Ah, the joys of the first....

Ah the joys of home brewing. I have been thinking about beginning my journey into the art for a few years now, but it took the birthday present of my wonderful girlfriend to bring the dream to fruition. There are no doubt hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs on home brewing, so it is not here that I will bog you down with specifics of the process, but instead I plan on sharing my joy of the brew with you.

Wait a second, way is there a "d" at the end of beer? Good question, I have a couple great passions in life, one is beer. The other is beards. Yes, I said it. Beards. They are wonderful. I have attempted to grow several in my life time, and have done an "OK" job during a couple of these forays, but I have never mastered the craft as well as Gerard Butler did in the movie 300 or Brad Pitt in 7 Years in Tibet. But here on this very blog, I will share the joy of Beers and Beards, Beer'd's if you will. (Props to Melissa for coming up with the name).

OK, now that the introduction is out of the way, I will present you with my very first beer'isode.

Yesterday I received an early Birthday present from the girlfriend, all the equipment needed to brew my first batch of beer. I chose an IPA not only due to my fondness of this particular type of beer, but because the employees at SF Brewcraft recommended it as a great starter beer.

Today I brewed my first batch and it is currently in the primary fermentation bucket. I feel like a proud parent awaiting my child's very first day at school. With a little bit of waiting (2 months) and a lot of bottles, I will bottle my first batch of Beer'd IPA. I am in the process of designing a kick ass label (any input is welcome), but I am sure that will come with time...

On to the brewing process. I began the brewing process by sanitizing all of the equipment that I was to be using. Not that I don't enjoy drinking a whole lot of bacteria with my brew, but I figured better safe than sorry on the first batch. After a whole lot of sanitizing, I was ready to begin. Beer is made from a few key ingredients, grains, hops, water, and yeast. The first step is to mash the the grains in water. This is done in a similar way as steeping tea. I gathered all the grains and put them into a giant tea bag (cheese cloth), then put them into a giant pot of boiling water. I let it "steep" for about 40 minutes before removing the bag. Now its time for the fun part. Boiling the wort, as its called, and adding the hops. The hops are added to the boiling wort at timed intervals. This part is boring, so I will tell you about the hops. There were two different types of hops. Both had a very distinct smell. One smelled just like an IPA, which is good because that is what the brew will eventually be. The other smelled like a pretty bad cross of marijuana and ass. I guess this is OK, and it probably means that I have not acquired the requisite nose for hops yet. I was slightly disappointed that the hops did not look like they do in the Samuel Adam commercials. You know, full nuggets of green hoppy goodness... Instead they look like animal feed in a pellet form. I guess at the end of the day it doesn't really matter what they look like, as long as they produce the desired result.

After finishing the cooking process, I placed the wort inside a primary fermentation bucket where it will stay for about 2 weeks before I transfer it to the primary glass carboy, which is the secondary fermentation bucket. There it will stay until it is ready for bottling around Christmas time (talk about a great Christmas present).