My first brew day!

I'm not so new to beer that I don't know how brewing works, but never having brewed a beer myself before, it's like everything I thought I knew flew right out the window. I arrived at Home Brew Mart in a sleepy, half-hungover fug, and let the home brew advisor, Brit, lead me through my first recipe: grain measurement and milling, gathering hops, yeast, and additives.  I can't say that much of what she taught me stuck, except I learned that once it's in your bucket, it's going in your beer.  Luckily, I didn't screw that up too early.

Decisions were made!  We were making a hoppy red ale, using Centennial and Cascade hops, and California ale yeast from White Labs. We were aiming for a 5 gallon batch, which we would split into two 2.5 gal carboys and dry hop separately (...speaking of which, we haven't decided on which hops we'll use...oh well. We'll figure it out later.)

Thanks to Brit and Ballast Point Homework Series for making this recipe easy!

Brew day was actually awesome though. I have some great beer friends who knew what they were doing and once we got started and they talked me through the process, I realized I actually DID know a lot about what we were doing.  Mash, Sparge, Boil, Chill, Pitch, Ferment. How hard can it be?

Uhhhh....pretty hard.  It's all in the details, my friends (apparently, all my friends already knew this, so I don't know who I'm talking to, but still).

I've always been a big fan of baking--cupcakes, pies, bread, cookies--you name it, if it contains flour and/or sugar, I'm in.  Brewing is not that different from baking.  To be a good baker, you need precise measurements, to combine the ingredients in the correct order, to make sure your eggs and milk are at the right temp, to make sure you add your wet to your dry mixture at the right pace....

Of course, you can buy a box mix, dump in some eggs and oil, mix it together and throw it in the oven. But good cupcakes (I only think in cupcakes these days) require knowledge, precision, and a deft touch...and an evenly burning oven (sad face. My rental doesn't have a good oven).

Turns out that brewing is much the same. Once I got my hands on a thermometer to get the water up to temp, and Josh talked me through the process, it clicked. I can totally do this.  And so I did! And I loved it!  As much, if not more, than I love baking!

FYI: I make some yummy beer-infused cupcakes. It's my other hobby.

Home brewing is not without wildcards though.  We did overestimate the amount of water we were supposed to mash in with. We also didn't get the right proportions of water to grain while sparging (I think. Honestly, we won't know for another few days how this affected the beer).  We did damage control with a sugar additive. Our original gravity, before compensation was 1.077, which was higher than we expected, so we cut it with some water. And then we forgot to remeasure the original gravity once water was added and we chilled it. Oops.

Also, it turns out that one of my collaborators hated the Cascade hops I had picked out, so we debated whether or not to swap them out for something else right up until the last minute.  (We kept the Cascade--I mean, come on, who really hates Cascade?)

But I chalk this up to my perfectionism and my general panic that I was doing everything wrong.  Everyone else involved seemed calm and collected most of the time.

Anyway, we got it into carboys and fermenting away in some tupperware filled with water and icepacks.

Where we live in San Diego is not conducive to temperature control. Living half a mile from the ocean makes many homebuilders and landlords believe that we don't need air conditioning. And mostly, we don't. But those three weeks a year when the temperature spikes to 86 degrees, it gets HOT in these houses.  No AC, very poor insulation, and no trees for shade...when it's hot in San Diego, we live IN it. Being from the south, I know heat. But I also know how to get out of it.  This isn't possible in SD, and really isn't possible for my sensitive, temperamental, baby beers.

Bubbling away!  Note the ice pack.

In short, it takes three ice packs, swapped out morning, dusk, and midnight, to keep that water temp between 62 and 70 degrees.  It's been five days and it's bubbling up, happy and busy, just starting to chill out into teenage apathy.  Which reminds me that we really need to make a decision on those hops for dry hopping...meh, we'll figure it out later...

By the way, we named the beer "We'll Figure It Out Later" from Procrastination Station.