My First Homebrew Experience

I recently took up brewing my own beer, and with my second brew day planned for next weekend, I thought I would look back on my first brewing experience and the lessons learned.

My first homebrew was an Irish stout from Midwest Supplies.  The first part of the brewing process was steeping grains in hot water to extract their fermentable sugars.  Then I added malt extract (a concentrated version of the steeped grains) and hops and boiled everything for an hour.  This all went off without a hitch.  After all, it really consisted of putting stuff in hot water and making sure it didn't boil over.

The trouble started when the pot came off the stove.  When the brewer removes the wort (unfermented beer) from the stove, the most important task is to cool the wort quickly.  This causes proteins suspended in the wort to coagulate and fall out of suspension.  Cooling the wort quickly also helps prevent bacterial growth, which is a major threat to beer.

I put the pot full of hot wort into the kitchen sink with ice and water.  Unfortunately, our kitchen sink isn't all that deep, so it can't hold a lot of ice and water to help cool hot wort.  Ideally, the wort should be cooled in a half hour or less.  After an hour of emptying the sink and refilling it with cool water, I grew impatient and moved the wort to my fermenter.

The wort was probably about 90 degrees at this point, which created several problems.  First, when I measured the specific gravity (density relative to water) of the wort, I got an incorrect reading.  Specific gravity is useful to brewers for determining alcohol content of their beer and for knowing when fermentation has ended.  Because specific gravity is a measure of density, it is affected by temperature.  Since I took the reading at a higher than normal temperature, my measurement was off.  Normally, one can correct their reading for temperature if they know how warm or cold their wort is, but I was tired and irritated with the process at this point and didn't care to figure all that out.

Next, because my wort took so long to cool, the suspended proteins never coagulated.  This doesn't affect the flavor of the beer, but it does cause hazy beer, which isn't as visually pleasing.

Finally, I pitched the yeast into the warm wort.  Big mistake.  When ale yeast ferments at temperatures that are too high, they create off-flavors in the beer.  In my case, there is a medicine-like taste to the beer.

So, here I am with hazy beer that tastes a little funny.  But it's my beer.

Next weekend when I brew Hop Scare IPA from Midwest, I'm going to try cooling the pot of wort in a large tub with more ice.  I'm also going to do the cooling outside, where the cool temperature should make the process quicker.  I also ordered some Irish moss to add to the wort.  Irish moss is a seaweed that aids in the coagulation of those proteins, but it doesn't affect the taste of the beer.

As for the brew from a few weeks ago, I am going to let it sit for awhile.  I hear that some of those off-flavors age out of the beer.  Even if it never comes around, I still learned some valuable brewing lessons from my first batch.