Many years ago, when my wife and I were getting ready to refinish the wood floors in our house, we asked several people whether they had ever done that. The answer was often, “Yes, once.”
I would guess is that you could ask homebrewers, “Have you ever bottled your beer,” and the answer would be the same. Many of you keg your beers, and after one bottling session, I fully understand why. It’s a lot of work. But all in all, my first shot at it went swimmingly.
Most of the labor was in cleaning the bottles. Between scrubbing the insides and scraping off some Old Milwaukee labels, it took a couple hours of standing in front of the sink.
Now, I should have been completely prepared before I started, but ignorance saved me from being too cautious. When I started cleaning my bottles, I found that my brush fit inside the necks of some but not others. So having just begun, I had to stop and run around town to find another brush.
Another area of my ignorance was priming sugar, but after posting a question on the club’s Facebook page, I soon had some helpful answers about that, including a link to a calculator (WWW.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator/)from Bob. O. There was also a dark haze around my knowledge of sanitizers, which also was cleared up on Facebook. Continue reading →

I don’t take instructions well. That’s probably not a good thing for a first-time home brewer. We’ll find out when my first batch is done.
But right now, it’s bubbling away happily in my basement. I can only assume that’s because the yeast is doing its job on the sugars, but who knows, it could be bubbling because mice are swimming around in it.
I entered my first brew session, this was March 22, with a serious misconception: I thought the club had a loaner kit available, and before I sank a bunch of money into my tentative brewing hobby, I was going to try it once or twice with the club’s kit. Turns out that rather than having the whole kit and kaboodle, which I think is an appropriate term here, it was just the burner and the pot.
Bob C. also threw in a nifty chiller, one of his spoons and a funnel. He also set me up with my first recipe, a pale ale.
Then I scrambled around town looking for the rest of the kit, most of which I picked up from Staple and Spice. I also had to get some water bottles so I could buy clean water.
My first departure from Bob’s wise counsel was to decide, a la John Palmer (http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html), to cook it on my stovetop and split the boil in two. There’s a term for that, and I could look it up, but. … So that means I boiled up a couple gallons of water and put it in the sanitized fermenter (a plastic one). I learned from Bobs Cronin and Oliver why that wasn’t ideal, but that didn’t stop me from doing it. Why? See above about instructions. Continue reading →