My first "real" batch

So, today was the first real batch of beer I brewed.

The instructions are pretty straight forward. Sanitize your equipment, dissolve the dextrose, boil the water, add the malt, pour into brew keg with cold water, top of keg, add yeast, stir, wait, stir, close and wait a week.

And so I did.

Sanitizing essentially means you are making sure there are no stray bacteria which may cause tastes you didn't expect. Since the entire process of brewing and fermenting takes place at the biological level, you have to know that any stray bacteria has the opportunity to act on the sugars and yeast by-products to create a flavor you don't want in your beer. In fact, the warm wet yeasty environment just BEGS for mold and mildew... but a sanitized brew keg and utensils pretty much eliminates all that.

After sanitizing the measuring cup and stirring spoon for the required ten minutes, I began blending the dextrose into the water. What a pain... they say "slowly" and so I think slowly is like slowing adding eggs to your cake batter. What they mean is if you add it too quickly that it clumps up and becomes a wierd little crystalline mess. So stir, and stir and stir and stir. What they SHOULD do in this kit (Mr. Beer) is give you an alternative booster material, such as pure white sugar or something else that doesn't require all that stirring. But you stir. And stir. And add, and stir, and add, and stir. It does all eventually dissolve.

After the dextrose is dissolved, you are going to boil the sugar water. Boiling does two things. First, it sanitizes the water (in case your water has bugs in it), and it makes mixing the malt into the water easier.

Wort - what a word, huh? Sounds like something you need Compound W for, doesn't it? Well, a wort is the combined aspects of water, malt and other fermentables that is added to the fermenter. The wort usually smells like strong beer... which is pleasant as far as I'm concerned.

Alright, so the water boils and I take it off the stove. I had to open the can of malt with my can opener, that did NOT get sanitized because it hangs from under the counter and is electric and I can't put it into the sanitizing solution. So my hope is that it doesn't have any really nasty bacteria on it to infect my brew.

I have previously warmed the can to make it easier to pour the malt out and into the boiling water. But I still need to stick the spoon (sanitized AND boiled) into the can to get the stuff that sticks inside. Be prepared here, as the malt is quite sticky and stringy (fine web-like strings). Once you get it all into the water, you stir some more. Not as much as with the dextrose, but stirring is stirring, right?

I had added a gallon of cold water into my brew keg, and now pour the wort (the stuff in the pan that I boiled on the stove then added the malt to) into the brew keg. Slowly here, since the keg opening can be tricky if the wort runs down the side of the pan. Just be careful. I thought about using a funnel, but didn't have one handy.

Once everything is in there, I topped it off with water to the 2.5 gallon mark and closed it up. Whew, I thought, this isn't so hard.

The instructions say to keep your keg in a location that is 68 degrees or better. So I figured sitting it near the fridge would work out, since heat from the condensor would be sufficient. I also put a thermometer nearby to see how warm/cold it was getting. It actually stayed closer to 65, but that probably wasn't going to kill it.

The next day I kept trying to see what was going on. I hated that they made the brew keg a deep brown clear plastic. Why make it clear at all if you're going to make it brown? I had to shine a flashlight into the keg if I wanted to see any activity. And when I did there was foam, about 1/4" inch thick, all along the top. I would later learn that is exactly what is supposed to happen.

So I waited.

My first batch was in the fermentor. :)