First Brew: Lessons Learned and a Few Questions

Well, I did it...this afternoon I brewed my first batch: St. Arnold Christmas Ale clone from Austin Homebrew Supply. Below are some observations, lessons learned, and some questions.

Don't go cheap on your boil pot; I bought and used a 12-quart pot (3-gallons)...sooooo not big enough.

I had a boil over immediately after I added my bittering hops.

The mess from the boil over wasn't as nasty to clean up as I had expected, and was even able to get it cleaned up before my wife busted me.

The liquid malt extract dissolved quicker and easier than I anticipated.

I have a wort cooler, but didn't use it. Instead I went the ice bath route. It took me probably close to 30-minutes to get my wort cooled to 80-degrees.

Planning and having everything sanitized beforehand is essential.

My OG measured at 1.075; according to the directions from Austin Homebrew Supply, it should have been about 1.066.

After I pitched the yeast (liquid White Labs English Ale), I moved my fermentation bucket to its final location. For the next 10-minutes, I noticed action in the air lock.

With my OG higher than it should have been, what are the ramifications? Is this going to be a problem?

The action I saw in my airlock: was that probably just due to me relocating my fermentation bucket? The action seems to have stopped, or at least slowed way down.

All in all, it was a fun process, though longer than I expected.

If I could make one single recommendation to a fellow beginner, it is to get a large boil pot..follow the directions of the experienced brewers or the directions that come with your brew kit...don't go cheap on the brew pot!

I think the hard part is done...I just hope the fermentation goes well (I did not use a starter). Looking forward to drinking some good, fresh beer.

Thanks in advance for any helpful comments!

Was the airlock sucking in towards the beer? I sometimes see that as the beer comes down to room temp. I would be surprised (happily) with the
OG difference with an extract or mini-mash kit. Do you recall the amount and ingredients used? What was the volume into the fermenter?

And f you measured the og @ 80f you are higher than 1.075...more like 77 or 78.

Hrm, the biggest pot I have is 1.5 gallons. I was planning on doing a 2 gallon partial boil in two stages, 1 gallon each. Maybe no?

mtgray9 said:

I think the hard part is done...

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I thought that too, until i came down with "Watchit Syndrome." Now the hard part is the waiting.

also, great thread info for newbs like myself. I also learned that the 3 gal pot was not enough for a 2.5 gal boil.

ashpub, why do you say you'd be pleasantly surprised with the high OG (please excuse my ignorance)?

the og of 1.075 is already adjusted for the 80-degree temperature.

the recipe called for 5.25-gallons in the primary fermenter.

the airlock sure looked like it was reacting to C02 coming out of the bucket...would it have looked different if it was sucking?

the ingredients were:

grain bag consisted of:
.5-lb cara munich malt
1-lb cara vienne malt
.5-lb special b malt
13-oz munich malt

hops:
1.5-oz perle hops
3.0-oz liberty hops

malt extract:
9lb amber malt extract

yeast:
white labs english ale 002 liquid yeast

ezzieyguywuf, get you a bigger pot...trust me.

sounds like wrelsien would agree.

congrats on your first brew! Next time you brew don't be afraid to use your wort chiller, it'll cut that cooling time in half. and if you haven't tried, heat up your lme in some hot water prior to adding to the pot, makes it much easier to work with. As far as a bigger pot and following instructios of experienced brewers, YES. Following instructions that came with the kit, not so much, reference at best. Ask questions on this forum before following kit instructions

I generally like my missed OGs to be high. I'm an alchy like that. I am getting 1.067 for that recipe and volume also. That recipe looks delicious none the less.
The s-type airlock will show vacuum on the beer side when cooling as opposed to pressure escaping to atmosphere during fermentation. Now go shake that fermenter....

gaurenteed your OG is not 1.075 or higher. with an extract + steeping grains kit you're going to be within +/- 2 pts or so of the expected OG. since you didn't do a full boil, chances are your reading showed higher due to a poor mix between wort and top off water. nothing you can do about it, wort and water are very tough to mix properly, the yeast does it best.

also, it wasn't CO2 coming out that early. it was most likely due to the dropping temp and thus pressure change.

Alright,

The reason why you got 1.075 is b/c that's about what you should have gotten with that recipe. When I plugged your recipe into beersmith, I get OG of 1.075 with 75% efficiency @ 5.25 gallons.

With that said, you should get about right on b/c with extract there is no guessing. You ALWAYS get 100% efficiency with extract b/c the conversion process was completed by the manufacturer. The bubbling I'm sure was like you said, probably from moving your fermenter or something.


EDIT:

Lol I'm late.

dcp27 said:

gaurenteed your OG is not 1.075 or higher. with an extract + steeping grains kit you're going to be within +/- 2 pts or so of the expected OG. since you didn't do a full boil, chances are your reading showed higher due to a poor mix between wort and top off water. nothing you can do about it, wort and water are very tough to mix properly, the yeast does it best.

also, it wasn't CO2 coming out that early. it was most likely due to the dropping temp and thus pressure change.

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When you say I did not do a "full boil," is that due to the boil over issue I had?

mtgray9 said:

When you say I did not do a "full boil," is that due to the boil over issue I had?

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nope, its cuz u said u used a 3gal pot and kits are for a 5gal recipe

mtgray9 said:

When you say I did not do a "full boil," is that due to the boil over issue I had?

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no. in most kit recipes it gives an option of doing a partial boil, usually boiling with 2.5 gallons and topping off with water at the end to give you the full 5 gallons. other option would be to boil all 5 gallons to start with (full boil) minor adjustments with ingredients and water need to be taken into consideration with the full boil route

Whats wrong with topping off? Then you dont need a bigger pot.although ive been finding you get better hop utililiztion with a full boil.Other than that top off with filtered or preboiled water.I am thinking about getting a bigger pot also, im not shure about topping off i guess, it makes me nervous, but are benefits to it. You can cool your wort faster, but you have a chiller. I dont but i do small batches and is easy to cool in a half an hour. dealing with a wort chiller is not another process i want to deal with,another benefit of small batch.

Thanks for the good info guys...learning a lot, and as I go!

How much should I be agitating/shaking the fermentation bucket?

I would leave it alone,maybe gently shake it once a week.
But dont be like me and bottle early , wait 3 weeks minimum.Get a hydro reading that doesnt drop any within three consecutive days -then bottle.As long as its in the finished gravity range thats estimated.Search post you have questions on. There are tons.

here's my .00002

First of all, way to go on your first brew!!! The hardest part of the process now is the waiting... as a famous teevee guy is fond of saying "your patience will be rewarded". THREE weeks at least. (sorry, those were the longest three weeks of my life too).

I strongly agree with you on kettle size. My wife started me off with a 5 gallon unit and I STILL had to, er, needed to, um... I almost immediately bought a 7 gallon pot so I could do a full boil. -5 or 6 gallons of wort and room for the boil. Great first upgrade if you already have a chiller =-which you DO!!! USE THAT SUCKER! You really want your wort to be "in the danger zone" for as short a time as possible.

Heating your LME in another pot really helps, and using DME is another great tip for extract brewing.

I would bet that you didn't use enough top-off water or you didn't mix it well if you're over your gravity by that much. Also, you didn't mention aerating your wort before you pitched... did you skip that step of did you not mention that you did it?

The boilover after you add the hops is completely normal... I usually keep a jar of cold water near the stove (just in case) to stop things from getting out of hand and making a mess.

-but most of all, welcome to the addiction. I'm a year in and it only gets to be more fun. You quickly learn what to worry about (5%) and what to not worry about (95%).

muthafuggle said:

here's my .00002

First of all, way to go on your first brew!!! The hardest part of the process now is the waiting... as a famous teevee guy is fond of saying "your patience will be rewarded". THREE weeks at least. (sorry, those were the longest three weeks of my life too).

I strongly agree with you on kettle size. My wife started me off with a 5 gallon unit and I STILL had to, er, needed to, um... I almost immediately bought a 7 gallon pot so I could do a full boil. -5 or 6 gallons of wort and room for the boil. Great first upgrade if you already have a chiller =-which you DO!!! USE THAT SUCKER! You really want your wort to be "in the danger zone" for as short a time as possible.

Heating your LME in another pot really helps, and using DME is another great tip for extract brewing.

I would bet that you didn't use enough top-off water or you didn't mix it well if you're over your gravity by that much. Also, you didn't mention aerating your wort before you pitched... did you skip that step of did you not mention that you did it?

The boilover after you add the hops is completely normal... I usually keep a jar of cold water near the stove (just in case) to stop things from getting out of hand and making a mess.

-but most of all, welcome to the addiction. I'm a year in and it only gets to be more fun. You quickly learn what to worry about (5%) and what to not worry about (95%).

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Can't say that I really aerated at all, other than what took place pouring the wort into the fermentation bucket with the additional water. At that point, what should I have done?

jonmohno said:

Whats wrong with topping off? Then you dont need a bigger pot.although ive been finding you get better hop utililiztion with a full boil..

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Topping off isn't bad, it's just sub-optimal I guess you could say. People make booze in prison toilets, it's all about what you want, your abilities and how much you want to invest

Like you said, for one thing it screws with hop utilization. Recipes are almost always written assuming a full volume boil so you have to do some math to get that on target. The water also probably isn't sanitized, so you have a chance for infection there. It can also lead to darker, more caramelized wort, but you can work around that by adding most of the extract right at the end.

If you are getting good results don't change just because the Internets said so. You can work around pretty much all the partial-volume boil issues if you know about them and just think it through.

mtgray9 said:

Can't say that I really aerated at all, other than what took place pouring the wort into the fermentation bucket with the additional water. At that point, what should I have done?

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If you splash the heck out of the wort/water as you add it to the fermenter, that is probably fine. You can shake the bucket around too to get more air in. People have other methods ranging from stirring to blenders to aquarium pumps but that is way beyond what you should be worrying about on your first brew Yeast needs oxygen to be healthy and reproduce, which is why you want to do this.

muthafuggle said:

I usually keep a jar of cold water near the stove (just in case) to stop things from getting out of hand and making a mess.

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So adding cold water at a hot break will simmer the boil over? Thats good to know, i would not have guessed that ADDING more water would solve the problem, but I see how the temp change will do the trick. Nice tip.

you can even get a spray bottle with water and just spray. Personally i try not to get it so close to the top because once you throw your hops in they can boil like mad. i actually started pulling the pot off the burner once because it was making me nervous, but a spray bottle is a real good tool,if you feel like spending a buck or so.The. spray bottle is also good for when you have to sanitze,just dont confuse yourself and use sanitizer to spray your wort.Label it.s I accidentally dumped some premixedsanitizer in my topp off jug once,but it didnt get into my wort,thankfully. im not putting sanitizer in water jugs anymore after that.

I very nearly had a boil over with my first partial boil. The next time I got a hop bag and haven't had any problems. was even able to run out to the store while my wort was brewing.

Well, it's official...I have constant action in my airlock! I pitched the yeast yesterday around 5pm, and I noticed action this morning around 9am...so I'm assuming this is a good thing.

As my dad used to tell me, "Even a blind hog finds an acorn."

The taste test still awaits down the road, but I'm at least happy to see evidence of fermentation.

Sounds like everything went well! Like others said the waiting is going to kill you. In the mean time get a copy of "How to Brew" by John Palmer or he has a first edition (the newest print edition is an updated 3rd edition) of it on the web @ Howtobrew.com. Read it. It will give you tons of instructional and theoretical information on brewing. It covers every step and process from extract through all-grain. I think at the beginning of your brew career a book like that can be better than online forums because the short answers that you can receive on here will leave you with more questions(like the follow up questions you asked on this thread). I read that thing cover to cover before my first brew and I was doing all grain on my 3rd batch. More important than knowing what to do is WHY you need to do it, and a good book will give you that information. Forums are great for a quick answer or some subjective advice from more experienced brewers, but a good book really lays out information more effectively if you really want to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can.

Good luck, and use that chiller!

So last night was bottling night...some additional observations and lessons learned:

Bottling is pretty labor-intensive and can be rough on the back (at least mine); but I enjoyed the process, and I'm someone that is motivated by creating a final product, so I just kept thinking of how cool it would be to have all of those bottles filled and capped.

I have been keeping beer bottles for a few months now; rinsed a few times and let them dry after I drank the beer, then stored in a box.

Last night, cleaned them using Ultimate Brewery Cleaner, then sanitized them using Brewvint Cleantizer; I never did use a bottle brush, because I figured just soaking and rinsing would be adequate. Does this sound ok?

I practiced with my siphon using just water before I started the actual bottling process; I'm glad I did this.

When you get the siphon working, it's a great thrill.

My kit has a bottling bucket. The first bottle I tried to fill by holding it up to the valve at the bottom of the bottling bucket and doing it that way...not good, too much foam. Them I wised up and realized that I could hook a hose up to it and use my bottle filler tool that came with my kit. After I did this, the actual bottling was a breeze.

Capping the bottles was a breeze too. I didn't have any misfires (bottle falling over, cap not going on tight, etc.). I was really pleased how easy it was to put the caps on.

To me, the cleaning and the sanitizing is the most challenging part. It's just tough to get everything clean and sanitized, especially when you consider the size of the buckets, and the small diameter of the hoses and siphons. I did my best, but still know that I touched things after sanitizing that I should not have touched, or sanitized pieces brushed up against unsanitized things. I did my best, but it's challenging.

Capped a couple bottles before I remembered that my bottle caps should be sanitized too.

All day yesterday I was plannng on "watching the Cotton Bowl while I bottled." Hysterical...didn't see much of the game. Ended up doing my bottling in the master bathroom and bathtub. The bathtub worked well because I could place the wort on the ledge up high, then easily siphon into the bottling bucket in the tub. Worked great for spillage too. The bathroom smelled like beer afterwards, but I liked it and my wife didn't even mention it. After I got everything cleaned up, the beer smell went away.

I tried one sip while bottling and it tasted more like Fat Tire than St. Arnold Christmas Ale. Fine with me...tasted pretty good, and smelled like a great beer. Maybe I'm doing something right!

The bottling process took me 2.5 to 3-hours, about the same time it took me on brewing day.

Hopefully my wife seeing all that I went through last night will help my case for buying kegging equipment sooner rather than later.

My OG was 1.075...FG was 1.016...according to the instructions that came with my kit, ABV = OG - FG x 131. So my ABV was 7.7% calculated, although when I measured the % alcohol from the hydrometer, I only got 2 to 3%. Which is more accurate? I'm hoping that I just misread the hydrometer? Not sure.

In an nutshell, the cleaning and sanitizing is the biggest challenge to me (and where to set things after they are sanitized). But I love the thrill of accomplishment, and seeing all 47-bottles filled and capped was a great feeling.

Can't wait to drink a cold one!

Any comments, observations or answers to the few questions I asked would be greatly appreciated. Also, maybe some of my observations will at least give another new brewer a good feel for what to expect...and especially what NOT to do!

One last thing...I've started reading John Palmer's "How to Brew." Man, this thing is a wealth of information...it gives me a feel that I still have a ton to learn!

Glad it went so well You can see why lots of people say kegging gear is one of the best "upgrades" you can get. It doesn't improve your beer, but it gets you brewing more because packaging takes 30 minutes instead of 3 hours. And practice makes perfect!

Since you are stuck bottling til you convince SWMBO that dropping $100-200 on kegging gear is a good idea, I really recommend getting an Auto Siphon. They are less than $10 and make starting a syphon easy and more sanitary.

One observation: you did add sugar before bottling, right? Just mentioning it since your writeup was super thorough and I didn't see it. Beer's not going to do much carbonating without priming sugar!

I found cleaning bottles throughout the week made bottling day a little more tolerable. Knocked an hour or so off the day since you only have to sanitize. Or you could even get a big rubbermaid trash can, fill it halfway with sanitizer solution and just leave all the bottles soaking in your garage til it's time to bottle.

Thanks Docjowles.

I do have an auto siphon...works great and if there are cheaper siphons out there, which I'm sure there are, I do not recommend going cheap on the siphon. If your siphon isn't working, you've got yourself a bit of a crisis!

Yes, I did add the priming sugar to my bottling bucket before siphoning my wort.

One other thing I did not mention is that now that I have been through the process one time, I learned so much and know a bunch of things that I can do differently to improve my brewing efficiency. A lot of it depends on your equipment, the space you are brewing in, etc...but I think the whole process will get easier over time because I will find shortcuts and will be able to avoid the problems I have run into in the past.