fermentation friday: brewday joys & stresses
I’m hopping on the homebrew-blog-talk-bandwagon here and throwing in my own $0.02 about the biggest joys and stresses of brewday. Granted I’ve had ONE brewday total to date so maybe this is more like my own $0.002…maybe this remind the veterans of their first time, oh yeah. You can check out more homebrewer’s thoughts at TedBrews and Beer Bits 2.
Joys
- Beer Deconstruction: Have you ever tasted malt? Smelled hops? Drank warm sweet wort? Drinking finished beer is one thing, but examining and fondling each ingredient for the first time was a wondrous experience. It brings tremendous perspective to the already beloved final product.
- Starting the boil: Every thing is cleaned? All cold side equipment is sterilized? All my ingredients are weighed and ready? Then f%$# yeah lets get this boil started! Turning on the burners (or electric warmers, which aren’t as romantic) means ~60 minutes of relaxed stirring, smelling wort and drinking your brewbeer (the cold one you have to drink while making beer, isn’t it brewlaw?).
Stresses
- LME IS STICKY: I was warned but…ARRRRRRRRRRRRG! Next time, I’ll have this on lockdown.
- Filtering: I had all sorts of worries about filtering trub/hopcrud from my first beer. First, I thought putting my hops in a bag would limit the larger particulates – but the other half of my brain got nervous about limiting the contact with the wort. Secondly, cheesecloth filter worked great as an abstract boat, floating about the incoming cooled wort, resulting in a chunky mess swirling around the fermenter. In the end, I let gravity do it’s thing and my beer looks lovely sitting in the secondary. OVERALL WARM AND FUZZY MORAL OF THE STORY: RDWHAHB; most mistakes can be fixed with a little engineering or time and if they can’t then call them features.
Hey, who you callin’ old timer? ;-) Indeed it does take me back. I’m still doing extract too.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:47 pm