Beer Brewing

Recently I have decided I want to try my hand at brewing beer and wine. Ultimately I want to brew wine as I have wanted to brew wine since I was a middle school student. Unfortunately brewing wine is a bit of a process and needs about a year when you consider the bottle time.

About two weeks ago I was talking with a friend and decided that brewing beer would be a good start.

I ordered a starter brewing kit online, and also a sanitiser.

I decided to use star san. It is no rinse which means I can soak or stray it onto my equipment and be ready to go.
1 ounce is used to make 5 gallons. So after some thinking and doing a bit of math I ended up making 5L. I used 9ml of the star san concentrate and 5L of water. After making up this batch I realised that this is a ton of sanitiser. Far more than I really need. But I will know for next time.

I covered everything with sanitiser and got started.


I used my stock pot to heat up 5L of water. To this I added 800g of plan white sugar. Corn sugar is the best to use, but I need to order it online, so I decided to just go for white sugar. If the taste is lacking from batch two I will change to corn sugar.

To my stock pot with water and sugar I added the contents of one can of malt extract.

This brought my total volume up to about 7L. This was actually too much boiling liquid. But I moved this into my fermentation tank and added another 14L of water. My temperature was still to high at 30 degrees, so I put my tank in the sink with cold water and got the temperature down to 28. Then I added the yeast and set the tank up in the spare room to ferment.

I covered the tank with an old t-shirt. Hopefully this will help maintain the temperature and also keep the beer from getting skunked from light getting into the tank.

In about two weeks it will be time to bottle!

Update: 24 hours later and my beer is bubbling. Looks like everything is underway. Just need to wait a week or so for it to finish up.