I SAW A BUBBLE! I swear, it bubbled! I’m glad nobody is watching me, on my hands and knees, intently staring at the airlock on the pail. It looks like we may be okay.
You are now officially hooked!
I always make a yeast starter. It saves all sorts of problems, and if it’s not fermenting, you’ve got time to start another before brewing up.
Note: first time I made a starter was with a grolsch bottle - sealed. Work up to a wierd noise of expelling gas, silence, expelling gas, silence. Pressure would build up, the Grolsch cap would allow some gas out, and then start over. I’m lucky I didn’t have an exploded bottle, and it blew yeast all over the bathroom when I did open it.
I second the dry hopping, especially if you are a hop head. Be careful you don’t get blow out (uh that’s when the hops plug up the airlock and then the fermenter explodes or the cork blows out with an amazing gyser of wort all over a 10 foot ceiling).
I personally hate those plastic buckets. Hard to seal, hard to clean, hard to get the fucking lid off when the wort has solidified and welding it shut. Glass carboys are definately the best. Again, I’ll make the pitch that a plastic carboy is pretty good as well (I’ve got 5 gallons going right now and another 5 planned for this weekend)
August West nailed it (give a man a beer and he wastes an hour, teach him to brew and he wastes a lifetime.)
Don’t worry, relax, have a homebrew
An alternative to making a starter is to use dry yeast, especially if you are mainly interested in making ales. 2 packets of Nottingham will give you plenty of yeast and will only set you back about 2 bucks. And it’s a nice clean ale yeast.
Dry yeast used to get a bad rap but the quality has dramatically improved.
Aah, we’ve had this (someone in our SCA group was brewing mead with cherries in it, bits of cherry blocked the lock, nett result is sticky honey water with cherry bits dripping off the ceiling)
I’ve made passable mead. Is beer that much more difficult?
Oh, it’s going full force now. Plenty of bubbles. We’re all set.
Nah, beer’s just got more things you can put in it. Plus for the vast majority of recipes, the time between brewing and drinking is a hell of a lot faster for beer than for mead, so that’s a bonus.
Holy crap does this smell good. I’m sniffing around the airlock, and those Kent Goldings hops are pronounced. I can’t bear the thought of having to wait over a month before I can actually taste this…
And to think, there’s still a Cascade dry-hopping in the works.
Let us know how it goes.
BTW, I almost always use dry yeast. Start it the night before. Within a few hours, your wort will be foaming away. Sometimes I’ll buy a beer with some live yeast to drink whilst brewing and pour some of it into the fermenter for the hell of it. Not sure if the yeast ever activated, but there are those that will cultivate the yeast from the dormant stuff in the bottom of a bottle.
I use liquid yeast almost exclusively. It gives you a lot of flexibility as some kind of yeasts don’t dehydrate well. In order to save money, I will not buy fresh yeast every time I brew a style. What I do is poor-man’s yeast recycling.
After I rack from primary to secondary, I will add some water to the trub at the bottom of the fermenter and pour the slurry into a flipper bottle. I generally pour two bottles (with the lineage on a postit) and put them in the fridge. Generally, pitching a warmed bottle gives me active bubbling within 18 hours.
BTW, I have three batches going; a belgian trippel, an american ale, and a mead. Oh, and a batch of sake.
Just cracked open the first bottle! It’s not bad at all. Nice head, good body, no obvious off-flavors. Absolutely competant first effort, if I may say so myself. Won’t be winning any prizes for it, but much better than I had expected. The second batch (an ESB) is in the secondary fermenter and needs to be bottled soon. I think I might move on to some maltier and heavier brews for the next batch (perhaps a porter or sourcherry stout).
congrats! nothing like drinking your own beer and enjoying it.
Nah. Beer, especially beer from malt extracts, is a walk in the park compared to mead. I’ve got a theory: the more ingredients you have the more less likely you are to have undrinkable results. Beer’s got at *least * five ingredients (malt, grains, water, hops, and yeast). Mead has at *least * three (honey, water and yeast). Sure you can add more stuff, but the proportions are the same, so in my theory you’ve always got much higher odds of screwing up a batch of mead than a batch of beer.
Start a new thread if you’ve got specific questions. We’ve got lots of opinions. 