Nexus555
Well-Known Member
Hey guys, what's up?? Well you've probably seen me ask a few questions here before. Well yesterday a good friend of mine and I brewed up our first batch!! We brewed the Big River Brown Ale.
Overall we did a great job for our first brew. Everything was kept sanitized, boiled a correct times, etc. I did have a few little problems during the end. First, I didn't notice until I was cooling the wort that the thermometer that I have starts at 100, not 50 or so. That kind of sucked, we had to guess when to throw in the wort to the primary (I only cooled 2.5 gallons, another 2.5 gallons was in primary already.)
Before that I had an embarrassing thing happen. I had the 2.5 gallons of water in the primary sitting there while we boiled, and I forgot to put on the lid. Well sure enough when the wort was chilling, we looked in there and what do you know: A little gnat flew in there!!! It was a very small little bug, and we sanitized a stirring spoon and fished him out. I really didn't have time to sanitize the bucket again, bring that water to another boil and dump it back in. So I'm really hoping the gnat didn't ruin the batch.
Besides those little errors, everything else went awesome!!! The airlock started to bubble only 1 or 2 hours after we pitched the yeast!! Now it is fermenting vigorously at about 2 bubbles a second!! So hopefully everything will go okay from here on out and in 6 weeks we'll have an awesome brew to drink!!!
Thanks for all the help!
Overall we did a great job for our first brew. Everything was kept sanitized, boiled a correct times, etc. I did have a few little problems during the end. First, I didn't notice until I was cooling the wort that the thermometer that I have starts at 100, not 50 or so. That kind of sucked, we had to guess when to throw in the wort to the primary (I only cooled 2.5 gallons, another 2.5 gallons was in primary already.)
Before that I had an embarrassing thing happen. I had the 2.5 gallons of water in the primary sitting there while we boiled, and I forgot to put on the lid. Well sure enough when the wort was chilling, we looked in there and what do you know: A little gnat flew in there!!! It was a very small little bug, and we sanitized a stirring spoon and fished him out. I really didn't have time to sanitize the bucket again, bring that water to another boil and dump it back in. So I'm really hoping the gnat didn't ruin the batch.
Besides those little errors, everything else went awesome!!! The airlock started to bubble only 1 or 2 hours after we pitched the yeast!! Now it is fermenting vigorously at about 2 bubbles a second!! So hopefully everything will go okay from here on out and in 6 weeks we'll have an awesome brew to drink!!!
Thanks for all the help!