Weezknight
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2009
- Messages
- 333
- Reaction score
- 2
Well with all of the help provided by everyone here and Mr. Papazian I got through my first brew day!
I put together an Irish Red recipe and everything seemed to go well. My electric stove got 3 gallons of water to 210F in about 45 minutes and it stayed right there, so I had a pretty good boil, without having to worry about boilover. When it came time to cool the wort, my friend and I used the ice bath method. We filled my sink with about an inch of cold water, put the kettle in and surrounded it with ice. We rotated the ice/water out about 3 times and had the wort cooled to about 68-70 degrees in about 25 minutes!
The only things I have worried slightly about are:
1) I may have got some sanitizer in my wort. When using my baster to obtain my sample it wasn't completely dry and I watched as some of the Star-San went into the wort. Oh well hopefully it's okay since it was diluted (1 oz to 5 gallons of water)! I also did notice the strainer was still wet with sanitizer too when I used it.
2) I pitched the yeast at 68F and it's been hovering between 66-68 for the first 24 hours or so. I'm a little worried that fermentation will be slow to start, but there really isn't a warmer place in the house. Today the temps are dropping back into the 40's so I have some blankets around the bucket.
3) Somewhere along the way I ended up short on my volumes and I noticed that I only ended up with about 4.5 to 4.75 US Gallons. I'm not too concerned about it, but I guess I'll have to watch how much priming sugar I use at bottling time.
Other than those worries everything else went great. Hit my OG at 1.044, which I expected using extract, but it still made me feel good!
Thanks to everyone here, I don't know how smoothly things would've went if I hadn't read all these threads about staying...RELAXED!
I put together an Irish Red recipe and everything seemed to go well. My electric stove got 3 gallons of water to 210F in about 45 minutes and it stayed right there, so I had a pretty good boil, without having to worry about boilover. When it came time to cool the wort, my friend and I used the ice bath method. We filled my sink with about an inch of cold water, put the kettle in and surrounded it with ice. We rotated the ice/water out about 3 times and had the wort cooled to about 68-70 degrees in about 25 minutes!
The only things I have worried slightly about are:
1) I may have got some sanitizer in my wort. When using my baster to obtain my sample it wasn't completely dry and I watched as some of the Star-San went into the wort. Oh well hopefully it's okay since it was diluted (1 oz to 5 gallons of water)! I also did notice the strainer was still wet with sanitizer too when I used it.
2) I pitched the yeast at 68F and it's been hovering between 66-68 for the first 24 hours or so. I'm a little worried that fermentation will be slow to start, but there really isn't a warmer place in the house. Today the temps are dropping back into the 40's so I have some blankets around the bucket.
3) Somewhere along the way I ended up short on my volumes and I noticed that I only ended up with about 4.5 to 4.75 US Gallons. I'm not too concerned about it, but I guess I'll have to watch how much priming sugar I use at bottling time.
Other than those worries everything else went great. Hit my OG at 1.044, which I expected using extract, but it still made me feel good!
Thanks to everyone here, I don't know how smoothly things would've went if I hadn't read all these threads about staying...RELAXED!