This is the big day! Finally I get to boil the wort and start fermenting my first beer. Still haven’t figured out a name for it yet… it’s going on my TO DO-list.

Preparations

Well, I still didn’t have all the equipment I needed to make my first wort boil, so I made a visit to the nearest brewery shop, which shall remain nameless. The lady behind the counter, although very helpful, had no expertise in brewing beer. My guess is that the shop survives on selling 3-day wine kits to teenagers and "turbo"-yeast for making moonshine. Anyway, she did have a hygrometer and a decent siphon and the prices were OK.

I then proceeded to my mom’s house. She never throws anything away , so I had no trouble finding a large 15 liter pot and my dad’s old fermenting bucket which hasn’t been used in 15 years. I also found a bottle capper, a 100 ml Pyrex measuring glass and a fresh bag of unused caps. Great stuff - I was ready to roll!

When I got home, I started the boring but crucial part of brewing - cleaning and sanitizing. From what I’ve read, this is probably one of the most important things to get right in order to make a good tasting beer, but no one ever writes about how much time it takes…

The Big Boil

I loosely followed a recipe I had found on the Internet and added 2.4 kg of Munton & Fison’s red malt extract to 11 liters of pure Staffanstorp water. Before the boil started there was a lot of foam in the pot and I was more than a little worried about a boil-over but as the temperature neared boiling, the foam disappeared and the clumps of malt dissolved leaving a nice reddish-brownish sweet wort. Then when the boil had started I added 14 grams of Admiral (14.5%) whole hops for bittering.

 

For flavoring hops I added 16 grams of East Kent Golding’s and another 32 grams to finish off. The smell of the boiling wort really made the memories from Faxe and Carlsberg come alive again. I certainly hope my beer will be better than theirs though

Fermentation

After cooling the beer to a nice warm 32 degrees C, it was time to mix it with 10 liters of nice cool aerated tap water to form an optimal 20 degree crib for my precious yeast to grow in. Aerating the water was very elegantly done with my mixing rod.

So then I pitched in the starter yeast (which was alarmingly quiet, I hope it was alive) and took a density measurement. The density was good, about 1.040, which I think will become a pretty well behaving first time beer.