Preliminary Brew - Amber Ale - Brew Day

Thursday night, Dana and I went by a local hobby shop that has a substore in it called Boston Brewin'. Yes, that's really the name. We talked for a fair bit with the purveyor of the establishment, and we purchased a basic kit, a True Brew kit.While it is a pretty basic kit, it came with everything we needed aside from bottles and ingredients. We picked up a set of ingredients for an Amber Ale, based on its simplicity and its relatively low price. All told, including taxes, we got our basic equipment and the ingredients for our first batch for $120. Split three ways, that's pretty damn reasonable. 

We put it in the back of my car, brought it to Dana's, where we opened it. We spent a good solid hour, maybe an hour and a half checking out the various bits and pieces. We made sure everything was seaworthy, and sure enough, everything was sound as a pound. Upon reading up on the process, we realized we needed roughly 3-4 weeks before the first brew was ready to drink. We did some quick math and realized that if we waited too long, Dana would be off to grad school before it was finished. So we decided to brew the next day. We packed it all back into the box, and I brought it back to my house.

 Late the next afternoon, Dana and I found ourselves in my kitchen, preparing to brew. Lauren, regrettably, was unable to be present, due to prior obligations. We decided to go 100% by the book, in order to really get the gist of the process down. We heated the can of malt extract, put the brew kettle on to boil, and got going. Once the water came to a boil, we cracked open the can of malt extract and hoo boy, what a smell. Not a bad smell exactly, but a very pungent aroma. For those of you who have been in Baltimore harbor, it smells very much like the Domino Sugar factory, but in your kitchen. We poured it in, and Dana stirred vigorously. We added in the dry malt and the hop pellets as the boil continued, and what we ended up with cooking on the stove looked something like this:

Not the most appetizing thing to see stewing on your stove, but we continued onwards with the assumption that we hadn't fucked anything up. Unfortunately, "continuing onwards" was simply letting the wort boil for roughly half an hour. So we sat and let it boil. We checked it to see how high it was foaming up every now and then, but there was never any risk of a boil-over. I think, again assuming that we didn't screw anything up, that the pot was simply too large for it to be a genuine worry. After all, being New Englanders, we were using a lobster pot. Towards the end of the boil, we filled the fermenting bucket with about 3 gallons of cold water. As the boil wrapped up, we grabbed a beach towel, put it on the floor, and put the fermenting bucket on it, in case of spillage. Dana took the pot holders, picked up the brew pot, and poured the wort into the bucket with all the gentleness and ease of a mother rocking her child to sleep. Now we had to let it cool to about 90 degrees before adding the yeast. How did we cool it? The same way we would cool ourselves -- by sitting it in front of the air conditioner.

After a fair amount of time, the wort got down into the 90-degree range, and we pitched the yeast. After letting it sit for about ten minutes, we put the lid on the bucket and sealed our baby up tighter than a drum. Lastly, we filled our nifty three-piece airlock with some water, and inserted it into the hole in the lid. I brought it down to the basement, where the temperature is a very stable 65-70 degrees, and I am proud to report that as of this posting, the airlock is bubbling, which means that the beer has started to ferment!

We plan on bottling the beer on Friday, July 23rd, then letting it condition in the bottles for about three weeks, so our estimated drink date is somewhere at the end of the second week of August. Huzzah!