Brewing your first batch

Now that you have gotten your stuff together, you are ready to start your first batch. If you have one, I suggest doing this in the laundry room sink. You can do it in the kitchen, but if you have a woman on premises, this may lead to discord of varying degrees.

The first thing you need to do is to sterilize everything that will come into contact with your beer.

Here we see the airlock setup completely disassembled and floating in a mild bleach solution in a Teflon pan. Behind the pan you can see the siphon tube full of bleach clamped off.

I like to wash the carboy and fill it almost to the top with tap water and about a quart of bleach, then put in the siphon, start the siphon, clamp the hose so the siphon stays full of the bleach solution, then top off the carboy so that there is bleach solution all the way to the top. I usually let the carboy and airlock soak for a minimum of 2 hours.

If you have a dishwasher, you can run all your stuff through there using no soap and a cup or two of bleach only. It works much better than soaking, and you won’t run the risk of bleach on your skin and clothes. If you can, use the bleach only in crappy clothes and with surgical gloves. The gloves are cleaner and you won’t stink afterwards.

After your carboy and airlock have soaked for the minimum time, release the clamp on your siphon and let the solution flow into the sink. Rinse the bottle several times until you are certain absolutely no bleach remains. If the bleach will kill the wee beasties who would infect your beer, they will kill the yeast who have decided to give their all to make it for you, too. Once you have rinsed the carboy out very well, rinse the airlock as scrupulously as the carboy, assemble the airlock, and put it on the empty carboy to keep dust, etc out of it. When emptying the carboy I like to take the bleach solution and use it to clean the funnel as it pours out.

Add a gallon of your room temperature bottled water to the carboy. Put your big pot on the stove and add about a gallon of your bottled water. Get it to boil. Once it starts to boil, take a can opener, I use a P-38, and open the can of malt extract. I use a P-38 can opener because mechanical openers have parts that can introduce all sorts of horrible bacteria laden crap into your malt extract as you crank them around the can. The P-38 is simple, easy to clean, and inexpensive to throw away. A P-38 is strongly recommended.

Note that in this picture the malt is very thick. You can heat the open can to aid in pouring, but I have never needed that. Pour the can’s contents into the water and stir to dissolve. There will be a hefty amount left in the can. Take your spoon and scrape as much out as you can. Add that to the water and malt mixture. This mixture is called the wort.

Once the wort has fully dissolved put your funnel on the carboy and pour in the wort. The water you put in there first will help to keep the glass from shattering from the introduction of a boiling or near boiling wart. If you are using plastic, it will keep melting from occurring.

Put the airlock back on and immediately begin boiling a second gallon of water. As soon as it starts boiling add a teaspoon and a half of yeast nutrient. When it dissolves completely, add your glucose. Once the glucose completely dissolves, add the water, nutrient, and glucose mixture to the wort. At this point start your third gallon to boiling. Take a cup or two of boiling water once the third gallon starts to boil and add it to the can. Swirl it around to melt the malt left in the can, and pour the melt directly into the wort. You will have to repeat this step several times until all or almost all of it is out and added to the wort. Once this is done, add the last of the hot water to the wort, cap it, and place the carboy where you are going to be leaving it while you brew the beer.

There should be about 4 gallons of wort sitting in your carboy. Add enough cool water to bring this to about four and a half gallons. When the carboy is pleasantly warm to the touch of your palms, and no hotter, add your yeast. The directions will tell you to perform all sorts of strange and difficult acts to pitch the yeast correctly, but I have discovered that if the carboy is pleasantly warm, you can simply pull off the airlock, dump in the contents of the yeast packet, recap with the airlock, and then by swirling the carboy, make the yeast enter the wort.

Look at your airlock. Notice that the cap has two protuberant holes. One is for your airlock, and the other is for a trubb line. Trubb is the nasty stuff you want to come off of your beer. Take about 3 feet of your tubing and hook it onto the airlock cap trubb line. Put the end of the line into the sink or into a disposable cup. If you use a cup, use a big one, and check it every day so it doesn’t overflow.

Lastly, take a towel or tinfoil and cover your beer. This is done to protect it from UV light. I like to use a towel because it is reusable and I can look at my alcoholic sea monkeys doing their thing, which I dig.

That is it. You are done with phase one. Go clean up.

Brewing your first batch

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