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Today the Mr. Beer West Coast Pale Ale I bottled as my first homebrew hit a solid two weeks in bottles. While that seems to be the lower limit of time a beer ought to spend bottle conditioning, I just couldn’t wait any longer.

Pssshhhh. The sound of gas rushing out of a bottle greeted me when I removed the shiny cap I’d crimped in place two weeks ago. At least I got the priming syrup right, and the beer was sufficiently carbonated. Pouring into a glass revealed great clarity, and a nice aroma. A head did form, but head retention was practically non-existent. As I’ve poured many a beer in to these glasses and been met with plenty of retention, I’ll go out on a limb and say the proteins required for head retention just weren’t there.

As for taste, you can taste the sweetness of the malt over any sort of hops Mr. Beer added to their hopped malt extract. For a beer with the words pale ale in the name, there was no hop bite at all. Drinkable? Indeed, but it’s not a recipe I’m likely to make again.

First Homebrew

January 8, 2010, I blogged about the start of my first home-brew experience. Today, I continue that tale with the bottling of my very first home-brewed beer. I had intended to wait longer in fermentation, but another hydrometer reading today showed no change from my last reading several days go. Time to bottle.

Since I will ultimately move up to larger 5gal batches, I decided to make another trip to DeFalco’s for a few more odds and ends. While I already had Iodophor for sanitizing my equipment, I did not yet have any way to dry my bottles after cleaning and sanitizing. I also lacked any way to really get a smooth, and controlled, flow of beer into my bottles to avoid aeration. In my last post, I really had no concept of how important any of that is to the final product. Fortunately, I spent about 10 hours in my truck driving across Texas and listening to Brew Strong podcasts. It all makes much more sense now. A bottling bucket, a bottle filler with some tubing, and a bottle tree came home with me.

Bottle capper and sanitized bottles

When I finally got home, it was time to clean and sanitize my equipment and working area. I would hate to make it this far only to infect my beer and have wasted my time. Iodophor should be used at a concentration of 12.5ppm for rinse-free sanitization. That translates to .50 fl. oz. per 5gal of water. Since I do not have much to sanitize, and did not feel like wasting that much solution, I made 2.5gal of solution to sanitize my bottles, the bottle tree, my caps, bottle brush, bottling bucket, bottle filler and hose. About a quart of the solution went into a cleaned and sanitized spray bottle so I could sanitize the outer surfaces of everything as well as the inner surfaces.

Once all of that was done, I made my priming solution. For a 5gal batch I would boil .75 cups of dextrose in 2 cups of water. I cut this in half for my 2.5gal batch, and added it to my sanitized bottling bucket. It was finally time to pour my beer into the bottling bucket, on top of my priming solution. This is when I wished I had gone ahead and purchased a racking cane and siphoning tube. Pouring, with any kind of control, 2.5gal of beer through the mostly useless tap on the front of a Mr. Beer brew-keg was an exercise in patience to say the least. It took forever, and exposed my beer to more air than I would have liked. Now I know. I will use a racking cane next time, for sure.

the bottom of the fermenter

The Beer

Bottling Bucket with my beer inside

My first beer, bottled.

Bottling went quite smoothly. My batch filled 16 12oz glass bottles, plus half another 12oz bottle and two ~33oz plastic bottles. I had my Dad tilt the bottling bucket towards the valve for me so I could get most of the beer out. In the end, only about half a pint was left behind. I can live with that. In a few days, I will check the two plastic bottles and see if they have hardened from carbonation at all. If I managed to make it through this whole process without screwing something up, I will be quite happy. Doubly so if the beer is drinkable.

Twelve days ago, I started brewing my own beer. Today, I made a stop at DeFalco’s Home Wine & Beer Supplies to pick up a few things I needed to finalize this brewing project. Lacking a hydrometer was making it pretty impossible to know if fermentation had halted or not, so that was number one on my list. I also picked up a floating thermometer, a bottle of Iodophor for sanitizing my equipment, a bottle brush, a case of 12oz. bottles, a few hundred bottle caps, a bottle capper, and a packet of priming sugar (dextrose).

Assorted brewing supplies

When I got home from DeFalco’s, I prepared to take the first sample of my West Coast Pale Ale from my Mr. Beer brew keg. Surprisingly enough, what poured out looked, smelled, and even tasted a lot like beer. It may have been a bit on the sweet side, but I am not complaining right now. Once carbonated, it will definitely pass as drinkable in my book.

First sample, straight from the brew keg

The hydrometer reads right around 1.010 for the specific gravity right now, at 72°F. According to the handy dandy sheet that came with the hydrometer to correct for temperature I add .002. So we’ll call my reading today 1.012. Since I did not have this instrument when I actually made the wort, I have no earthly idea what the original gravity was. That being the case, I will hold off another few days and take a reading again. If nothing has changed, I am going to start bottling. I’ve not quite decided exactly how I plan on doing the priming part but I’m sure I’ll get at least 30 different suggestions before that time comes!

Hydrometer reading

I think an Apfelwein is likely to be the next thing my Mr. Beer ferments, while I start gathering the equipment required to step up to 5 gallon all-grain batches of beer. This is definitely a lot of fun, and if the result is drinkable beer, I am all for it.

This is getting way ahead of myself, since my first brew is only 46hrs into primary fermentation, but that has never stopped me before. Anyhow, I ultimately want to be able to do all-grain brews. There’s nothing that would keep me from doing extract brews in an all-grain setup, I’d just use less of the equipment on the bench. Sounds like a deal to me.

After reading countless threads over at HomeBrewTalk.com, I came up with an idea or three for my own setup. Gravity is cheapest to construct, since no pumps are involved. Probably easier to sanitize too. The problem I see is vertical height. I’d like to be able to do everything without a ladder, or having several gallons of very hot water above my head. A single tier system looks awesome, but requires a few pumps and valves. These are not cheap, and present some hurdles in the sanitizing realm. I’m sure sanitizing is not all that difficult, since a ton of people brew a ton of beer in their very own single tier systems, so I am not too concerned about introducing a pump, or valves, to my setup. Money is the big issue here.

What I’ve come up with is a two tier system, with the HLT (hot liquor tank) and MLT (Mash/Lauter Tun) on the upper tier, and the brew kettle on the lower tier. I plan to use one pump, with a manifold on the intake and output to let me switch between input/output destinations. One input will pump from the HLT and output to the MLT. I’ll valve the HLT input shut, and open the MLT input to circulate until sparging time. Gravity will feed the post-sparge sweet wort into the brew kettle, which will input into the pump again for a trip through a crossflow cooler and into a carboy for the yeast pitch and primary fermentation.

I’ve not yet made enough progress in Google Sketchup, a few of its features are driving me batty, to show all the components just yet. What I do have, is below.

Rough Draft

Rough Draft

Any feedback from folks that have done this before is definitely welcome.

Most everyone that reads this even semi-regularly is fully aware that I like beer, a lot. My digital beer wall is rather incomplete right now; I have more than 15 new beers to add to the collection, I just have not made my way to setting up the lightbox and taking more photos. Eventually, I will re-shoot everything anyway.

So, now that we have established that I enjoy beer I’ll introduce the new hobby. Brewing my own beer. Countless hours inside The Ginger Man in Austin, Texas, put me in contact with brewers and other beer enthusiasts in Central Texas. When I moved to Houston, one of the first beer-related events I attended was a release-party of sorts for the Saint Arnold Divine Reserve 8. I was surrounded by home-brewing beer fiends. The creator of the Divine Reserve 8 was seated directly behind me. Hearing the men that made the recipes for, and brewed, the beers I loved sparked something inside me.

For months, I did not really do anything about this spark. The fuel was added when I stumbled into a thread on my favorite motorcycling forum about brewing one’s own beer. Fuel plus spark equals a full blown fire. Fortunately for me, my parents took note of all the talk about brewing my own beer and got me a Mr. Beer kit. At this very moment, I have a 2.5 gallon batch of their West Coast Pale Ale fermenting in my closet.

Something tells me as I read, and learn, more about brewing beer I will end up with an inordinate amount of equipment. My goal? Creating my own Belgian Tripel ale.