My First Brew...

It was a while back when I realized how awesome the idea of brewing your own beer truly was. I remember as if it were yesterday the first time I got to taste a home made beer at my friend's house in New York City. He didn't want to open all the bottles cause he said it was expensive to make it, which made me kind of sad because the beer tasted quite awesome. This was in 2012 before home brewing was a huge thing in the Netherlands (I think) and especially in Brazil.

He used a kit bought from the internet, it was a very simple one, but I can't remember the name. It used extract and yielded only 5l, but I could not find that thing whatsoever in Brazil, where I lived at the time. The beer was a brown ale, around 6% abv, a little bit sweet and caramelly, but with an awesome freshness and aroma that only home brewed beer can offer. Man, I was blown away by that, never did I think that it was possible to make beer at home. The feeling reminded me of the first time I learned that I could build my own PC with separate parts, just gloriously f@king awesome.

It took my five years before I grew the balls to invest in the equipment necessary to make my own beer. Honestly, I was scared of the stuff. I am a good cook though, really enjoy it, so making beer seemed like a natural step up and a good challenge. But what really tipped the scale was the fact that my friend from work Tales had been brewing beer in Brazil for the past 4 years, even having his own label with his friends – Bunker. Tales agreed to share the costs of the equipment, and while he bought the kettle and fermenter, I bought a plate chiller, grain mill and additional fermenter, not to mention all the basic things like bottle capper and measurement tools. And off we were to make our first beer!

I’m gonna go briefly through the methods and tools we used, but please don’t blame me if I’m not naming things properly, as you may already know, I am a noob. First things first though, the first rule of beer brewing: You don’t brew beer without drinking beer, so we did.

So for our American Pale Ale, we used 1 malt (Pilsen), and 1 hop (cascade) at 30min and 60min boil for the recipe, very simple but very balanced. In the mashing we used the brew in a bag method, so once it was done, we just pulled out the bag and all the grain was filtered out!

We used about 10l of water in the kettle and another 6l for sparging. I believe we lost about 2l after the whirlpool and unloading into the fermenter, and at the end we had about 9.5l of final product. Btw I was very impressed with the whirlpool method, I would never have figured that out on my own! This isn’t so instinctual like cooking.

After we ran the wort through the plate chiller, we noticed that we kinda did it too fast, and the wort wasn’t cool enough (around 32C) and we had to dip the fermenter in water for about 1 hour before the temperature reached the safe 24C for the yeast to be added, which we did, and then we were done. 5 hours passed like it was nothing.

After one gigantic anxiety filled week went by, finally it was time to bottle! Below is fat me getting some bottling action, oh ye.

We had some problems getting the beer to flow out of the fermenter since we didn’t get fermenters with taps (ALWAYS buy fermenters with taps), and we spent about 20 min trying until finally we were good. Filling the bottles was rather fast and simple, it was sterilizing, cleaning and then prepping that were the biggest pain in the arse. So much cleaning that it felt like I was about to go into surgery. But don’t even try to make beer without a proper sterile equipment, or you’ll surely end up getting a batch of malt vinegar.

After all the bottles were filled, we finally had our first batch. It looked noobish, it looked primal, but it was done!

Except I had to wait another god damn week before I could drink it. Turns out beer doesn’t carbonate overnight.

But FINALLY, after what felt like an eternity, I was able to open the first bottle, and damn, it was beautiful. Look at this thing!
Tasted awesome too, like a proper APA should. Even Tales was surprised at how successful this turned out, and even more surprised at how fast I drank my half of the batch! I managed about 10 days before I was out.

So that was my first experience making beer! Totally awesome, totally home brew, and totally successful. The brewing world was mine and it would only get better and better from there on!!!

Or so I thought…