This past week saw a couple more virgin homebrew experiences in our house. First, on Tuesday, I decided it was time to rack the Caribou Slobber to the secondary fermenter. The beer had been in primary for about 2.5 weeks. When I first checked the specific gravity of the fermenting brew (after two weeks), it was reading only 1.020 – somewhat higher than the expected gravity. I stoppered it up again, gave the carboy a good shake, hoping to rouse the yeast, and put it back in the closet. When I checked again, two and three days later, it had leveled out at a reading of 1.014. Racking went off without a hitch – I sanitized everything, and the auto-siphon worked its magic.

With my primary carboy now freed up, I was chompin’ at the bit to get another homebrew batch going, and, as luck would have it, my brother-in-law had given us a Williams Weizenbeer kit a little while back. One thing that I’ve been reading a lot about on the homebrew forums is the benefits of doing a yeast starter. The basic idea is that the liquid yeast smack packs do not actually provide you with a sufficient number of yeast cells for pitching to a mid-to-high gravity beer, despite what the packaging says.

While I know yeast starters are not always necessary, I was intrigued by the idea, and I wanted to give it a try anyway. Propagate my own yeast before brewday? Hell yeah. I smacked the Wyeast pack (3056 Bavarian Wheat Blend) on Friday night, and it was nicely swollen by Sunday morning. I had the good fortune to hit my local homebrew store – Thirsty Brewer – for the first time that afternoon, and I picked up a few last-minute supplies. I brewed up a starter batch on Sunday evening, following John Palmer’s detailed instructions in How to Brew:

• boiled 1/2 cup of plain light DME in 1/2 cup of water for 10 min
• threw in 1/4 tsp yeast nutrient; covered the pot
• cooled it to under 80 F in an ice-bath, in the sink
• poured it into a large, sanitized wine jug
• pitched the contents of the yeast packet
• covered with sanitized foil, shook like crazy, placed in my fermentation closet

I continued to shake the starter jug as often as possible. There was a nice big layer of active yeast sitting on the bottom, by Monday evening. Shaking the jug nearly blew he foil off the top, right out of my hand. Woohoo. Exciting stuff. Up next: homebrew batch #2 – stay tuned…

Two weekends ago, Baltimore was in the midst of the first half of its double-whammy, back-to-back snowstorm attack, and I figured there was no better way to spend an afternoon cooped up inside (with a stir-crazy, but surprisingly cooperative toddler assistant) than to try my hand at homebrewing for the first time.  So, with the snow falling down in enormous clumps outside, I fired up some good tunes, and gathered my brewing equipment, my Caribou Slobber extract kit, a tasty local craft brew, and my wits… and jumped on in.

One of the things that I had been concerned about before starting, was whether or not my stove top would be able to heat 6 gallons of water in a reasonable amount of time. Well, the 10 gallon Megapot I ordered from Austin Homebrew nicely straddles two burners, and the water actually reached 170 degrees (the specialty grains steeping temp) before I was even ready. No worries, though. I crushed the specialty grains, added them to the mesh bag, and had them steeping, in no time.  After steeping, the specialty gains were removed, and the wort was brought up to a boil, before adding the malt extract. US Goldings, Liberty, and Willamette hops were then added according to schedule.

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Alright, now we’re getting somewhere! My relentless reloading of the Fed-Ex package tracking pages today clearly payed off. When I finally made it home this afternoon, I was greeted by five glorious cardboard shipping boxes full of brewing equipment. They were glowing like a stack of gold at Fort Knox, I tell ya. OK, so maybe the boxes were just reflecting the sunshine that was beaming forth from my ear-to-ear grin.

In any event, all of the beer-making goodies that I ordered from Northern Brewer were sitting there waiting to be cracked open. Incredibly fast order processing and delivery from these guys. As I mentioned in my previous post, I may have gone a bit overboard with the amount of research that I did before ordering, but I really think that I managed to strike a good balance between the overall cost, convenience, and future scalability of my rig.

I ended up going with NB’s “Deluxe Beer Starter Kit“, an immersion wort chiller, and an extract recipe. Now that I see the wort chiller up close and personal, I’m thinking I could have most likely built one myself for about half the cost, but… well, this one’s pain-free and ready to go, I suppose. The deluxe kit itself has everything that I could possibly need to get started, plus, it should end up saving me some cash when I eventually want to upgrade to all-grain.

Now, I’m just waiting for the 10 gallon Megapot brew kettle to arrive. This appears to be a fairly popular size, since the few places that carry it all have it listed on back-order. Austin Homebrew assures me that the wait should not be too painfully long, though. This just gives me a little more time to chill, read up, “make some more bottles”, and prep everything for my first brew experience.