen. It was the last push I needed to get me to take the plunge. 

So after work, I came home and decided to start brewing in my kitchen.
I made sure to sanitize everything before I got started with the included sanitizer.
The problems started when it came time to sparge my mash. The kit had suggested that 1 pot would be fine, and a kitchen fine mesh strainer would be okay. I realized ahead of time, more than one pot was a necessity. I didn’t realize how inadequate a simple kitchen strainer was though. 

As I poured my grain and wort into my second pot with the strainer over top of it, I quickly overfilled the strainer. It was filled as high as it was deep. It was like a sphere of wet grain. Grain was spilling into the wort and I still had more grain left to dump.
I realized that this wasn’t going to work so I went downstairs to grab my mash tun – which was unassembled and completely oversized for a 1 gallon batch. I quickly put it together and got ready to rinse it out. Unfortunately I didn’t see that I had neglected to plug one of the outlets. So when I went to rinse, water went all over the floor. 

Fixed that and then transferred over (the now cooling for 20 minutes) grain. I poured in my wort and my sparge water. I went to open the effluent valve and nothing came out. Great. Stuck sparge. I closed back up the effluent valve and hoped that it was only the fitting on the exit side of the valve that was clogged. I removed that and reopened the valve. Out comes my wort. 

I noticed though as the wort was coming out of my mash tun, a lot more than zero grain was coming with it. So on the second pass, I used that kitchen strainer as a secondary filter on the wort. That seemed to work alright. 

Now it was on to the boil. The kit instructions had suggested a 6 qt pot to do the boil. I thought that was on the small side and was going to use an 8 qt pot. However once it started getting up to boil, I realized that the pot was not going to prevent boil over. I quickly found an even bigger pot and transferred the wort to there – now to get it back to boil. 

I’m guessing the cooling between the mash cook and the sparge isn’t going to help the beer and neither is the transfer between vessels during the boil. 

The hopping went down without issue. Finally, something was working. 

He built an immersion wort chiller.

The cold break after the boil though was a different story. I had a cooler full of ice to drop the boil pot into and hoped that would cool it quickly enough (would have been nice to have an immersion chiller). I went to add some water to the cooler to improve the heat transfer from the kettle and somehow that caused the plug on the cooler to open and now more water was on the floor. Cleaned that up and went back to chilling my wort. It wasn’t an ideal setup by any means – and it took almost 20 minutes to drop to under 70F. 

The big step was filling my fermenter. I had Kate help at this point because I knew juggling the carboy, the funnel, the strainer and the pot of soon-to-be-beer would be too much. Kate handled the funnel, strainer and carboy. I took the pot. I completely underestimated how much sludge from the hops would come pouring out. It quickly clogged the strainer and then the wort was spilling on to the floor. Huge mess. It leaves floors very sticky. After that it was just a matter of pitching my yeast and aerating the beer with some shakes of the carboy. 

Now the beer is sitting in my basement. Hopefully it’s cold enough – but not too cold. Hopefully it’s dark enough. Hopefully everything was properly sanitized. Hopefully the yeast is active and has plenty of sugars to eat. I guess I’ll find out soon enough if I made drinkable beer, or a gallon of drain pour. 

Still, it was fun. And I think I learned a lot of lessons for the next time.