A Home Brewing Beginning

Our friend Paul McCabe and his family make their own wine each year. A while back we went over to watch them "rack" the wine. To rack simply means to transfer containers. We even got to taste a little. We'd always talked about how much fun it would be to do it ourselves, but once we saw (and tasted!) it, we were hooked.
We visited our local home brew supply shop and looked at equipment kits. We had a tough decision to make though. Wine or beer? Which did we want to make? We decided on beer since we thought we might drink more beer.
Plopped down some money on our kit and bought an ingredient kit to go along with it and off we went. Clueless brewers!
A week or so later we decided we'd dive into our first home brew experience. We got all the equipment we needed (that wasn't included in the kit we purchased) and laid everything out on the kitchen table. The kit instructions were very clear and we felt ready to go. We washed and sanitized the necessary equipment and started our big pot of water. We steeped our grains, monitored temperature, added our malt extracts and hops. We waited for it to boil. And we waited. Wow, we waited. I have to admit, we went a little cheap on the stock pot. My engineer realized that the pot was probably a little warped on the bottom and wasn't contacting our flat, ceramic burner very well. Hmmm, maybe we should have bought a sturdier pot. So much for saving money! Anyway, we finally made it through the boil and alas, we had wort! Had to cool the pot of wort down in the kitchen sink before we could transfer it to the primary fermenter and then "pitch" the yeast right on top. We took a specific gravity reading and put a plastic airlock in the small hole on top of the bucket (to allow carbon dioxide to leave and to keep oxygen from getting in) and about 24 hours later, our wort was slowly turning into beer! Our Summer Ale was in the making!
It was a few days later that fermentation began to slow down. You can tell this is happening because there are fewer bubbles in the airlock. At that point, we racked the beer into a five gallon glass carboy. In order to minimize transferring sediment, we used a siphon hose with an anti-sediment tip and were very careful during the process. It smelled like beer, it looked like beer--we were excited! It had only been a few days!
We kept the beer in the secondary until fermentation was definitely complete. We brought the carboy out to the kitchen in preparation for bottling when I noticed some white "floating" patches on top. I was devastated because I thought we had mold growing on our beer! But, how could that be? We were super careful when we sanitized. I mean, come on--I'm a super mega germ-a-phobe--seriously mold?! I went online and visited a few home brew forums and shared the information with Paul. We concluded that it was not mold, but rather what are called "yeast rafts" that sometimes form on top of the beer. It's basically just patches of yeast products/bubbles, etc that have collected there. Phew!! So, convinced that we didn't have to toss the beer, we proceeded with bottling. We washed and sanitized all necessary equipment for bottling. The beer was racked into a bottling bucket and corn sugar was dissolved in boiling water and added to the beer to aid in carbonation once bottled. Paul and I both took turns operating the spigot and it took us a few minutes before we got the hang of it. We bottled and capped our beer and wound up with 44 bottles! We boxed it up and kept it in a dark place for several weeks before we chilled a few in the fridge and we were extremely anxious to try it! Finally, we opened a bottle and heard the "pssst" sound of successful carbonation and slowly poured out the contents into a glass. The suspense was killing us! A taste and the verdict? We liked it! When we initially selected our ingredient kit, we decided to go with something we thought we'd both like. I don't tolerate bitter very well, so I knew I would like something that wasn't overly bitter or super hoppy. In beer, bitterness units are measured in IBU's (international bittering units). The higher the number, the more bitter the beer. This Summer Ale had an IBU of 18-20 which is quite low. Surprised and satisfied with our work, we enjoyed our first home brew creation! And, we realized that this was only the beginning!


Summer Ale