Long time reader, first time brewer

I've been reading this forums on and off for several years making Kombucha, rice wine, and on home brew technique. I'm proudly typing this post because I brewed my first batch of beer last night.

It was a Chamomile Wheat recipe kit from my LHBS that I'm modifying a bit, let me know your thoughts on my process and observations, if you have any tips I'd love to hear them.

Recipe:
6.6 lbs liquid wheat malt extract
1/2 lb. Munich malt, crushed
1/2 lb. Wheat malt, crushed
1/4 lb. Aromatic malt, crushed
1/2 lb. Flaked wheat

.25 oz Tettnang (60 min)
.5 oz Tettnang (30 min)
.5 oz Hallertau (15 min)

Yeast:
Wyeast 3056 Bavarian Wheat

Additions:
3 blood oranges (meat and zest)
4 navel oranges (meat and zest)
I made a "tea" out of them by boiling all of that at 160 for 10 minutes then added the whole thing to the cooled wart before pitching the yeast

I will be adding about 4 pounds of frozen blackberries after about week. First I'll boil them up at 160 for about 10 minutes then add that "tea" in.

Worries:
--Completely forgot to add the irish moss
--Smacked the hell out of my smack pack and let it sit for 3 hours, but when I cut it open the inside nutrient pack was still intact. I cut it, mixed it, let it sit for about 10 minutes, then pitched it.
--It was extremely difficult to hit my temps and stay at them on my electric stove, but it was too cold to even brew in the garage with the propane turkey fryer (took me almost 15 minutes for a 2 gallon boil!) I overshot my steeping grains temperature (150) and had to wait for the water to cool back down. I'm hoping this will come with practice as I spent a lot of time waiting for things to come back up to boil or down to a certain temperature.
-- OG was 1.030, the original recipe (I took out the chamomille and added the oranges and blackberries in it) was 1.047-1.050

Temperatures:
Pitch temp 67.9
Fermentation temp around 71
After 24 hours there's a few bubbles, not much activity.

Closing thoughts:
The house smells amazing after brewing beer, I'm super excited to finally be brewing, and I'm to try to relax and not worry about stuck fermentation and the other things that could go wrong.

-Adam

Hey man, I've been in your shoes. The good news is that as far as steeping grains are concerned, you can't really mess up. It just adds complexity, color, body, and (in some cases) head to your beer. Honestly I'm excited about your recipe. It sounds like it will be very delicious.
I believe that the irish moss is used as a clearing agent. As far as that goes, your beer might not be as pretty as you were hoping. I say function over form!
Remember: people were brewing beer for hundreds if not thousands of years with half as much knowledge about the process and not nearly the equipment. Your beer will be fine!
Let us know how it turns out.

With all of the fruit you are adding to your beer (and the fact that this is a wheat beer), the Irish moss wouldn't have really done anything anyway. This beer is going to be cloudy no matter what you do. Sounds like an interesting brew, good luck and report back with results.

Oh, pectic enzyme will help make fruit clearer. I'm not sure when to add it for beer brewing purposes, but with fruit wines I add it 12 hours prior to pitching.

A couple questions/concerns I had:
1) The OG seems a bit low, by my rough calculation it should've been around 1.055
2) Do the fruit additions seem to be in the correct quantity and at the right time? I culled over a good amount of posts to come up with those #s and methods.

Side note: 48 hours later the airlock is bubbling away, room (closet) temp is at 75°

What is your batch size? I can try to help with your first question. Also, 75 degrees is pretty high for fermentation, even for a wheat beer. Is there a cooler place in the house to keep it? Warmer temps tend to lead to off flavors.

5 gallon batch size. I have one closet upstairs that's around 75°F, one around 68, and one downstairs around 63. No basement. I'm assuming 63 is too cold so I put it in the 68° closet.

68 isn't bad, I'd go with 63 next time. During the early stages of fermentation (first few days) the beer will be warmer than the ambient temps. So, considering most ale yeast have optimum fermentation in the 60-68 range, you are better off being a few degrees below the upper limit of that range. As for your first question, I ran the numbers on your brew... it looks like the only fermentables you really have there (assuming the grains were steeped and therefore did not contribute fermentable sugars), your OG should have been 1046. I'm not sure why you came up short considering you used LME, did you stir before taking a gravity reading? I'm wondering if you didn't have a good enough blend to get an accurate measurement.

Should I move it down to the 63 degree closet now (day 4)? or leave it where it is?

Also, the OG I took was after I dumped the oranges and zest in so I didn't stir at all (just the recommended splashing when I poured the wort to the fermentation vessel). Should I stir it now and take a reading or should things have settled down enough to take a "good" OG. I'm resisting opening up my bucket so as not to let contamination in.

This actually brings up another question, assuming a "normal" fermentation (kick off 2-4 days, no bumps in the road) how often should you take a gravity reading?

With the wheat beer yeast,higher temps can be good to get those banana esters into the beer. 68-75 would have done that.

Union is right about the higher temperature range for the bavarian wheat yeast, so just leave it where its at. No, the OG needs to be taken before fermentation starts, by now the yeast have probably chewed through a majority of the sugars and you are likely to get a gravity reading showing that you are somewhere around halfway between your OG and your final gravity, so just let it go for now. Some people seem obsessive about taking readings, but I prefer to open the bucket as few times as possible. If it were my batch, I'd probably let it sit there for about 2 weeks then take my first gravity reading and seal it back up. I might check it out 2-3 days later and see where the gravity is and make a decision at that point to either bottle or let it continue to ferment. If it were a higher gravity ale, I'd probably wait until about 3 weeks before taking my first reading.

Another question, after reading a ton of posts I'm not going to secondary, but I am going to leave it in my primary for 4 weeks to let everything settle out and let my yeast clean things up. The recipe sheet says only 2 weeks of fermentation is necessary. Is this too long for a bavarian wheat but alright for other beer styles?

Also, I was going to add my 4 pounds of frozen blackberries after making a "tea" out of them. Some of what I read on the forums suggested 2 weeks, some suggested after the gravity has remained steady for 48 hours. What does everyone here recommend?

Thanks so far for everybodies replies and knowledge.

I'm sure that four weeks will be just fine for the style. Typically when people add fruit they do it in a secondary though. I'd bet that at about 2 weeks your gravity will be mostly stable, although the yeast might continue to attenuate a point or two. If you added the fruit at 2 weeks, it would be fine to stay in there until you are ready to bottle 2 weeks later.

Another question, sorry for all of them, I might be brewing up a milk stout tomorrow. My question is, where should that ferment at? The 68 degree closet or the 62 degree closet?

Thanks again

It all depends on the yeast you are using.

If you're using an english yeast for the stout, pretty good chance you'll want to put it in the colder option.

Yeast is Wyeast 3056.

Ok, so I was about to post about my nightmare of a stuck fermentation since my temps dropped down to 61 for a few nights. Then I decided to relax and actually take a gravity reading.

Gravity at 1.009 which means to me its done as the FG was between 1.014 and 1.008. It smelled like beer (good sign). The oranges haven't dropped yet (don't think that's a big deal). External temp was 68, internal temp was 67.

So the next step is adding the blackberry "tea" on Sunday, then sit for 2 weeks on that. My only fear is that their won't be enough yeast left to gobble the blackberries but from what I've read that shouldn't be a problem.

Thoughts from anyone?

sounds awesome! There will be plenty of yeast for any additional fermentation needed, and for carbing the beer down the road. It may appear as though the yeast have dropped to the bottom, and many have, but plenty are still in suspension and will continue to be. Good luck with the next step!

Attached are 2 pictures of the fermentation. Thanks for the words of encouragement BlackGoat!

looks ugly and beautiful

thanks for responses! this site is great!

The saga continues, I added 5 pounds of blackberries after making "tea" (boiling at 160 for 10 minutes then letting cool to room temperature).

Well I added too much to my 6.5 gal fermentation bucket and after checking the airlock after work today I saw beer pushed up into the airlock.

I quickly made a blow off tube and stuck it in a bucket of sanitizer. I noticed the temp was back up to 71 so I dropped some into the tub I had the bucket in. Last time I checked the temp it was down to 68.

I have several worries: 1) Fermentation temp staying too high 2) Possible contamination from the "tea" transfer to the primary 3) Possible oxidation from the "tea" transfer to the primary (I tried my best not to shake up/disturb the beer when transferring)

If none of that messed up the beer, I've been reading about cold crashing and using unflavored gelatin to clarify my beer, along with transferring to a bottling bucket even though I have a lot of fruit floating free in my primary right now.

Can you tell I'm a little OCD?

Blow off tube set up and flooded air lock

Relax, grab a homebrew... you'll be fine.

yep, relax. You added sugars in fruit form, the yeast are devouring them and what you are looking at is vigorous fermentation. You did everything right by setting up the blowoff tube. Not exactly sure what you meant by "dropped some in the tub..." did you mean that you put the fermenter into a tub of water/ice? In any case, getting the temps back down was important and you managed to do that which is great. Don't worry about cold crashing right now or doing anything, just let it do its thing until fermentation is 100% complete. Also, since you added fruit, you can probably expect a hazy brew - cold crashing and gelatin finings might improve it but anything with 5lbs of fruit will likely not clear. Sounds like everything is moving along nicely! good luck

Picture taken before I cold crashed it in my chest freezer. Since there's not an exact controller on there (just numbers) I wanted to bring it down a little bit lower than 38 then turn it off. Got it down to 31, hope my beer isn't beersicles at this point (or it doesn't stay that way).

I will be very glad when I can get some sort of temperature controlled system built for sure.

And here's what came next...

That's right ladies and gents, never put your first beer in your new chest freezer then not check to make sure you turned it off off before going to bed. I woke up to a beersicle. Then I panicked...a lot. Then I kicked over a few things and said some curse words...a lot.

Then I checked the forums, seems this thing has happened before, made a panicked HELP!!! post. Some fine forum members came to my rescue and calmed me down.

Re-sanitized the lid and the airlock, put her in my closet, 24 hours late she's sitting at 56 F. I'll wait another day, bottle, and hope for no infection and hope some yeast are still alive (it may be hard to tell in the picture but it wasn't completely frozen through, just the sides and top) to bottle carb.

We shall see.

The beer has re-heated back up to 56F (ish) and we're bottling. SWMBO and I finally got the (not auto) siphon started, just needed to remember our beer bonging days.

We got 55 bottles of beer and probably could have got at least 5 more out of it.

Gonna let these babies bottle carb (1-3 weeks on account of the beersicle incident) then crack them open.

A little disappointed upon tasting the uncarbonated beer, just kind of watery and bitter with no fruit tast whatsoever. Let's see how that changes when we add carbonation.

Pic 1: Dishwasher rack doubles as a drying rack.
Pic 2: Unofficial sponsor is Hotbox pizza (Hoosiers know what I'm talking about)
Pic 3: Measuring out priming sugar, 4.39 is what I needed, I got it a little under 4.5
Pic 4: Drop in the paint strainer, then drop in the racking cane
Pic 5: Everything in the bottling bucket

Pic 6: Everything in 6 packs
Pic 7: Leftover fruit and trub

So right now the bottles are sitting in a 65F closet, I might move them up to a 70-73 F closet. Worried about bottle bombs but we'll see. Maybe leave them in the closet for a week, then move them? Does ramping up the temp make a difference when bottling?

At 65F it'll take a bit longer to carbonate. I always put them in the master bedroom,the warmest room in the house. As much as 85F in there,but rarely below 70F. So warmer temps are better,imo.

I moved it to the upstairs closet, currently 74F, and covered it in case of bottle bombs.

Two weeks in the bottle in my low 70's closet and I was still afraid I'd have flat beer because of my beersicle incident. This was not the case. Put two bottles in the fridge Thursday and opened them tonight, a pleasant PFFT of carbonation awaits me!

I think these still need a week or so to carb up properly but here are my first impressions:
-Small amount of orange taste
-Small amount of orange aroma
-Definite blackberry taste
-Watery body

Overall, for my first beer, not to shabby. No off flavors to speak of. I believe the watery body comes from me pouring the "tea" in with my blackberries (or the freezing and thawing of the majority of the beer). As far as fruit flavors go, not sure if I need to move some of the orange additions to the "secondary" or possibly the fruit flavors just clash.

Anyone's thoughts?

I think freezing/thawing the beer might be part of the problem. I never do that myself. They say freezing partly can make it higher ABV-wise,but the rest,idk...

Freezing was completely on accident I assure you.

Four weeks in the bottle and this has finally hit it's stride. Incidentally, I finally know what it means when people say it takes time for your beer to develop, even in bottles. Despite all my stumbling steps this has turned into a tasty summer sipper.

Also, last night was the first time I had someone besides SWMBO tried my homebrew and they (craft brew lovers themselves) received it a lot better than I thought they would. Two lessons learned, no wonder this hobby get addictive.

Good to hear. Def one of the lessons to be learned is giving the beer the conditioning time it needs to be at it's best after 1-2 weeks fridge time.