My first brew (with pics)

Hello all,

First off, thanks for all the information contained in this forum. It's a terrific resource that encouraged me to take the brewing plunge.

My first brew day was making an America IPA with Chinook and Citra hops. I enlisted the support of two experienced mash tun type brewers to help things go smoothly. I ended up with 12 litres in the fermentor with a 75% brew house efficiency. The OG was 1.061 so it should be a 6.4% ABV beer. I'm currently deciding whether to dry hop it in the primary once the yeast calms down.

I'm using a plastic tub with water and a tropical fish tank heater to keep the beer around 18.5C. There's a nice head of yeast on it now, so I'm hopeful for a good end product.

I followed the checklist here but still made a few mistakes:

• Temperature dropped in the mash in between the 40min and 70m check. I had a cake rack in the kettle, so it was ok to turn the heat on
  I misjudged the amount of space required once you add the grains. So kept some water aside in a pot which I poured over the grain bag after the mash
  My pot lid had wort on it underneath which split on the stovetop. That took ages to clean off with baking soda and vinegar. I also ran out of kitchen roll
  Crocodile clips could of held things in place to save me holding them

Pics, or it didn't happen!

In the Mash:
3Kg Pale Malt
160g of Crystal 60
20 Litres of water

In the Boil:
Chinook: 12g at 60m, 10g at 15m.
Citra: 10g at 15m 20g at 5m, 20g at 0m
Irish Moss at 15m

Chill: Using a wort chiller to go from 100C to 20C in 10 minutes

I added this just before the flavour hops so I could wait for the wort temperature to get back to boiling.

For moving to the FV I just poured it in through a sieve and the BIAB bag. It came out pretty clear.

Pitching: In a water bath with temperature controlling heater, keeping the 12L around 18-19C

Yeast Action: 36 hours later the yeast is doing it's thing

Thanks everyone,
Joe.

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Today I dry hopped, took a hydrometer reading and sampled the beer.

Dry hopping with 10g Citra. Using a hopsock to allow me to easily remove the hops later on

I'm dry hopping in the primary. It's been bubbling away for seven days now. When I removed the lid you could hear the CO2 escaping.

I sanitized a beer thief, trial jar and hydrometer and took a measurement. It came out around 1.020 which is higher than I'd hoped. I wonder if it's still going to eat away to get to 1.011

I didn't want to put the beer back in, so I tried it out. It's very piney and citrusy aroma with a long piney finish. Obviously flat at this point but I'm really looking forward to trying it out in 3 weeks time.

I'm bottling the beer next weekend, so I'll post pictures of that on here too.

Thanks for the responses everyone.

@Mad_Scientist

I went around my house looking for a room with a consistent temperature. Under my stairs seemed to be 16-19C all day round. I still wanted to control the temperature a bit better than that. So I went and bought a storage container big enough to contain my 15 Litre fermentation bucket.

Tropical Fish heaters are sold according to how many gallons of water you want to heat. Which is pretty convenient.

I first fill the container up with water at the desired temperature, then add the bucket. I add or remove water so the amount in the larger container is at the same height as the wort in the bucket. Otherwise the FV moves around. Then I pitch the yeast.

I heard messing up the fermentation is a common beginner mistake. I didn't want to get caught out there.

@Mally

Interesting about adding the Irish Moss at 5 instead of 15. I was just followed the packaging instructions. I'll read up more about that and change my future brews. Thanks for the tip.

@PistolPatch

I was paranoid about burning my brand new, exact-dimensions BIAB bag. So I was stirring while heating despite the cake rack. I had read in the PDF guide on here that you should do that. I was unaware that the reasoning was to protect the grain bed, rather than the bag itself. So thanks for letting me know about that.

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Today was bottling day. The FG was 1.013, pretty close to the expected 1.010

I started off by sterilizing everything in sight

Then got everything together for a group shot

For sanitizing the bottles I'm using a Vinator with Starsan. It fires the solution into the bottle cleaning them quickly

The bottles were dried out on a xmas tree for bottles. I put the bottle caps into the Vinator so they could soak in the StarSan.

I prepared 73g of caster sugar in boiled water to reach a 2.5 volume CO2 level required for the style

Using an auto-siphon the beer was transferred from the fermentation bucket into the bottling bucket, adding the sugar after the siphon started.

While cleaning the empty fermentation bucket, I noticed it had a thick layer of yeast at the bottom. I suppose this is what people call the 'yeast cake'?

Now I moved around the bucket and some chairs to get ready for bottling. My bottling bucket has a spigot which takes a bottling wand. I've got a small table and a chair to make this easy on my back.

I filled the bottles in batches of 6 then left a bottle cap on top.

After using a capper to get the caps on. I took a picture full of pride for the final product.

I made this.

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