First boil tomorrow

[Spaceball1]

Ok, I received my kit from AHS yesterday and plan to do my first boil tomorrow evening. I've watched the "HomebrewingVideo" series on Youtube, I watched the "Good Eats" episode, I read the first chapter of "How to Brew" a few times, and I read the "how to" post in this forum..

Being the nerd that I sometimes am, I wrote out a little plan to follow so that I'm using my time efficiently and not having to go back & re-wash, re-heat, or re-sanitize things..

A few questions I had as I thought through my plan...

A) I plan to use store-bought drinking water for my wort. Do I need to pre-boil it or is it ok to just use it out of the bottle? (I'll sanitize the spigots before pouring..)

B) I'm pretty sure that my sanitizing powder is rinse-free. Is it a bad idea to give a brief rinse anyway? (With drinking water of course)..

 

[JayJitsu]

If you are going to be boiling the water I don't really see a need to sanitize the spigot. Also, preboiling is not necessary.

 

[sketerbuck]

how many gallons are you boiling

 

[Yooper]

No need to boil bottled water.

What kind of sanitizer is it? If it says no-rinse, it's just find to not rinse it. Remember, it only sanitizes while it's in contact with the object, so if you rinse the sanitizer off, it's not able to do its job.

Having a plan is a great idea! It should be fun for you. Good luck!

 

[Spaceball1]

5 gallons total volume. 3 gallon boil, 2 gallon mix water

The sanitizer is BrewVint Cleanitizer. It says no rinse.. Maybe I'm just OCD or something. It just bugs me to think that there will be sanitizer in my finished brew...

 

[Spaceball1]

Another question..

All of the instructions that I've seen/read are a bit different when it comes to rapidly cooling the wort, adding it to the fermentor & pitching the yeast.

My plan is to
1) have 2 gallons of drinking water cooling off in the fridge while I'm working
2) move the hot brew pot into a large ice chest full of ice.
3) As the wort cools, pour the refrigerated drinking water into the fermentor
4) Check the temperature of the cool water & calculate the temp that the wort needs to be so that they'll average out to pitching temperature. (example: if 2 gallons of top off water are 55, then 3 gal of hot wort needs to be at 96 so that the full 5 gallons average out to 80)
5) check temperature of wort in fermenter. if it's is right, pitch yeast (i will be using dry yeast, it's instructions say no need to hydrate)
6) aerate inside fermenter, pull out sample for satellite fermentation then button it up..

Opinions?

 

[arxix]

If your brew pot has some extra room just add some cold water to that when you are trying to cool it down. I have a 5gal brew pot and if I have a 2.5gal boil, I will add at least a gallon of cold bottled water right to it to speed the cooling. This way I can normally get it down to 80deg in about 10min with an ice bath.

 

[Spaceball1]

Two more questions..

After I boil tonight, I'm going to set the fermenter in an ice chest with some water & ice packets. From what I read, target temp for ale fermentation is 65 and it will generate some warmth of it's own. So what should my target temperature be for the water in the ice chest? 60?

Second.. Temps in my house are typically 68-75 while we're home. I don't think it'll be too much trouble to keep my cooling water at 60 (or whatever) with those temps. However, we're going out of town Dec 23rd-27th (12 days from now). By that time, the early stages of primary should be complete. How important is temperature after that? I could set the A/C in my house to make sure ambient temp doesn't get above 75. Is that too warm? What if we get a cold snap and temps in the house hit 60?

I do have a secondary that I could use, but based on what I've read here I was just planning on doing primary for 3-4 weeks.

 

[dale1038]

Things will be mostly finished by the 23rd, I wouldn't sweat it. You don't really want it to get cold (ie 60), but it wouldn't be the end of the world either. Room temp would be good. 75 is not too much imo after 12 days. I would rather finish warm.

I don't remember what I used to put the water at for ice baths. I think I just adjusted according to my therm on the bottle. I'm sure you could search it. Looks like you have a good plan, just have fun with it.

 

[Spaceball1]

Ok.. Things went pretty well. Only two problems..

1) It takes a LONG time to boil on my stove and I had to keep the lid on the pot most of the time to keep the boil going. This was especially annoying since I had to condition my brand new aluminum pot. I applied heat to start conditioning around 5:30. Finished washing up around 1:30am.. Yikes..

2) When the boil was done, it was late and I was in a hurry. I goofed up and poured the hot wort into the fermentor instead of cooling it off in an icebath first. Oops.. I started to cool inside the fermentor, but there didn't seem to be much activity with the ice, so I poured everything back into the pot and then put the pot in the ice bath. I had it at pitching temp in about 15 minutes.

The good news is that my OSG reading was 100% perfect. Absolutely spot on at 1.055.

Keeping stuff sanitized was easy. I bought one of those plastic busboy tubs that they use at resturaunts. After I initially mixed sanitizer solution in the fermentor, I transferred it to this container. That worked out very well. Everything fit in there. When I needed it, I grabbed it and wiped with a clean paper towel. When I was done, I put it back in the tub.

The 12 hour mark is getting pretty close, hopefully I'll see some activity pretty quick..

I'll try to post a few pics later..

 

[xcdude]

Which kit did you get?

 

[Spaceball1]

NXNW Amber Ale...

My wife & I ate there a few weeks ago and really liked their brews..

 

[Spaceball1]

Ahhh.. the sweet gurgle of yeast flatulence...

Bubble away boys..

 

[DavidSteel]

Keep in mind: the episode on brewing from Good Eats was an absolute menace. I love Alton Brown but he publicly apologized about that episode for how off it was.

 

[Spaceball1]

Yeah, that episode was somewhat different that the other stuff I read. On the other hand, actually seeing how simple the process is gave me the final push to get going with it..

Really good activity in the airlock this morning...

I've been keeping the bathwater at 59-63. I think that the bubbles might have been a little slow to get started because the water was on the cool side (low 50's) to begin with...

 

[Spaceball1]

Well, I bottled last night.

I had nice krausen residue and a good yeast cake on the bottom. The beer smelled great (my house did too). It tasted ok (for not being carbed). Maybe a touch watery, so we'll see how it does after a couple of weeks in the bottles.

I measured final gravity, and I *think* that it's right on target but I don't remember for sure (need to find my instructions). I figure that if it's not done after more than 4 weeks in primary, then I've got bigger problems.

Sanitizing all of those bottles sucks.

Auto-siphon is bit hard to use.

Fortunately, I'll be out of town from tomorrow thru the 22nd, so I won't be tempted to break into the bottles too quickly. I wish I had one more day, then I could get batch #2 going.