First brew under my belt

After waiting nearly a month (it seemed so much longer) I've finally got my first brew day under my belt!

It all went pretty smoothly, but I don't think I realized just how long it would take...about 4 hours start to finish.

I've discovered my stove (gas) just isn't quite powerful enough. It took nearly an hour to get 5 gallons up above 200 degrees. I eventually moved it over two burners because I couldn't quite get the boil going with one. I'm not sure why, but even with two burners, it didn't seem to get a very solid rolling boil, but it did keep it boiling the whole time.

I did manage to not take into account the amount of water that would boil off. When I got it all into the fermenter I only had 4.5 gallons. At that point I wasn't quite feeling like boiling more water and adding it, so I just let it be off. It means I overshot my OG by half a dozen points (recipe called for 1.050-1.054 and I hit 1.059)

I've got to give a ton of thanks to everyone who's come before me and posted here. Thanks to all the helpful threads here, I was able to sit back, relax, and have a (craft) brew, and just let it play out. There were a few spots that probably would have been more stressful if it weren't for all the great advice I've read over the past few weeks.

Now to see if I can have the patience to wait 6+ weeks for it to be ready!

congrats

I hope it ends up awesome!

Ok, my one real frustration is trying to keep my temps down low enough. I'm now holding around 69 and slowly dropping. (This kit used the San Francisco Lager yeast which wants 60-65)

I was happily surprised to see the airlock bubbling very slowly when I went to add ice bottles to the bucket earlier, after only 16 hours or so.

rsquared said:

I did manage to not take into account the amount of water that would boil off. When I got it all into the fermenter I only had 4.5 gallons. At that point I wasn't quite feeling like boiling more water and adding it, so I just let it be off. It means I overshot my OG by half a dozen points (recipe called for 1.050-1.054 and I hit 1.059)

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I'm not the authority on matters homebrew, but for what it's worth, I top off with unboiled tapwater, and of the two brews I have seen as they ferment (one's in a carboy, the other is in a pale I opened to take a gravity reading), neither has grown any nasties yet. I just make sure to clean and sanitize the vessel from which I'm pouring the top-off water.