Your first time. (if you can remember.)

[unionrdr]

I started making wine at age 15 with a 1 gallon kit pop got & never used. Made wine till about age 30 & got tired of waiting a year to sample my handywork. We agreed I should try my hand at brewing beer in December 2010. Brewed the OS Lager kit that came with my Cooper's micro brew fermenter kit on 1/29/11. Used the Cooper's sanitizer I ordered with it & needed overnight to work. smelled like bleach to me. Still have that jar,as that was the 1st & last time I used it. Ordered Starsan & PBW the next day.
My notes say I got the 1.048 OG @ 30C (86F)! Pitched at 4:32pm. Yikes.
Temp went down to stabilize @ 22C (71.6F). Yeast was def slow being pitched dry,as the 1/2" of foam I saw the night before was gone. Wound up with some fusels & other common off flavors. But I signed up here & learned the differences with brewing beer vs wine making. Cold nights brought temp down to 19C so I figured that was good.
I at least had the sense to let the PET bottles sit from 2/13/11 to 3/6/11. They cleaned up & cleared of chill haze by 3/10/11. Off flavors gone & clear beer even my wife loved.
Wow....lookin at that first brewday in my notebook was like stepping into the way back machine. Rather amusing now that I'm now nit picking partial mash to get it clear,etc.

 

[finsfan]

My first batch was only a month and half ago and was also a mr beer kit. After seeing how easy it was i picked up the equipment for 5 gallon batches. The first one was mexican cervesa and has yet to be tasted carbed but the taste test before bottling was quite enjoyable.

 

[Zoidberg]

OP said something about being cocky but I gotta take the cake on an overly-cocky first brew.

My real first brew was an Classic American Light Hopped LME that came with Mr. beer kit. This one I don't count.

I wanted to make a Dry Irish Stout. Chose to go with a chocolate stout. I had Beersmith and thought, hell I could make up a recipe (I got into brewing for the creativity and art, if you will, of it).

So I found a basic recipe for a Dry Irish Stout and I think I ended up more than doubling the chocolate malt to a lb in a 2 gallon batch (i know right). I steeped this absurd amount of chocolate malt with a half lb of roasted barley then boiled for an hour with dark dme and a little East Kent and Fuggles and added a .5 lb of brown sugar with 5 min left to boost abv.

This stuff turned out light some sort of dark alcoholic molasses but truth be told as bad as this stuff was i was very proud of it and drank every bottle, with help from some of my nicer friends that are now my biggest supporters of my obsession. To make matters worse i thought to add coffee flavoring to half the batch and accidentally put 1 dram of coffee Lorann oils to 1 gallon of stout syrup and it was ungodly dry and roasty.

Thanks for hearing me out on my homebrew tribulations, lucky for me i found these forums shortly after and all batches since have been 100% better