Brew Time!

After a few weeks of delay I finally spent Sunday afternoon brewing my first batch of beer. I decided to go with an American IPA clone as my first attempt for 2 reasons: 1. I love IPA’s 2. I’m hoping that as hoppy as an IPA is it will mask any of my potential screw ups.

Overall the process is very straightforward. The biggest difficulty that I had was cooling the wort. Even with the addition of a gallon of frozen ice it still took quite a while to cool on its on. I spent a significant amount of time waiting on this before I was able to add the yeast. In the future I’m going to fill my sink with ice and cool the cooking pot directly to speed things up.

The crew at Main Street Homebrew Supply located in Hillsboro were very helpful in walking me through the process. I highly recommend them. Additionally their site is extremely helpful for the first timer and will walk you through the entire process.

I wish I had more photos of the process but over the whole hour, watching the pot is the most exciting part. Here is what I looked at for an hour:

In hindsight I probably shouldn’t have worn shorts around so much hot liquid.

Considering that my stove is from the Regan era I’m also surprised that it was able to heat up so much liquid and not break. There was quite a bit of “settling” noise when I put the pot on the stove.

The yeast is in and the fermentation is taking place now, I’ll post updates as the process progresses.