Czech Pilsner - Part 1

In addition to all the fun beer making equipment that Husband got me for Christmas, he gave me two extract kits from NorthernBrewer.com. I decided to start with the Czech Pilsner.

The extract kits from NorthernBrewer are great. They include everything you need, and the instructions are clear and easy to follow. My only worry was that I hadn't refrigerated the yeast in time. I let the kits sit under our Christmas tree for a couple weeks before I actually opened them up, and when I did I realized the instructions called for the yeast to be refrigerated as soon as the kit was delivered. Not knowing how long the kits had been sitting at Husband's office before Christmas, I figured it safe to assume the yeast was bad. And of course, by the time I opened the kit, I was ready to start the brew. No way did I want to have to wait for NorthernBrewer to send replacement yeast (though according to the included instructions, they would).

So I headed to my local homebrew store. I love this place, by the way. I'll do a full post on them in the near future. This is where I learned that apparently Pilsners are not a typical beer for a beginning homebrewers. Lagers typically take longer than ales, and require refrigeration for 1-2 months before bottling. Oops. My other kit was a Double IPA, which the guys at Beer and Winemakers said was basically an equal difficulty.

But, they encouraged me to dive in and try it, saying that would make my next batch go that much easier. So off I went, with 3 vials of fresh yeast.

Brew Day (1.25.09):
The hardest part of homebrewing is cleaning all the equipment. Even the tiniest amount of wild yeast or bacteria can ruin a batch, so absolutely everything that touches the beer needs to be cleaned and sanitized. To make matters worse, our kitchen sink decided to start having water pressure trouble, and our waterflow was at about a half-trickle. Try filling a 5 gallon bucket with that.

While I was sanitizing, I had 2.5 gallons of water boiling on the stove. When that cooled to a non-plastic melting temperature, I poured it into the fermentation tank and set another 2.5 gallons to boil.

After that, I followed the kit instructions pretty much to the letter. If you have any experience with homebrewing, you know what I did. If you're more new to this than I am, I'll do a more step-by-step post for my second brew, that way it's more accurate.

Everything went well during the boil. There were no boilovers, and I made sure to time the hop and extract additions perfectly. Then came the cold break. I knew I had to cool the wort from boiling to about 58 degrees, but I grossly underestimated the amount of ice it would take to do this. I set up an ice bath in the sink, but all my ice melted within about 10 minutes, and the wort was still over 100 degrees. After an hour and 23 minutes of cycling cold water through the sink, the wort was finally down to 62, and I was ready to give up. I added it to the fermentation tank, and found that thanks to steam I was still about a half gallon away from 5 gallons. Planning: I did it wrong.

At this point, a normal person would have poured in a half gallon of water from the sink. But I was so nervous about contamination, that I really felt the need to boil the water before I added it. Of course, I had no way to cool it, so I had to wait another 20ish minutes before it was cool enough to pour in the carboy.

I tested the Original Gravity of the beer with a hydrometer, but I got a reading of 1.100. This didn't seem right at all. I know that the hydrometer is supposed to read at 60 degrees, and I was slightly higher than that, so there's probably a conversion that I'm missing somewhere. 

Finally, I was ready to pitch the yeast. The wort was hovering between 62 and 64 degrees, which I knew was slightly too warm, but I hoped that a few degrees wouldn't make a huge difference. I'd bought 3 vials of White Labs Czech Budejovice Lager Yeast WLP802, so I pitched them all. Having all that yeast prevented me from having to make a starter, which was good, because I'm still not sure how to start one. Finally, at about 2 am I sealed up the carboy, added the airlock, and stored it in the garage.