Rookie here, just tried first brew

First off, I'm Mike from southern California. I Decided I wanted to try brewing beer after seeing an hour long show about it on TV. I asked around and got a good deal on a kit and then off to the beer store.

For our first brew, we picked an American Ale kit and a book. The brew took a little long because the burner we used wasn't ideal.

We filled the fermenter, but somewhere we missed the part on how high to fill it. Yeah, we overfilled and the pressure popped the cap off and it spilled over, made a mess. Cleaned the cap real good and put it back on. At this point we were worried about contamination.

Searching posts here on HomeBrewTalk.com, (thank you0, I felt a bit reassured that these things happen and to not give up on the beer. So, we rode it out, it looked good when we bottled it, but I wasn't too optimistic on it tasting good enough to finish a bottle.

Well, 4 1/2 weeks later, cracked open a bottle and it was perfect! So, you fellow new brewers, don't stress it! Unless you have sea monkeys swimming around in there.

I'm surprised if you made this far through my boring story, but if you are still here, we didn't waste anytime on starting our 2nd brew. We just bottled our second batch last night, an American Orange Wheat.

Thanks for having me and good luck to my fellow newcomers!

Great story Mike..Im new myself and I have messed up plenty of times..Its all a learning experience..I've never had to dump a batch yet so im keeping my fingers crossed...The fact that you live on the west coast is great in that you can probably get some nice fresh hops over there. Keep brewing and enjoy yourself!

Same thing happend to the second one i brewed, I added a 6th gallon of water by not keeping track correctly. Hope mine comes out as luck as yours.

welcome to the site.

Maybe we are brewing differently, but I used 6 gallons of water as per the directions, when making a 5 gallon batch.... I believe you should lose about a gallon to evaporation. I think it didn't evaporate enough on my first batch, so I just filled up the fermenting bottle to the neck, (yeah, too high). I brewed my second batch the same way, and it only went up to the first curve of the ferment bottle.

JMG680 said:

Same thing happend to the second one i brewed, I added a 6th gallon of water by not keeping track correctly. Hope mine comes out as luck as yours.

welcome to the site.

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Welcome aboard and congrats on your first homebrew.

Generally, we like to have between 5.25 and 5.5 gallons of wort. Not due to evaporation, but due to the yeast sediment (trub) that will develop as the yeast ferment and multiply. We like to leave that bit behind in the fermenter.

When you start brewing bigger beers (higher gravity), you'll want to rig a blow off tube.

Welcome