The New Brew

Sometimes when I do something I jump in feet first, well ok I always do that, and I did it this time too. Well when you do that, you get so excited and moving so fast that you make mistakes. At work we say that if you're not making mistakes than you're not doing anything and that's true but usually I do enough research to minimize the mistakes. Not this time, this time I jumped the gun. The mistake came while making the decision on the carboy. My friend was at the brew store buying a carboy and I told him it would be ok to get a 3 gallon carboy, I was wrong. Yeah it works, and it did work for the first batch of beer but it wasn't enough. So I was going to buy another carboy, a 5 gallon carboy... Then I thought about it, and decided that I needed to do more research before I buy it. So I did the research and I found out that I don't really need to spend a ton of money on the carboy when I can buy two fermenting buckets and, from what I read, it will turn out exactly the same. Then, I went to the online brew store to buy one when I realized all it is is a food grade bucket with a hole drilled in the lid and a gromet installed. This would have cost me about $18 dollars a piece, or I could go to Lowes and make the fermenting buckets for about $6.50 a piece. That's what it would have cost me, but it cost me an extra $1.50 because I drilled the wrong size hole for the gromet. It happens.

After getting everything ready and the stuff showing up in the mail it was time for another brew day. As I said the last time this needs to be done on a day when you don't have to worry about working the next day, this way you can enjoy a few beers and not have to be in a rush. We did take our time, and we had a 6 pack of our first beer left over to drink while we were brewing. I think that I'll try to turn this into a brew day tradition. There's something gratifing about drinking your own beer while working on the next batch. Below is the last of the Centennial Blonde.

So this time we did a kit. The first time we did a recipie and it turned out great, the main difference between this batch and the last was that last time we used powdered malt and this time it was a syurup. Oh, and last time we had to add dextrine to give body to the beer.

The Wort

The Fermentor

Chilling The Wort