Brewing in San Jose

Hello!

I asked my boyfriend for a home brew kit for Christmas and he was more than happy to get me one! I blogged about our experience with the first batch, check it out. Any comments or advice are greatly appreciated!

http://drinkveganbeer.blogspot.com/2012/12/zombie-apocalypse-wheat-beer-part-1.html

or

http://samsvegan.blogspot.com/2012/12/zombie-apocalypse-wheat-beer-part-1.html

You're off to a good start. I'd highly recommend buying the hard copy of How To Brew by John Palmer. This book, combined with all of the great info on this forum will help you improve your process (and your beer) quickly.

Just a couple of quick pointers:
1) You don't want to add the powdered corn sugar (priming sugar) directly to the fermenter. Corn sugar can be full of nasties that you don't want growing in your beer. Add the corn sugar to a cup or two of boiling water, allow it to sit for about 10 minutes to sanitize, then add the sugar water to the fermenter. Rack (siphon) your wort onto the sugar water. This will mix the sugar into the wort.
2) Check out the "bottling tips" sticky in the Bottling/Kegging section of this site. There are some excellent tip in there to improve your process.

Good luck. The more you learn about this hobby, the more you realize you have more to learn.