I had my first ever brew day today.  Simple enough setup – extract brew labeled “pirate gold ale” with everything pre-packaged.  My apartment smells like feet and maple syrup.

My only real hiccup was that final clean up took a while.  Upside is that it had little to do with the brewing process – I had a bag of ice and a bag of flour break open all over the kitchen – then dropped a glass and shattered that on top.  Oh – and I sprayed wort all over the kitchen at one point.

Ok – so this wasn’t the easiest thing I ever tried.

That said – overall things went MUCH faster than I thought they would – 3 hours end to end (I was expecting 5-6). Water went to boil in 25 minutes this time (the bottled water went faster than my tap maybe?) and cooling took less than 25 minutes.

Now I don’t have a wort chiller.  What I do have is a ridiculous-sized stock pot.  Since it holds 5 gallons I just took a 25 gallon stock pot, sterilized the outside, and filled it 2/3rds with ice water.  This I dropped in to the wort – it hovered about an inch above the bottom of the kettle with about three inches all the way around.  Once the ice melted I pulled the pot and refilled with ice water again.  Super fast – and nothing to connect to the sink.  (I’ll post pictures if anyone is interested)

While a simple brew – I learned a lot from the experience. I need to think more about organization for sure – and there is some more gear I really wish I had on hand… like an additional plastic bucket for sterilizing, a MUCH larger funnel, and a turkey baster or something to be able to draw wort out of the fermentor for a gravity check.  I also wish I had pre-filled the fermentor and marked the side so I knew where 5 gallons is.

But all that is behind me now. The beer is in the fermentor – happily humming away under a cardboard box wishing it had a blowout tube instead of an airlock.  We’ll know in a day I guess whether this is gonna work out I guess.