My Label

03Nov06

I hadn’t really considered making a label until Leah suggested it, but I can already tell the labels are going to be one of my favorite things about brewing. I include in this post the first label I’ve ever created – for my next batch (which I’m hoping to brew tomorrow), the Pontipee Ale, I’m going to have to do something even MORE musical theatre-esque.

I couldn’t resist the championship patch in the top left corner – I figured I was being restrained enough by not renaming the batch “Yadibrau”!

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Bottling

01Nov06

So I’d never bottled before. Unfortunately, Kev was out of town, doing the “Fall Foliage” thing with Leigh, so I was on my own to some extent. To further my distress, Leah didn’t get my message, so I figured she was off taking care of baby things. So I really WAS on my own. Yikes!

Anyway, the first thing I tried to do was lift up the carboy off the floor. Nothin’ doing. It was just too darn heavy for me to handle. Good thing I have a BFG (big fucking guy) roommate who can handle such matters for me. (And I’m seriously going to have to start working out. This is getting embarrassing.)

I’d spent the morning scrubbing bottles (pain in the ASS, by the way, it took forever and I’m STILL not positive I was as vigilant about it as I should have been) so after sanitizing everything, all I had to do was figure out the siphon. Errr.

“Ok, so I pump this little thingy and… Oh shoot, I’m spilling…. Hmm, how many times do I have to pump this little thingy?… Hey, why isn’t anything coming out?… I wonder if I should sanitize this again…”

And just as I was giving up hope, I got it. On to the Beer! On to the Siphoning! On to the Bottling!

After 3 minutes: Hey, this isn’t so bad!
After 20 minutes: Hmm, I’m not even half done yet…
After 45 minutes: KILL ME NOW. I’M MISSING THE WORLD SERIES.

Anyway, long story short everything got done eventually, I made it out to watch the game, and all went well (cards won!). Good thing I’d gotten bottling done that day, as the very next day I was stricken with a cold that probably would have contaminated the beer if I’d even gotten near it.

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Gingerbread Ale

16Oct06

Well, I’ve selected my next brew: the gingerbread ale mentioned in Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing. Of course, the recipe isn’t exactly what I’d call “detailed”:

 The base brew should be a soft brown ale, lightly hopped, with no pronounced hop aroma.

The question is, then, how do I make such an ale?

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My First Pitch

15Oct06

So I actually brewed my first beer one week ago yesterday, with the help of friendly neighborhood expert Kevin. Kevin was in charge and did most of the “head” work in terms of deciding how long to boil the wort and so on, but we actually got the recipe from my friend Leah. It was hilarious for me to be so concerned about sticking to the recipe, while Kev was continually wanting to improvise and put his own spin on it. Here’s a photo of us hard at work:

It was a lot of fun, and not as difficult as I’d feared (but then, I wasn’t doing the heavy lifting – this is actually a huge concern of mine for when I brew on my own – note the lack of arm muscle in the above photo).

Kevin and I were both concerned about the viability of the yeast, as we’d ordered it from Northern Brewer and it had been in transit and unrefrigerated for six days. We’d attempted to make a starter a few nights before, to disastrous effect (involving broken glass jugs), so I really felt like we were gambling. After 18 hours, there was still absolutely no activity or foam in the wort at all.

But I started to hope all was well after about 24 hours, when the wort looked like this:

I kept thinking, “I could swear those bubbles weren’t there before… “And my suspicions were confirmed the next morning, when I checked the carboy and found – DUN DUN DUN!!!! – this:

So now I’m still playing the waiting game. I’m mildly freaked about bottling next weekend, especially because Kevin will be out of town and the directions look very complicated. On the other hand, Leah has assured me that it’s not quite as hard as I’m making it out to be. So I guess with both my experts on hand to coach me through it via cell phone, I can only do so much harm. Right? RIGHT?

The other question on my mind is a more fun one. What to brew next?

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A Learning Tool

15Oct06

So this would be my Adventures in Beer blog. I’m new to the hobby, having fairly arbitrarily decided to take it up about a month ago, and this here blog is basically a document of my progress. I’m hoping to post pictures, comment about my brewing process, and of course, talk about drinking too much beer.

A bit about me: this is my second WordPress.com blog, the other being solely dedicated to my baseball obsession. Baseball and beer… Anyone think those two might have a future together?

Anyway, the “First Pitch” name is the one I’m going to put on all my bottle labels. It came to me as I was walking to work the other day. I loved the double meaning so much that I suddenly decided to open up a microbrew (and immediately changed my mind on that – I don’t actually want to open anything of the sort).

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