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Adventures in Homebrewing Pt 2

I finally made the time tonight to bottle my first homebrew, and it turned out to be a bit more time consuming and involved than I expected. I think it went well overall, but if even one of those bottles is untainted it’ll be a miracle.

Let me be clear, I think it went pretty well for my first time, and I enjoyed the process, but there are a few things I’m going to change next time around.

Firstly, I’ll be a little better organized. There was a lot of shuffling around during crucial moments. I don’t have a lot of counter space and once everything is sterilized you really want to touch and move it around as little as possible. It’s safe to say I got myself a little overwhelmed at first trying to find places to set hard tubes and soft tubes and clamps that that were in my kit, most of which I didn’t actually need. I had to restart my siphon four times during the transfer from fermentation to bottling bucket and I’m afraid that there was too much touching of hands, sink, counter and tap water involved to remain sterile, but only time will tell. I am really grateful to this Make: Online post and homebrewingvideo.com for the video on starting a siphon.

Secondly, I’ll never use bleach as my sanitizer again. The guy at my homebrew store talked me out of buying one of the no-rinse sanitizers and said that bleach is the easiest and cheapest way to go. Well, having to rinse everything so thoroughly to get the bleach off after sanitation just makes me feel that I defeated the purpose. Plus, my hands smell like bleach now, which is really bothering me.

Finally, I’ll make sure that I take the labels off of my recycled bottles long before bottling day. Labels are a bitch to get off even with soaking. Some of them popped right off, but most bottles took several minutes of intense work to get clean. In any case, I’ll make sure that next time my bottles are ready before hand. This go around about half of my bottles are label-less. The rest still retain the symbol of their former lives. Hopefully it won’t make me feel too bad when I’m drinking my porter and thinking “man, I wish this really was an Arrogant Bastard.”

As for the beer itself, it tasted surprisingly good for a flat, warm beer. I am really pleased that it survived the first half of the process and actually tastes like something I would drink. If the bottle conditioning goes well then I think I’ll have a passable porter - definitely a win for my first go. The final gravity came to 1.016, which, after accounting for a slight calculation error in the original gravity due to temperature (should have been 1.046), puts the final porter at ~3.93% alcohol. That’s pretty weak, but still beer. I’ll need to figure out how to get it bit higher for next time.

Speaking of which, I’m already pretty excited about making my next brew. This experience has been a good one and I’m thinking my next try will be an IPA. I got quite a few in our company beer trade last week, so they’re on my mind, but who knows, that may change before I get to the store again. One thing’s for sure though.. I’m going to make that guy sell me some Star-San whether he wants to or not.