I finally decided to take my first steps beyond a simply kit brew, so on saturday I gathered the ingredients together (amber malt extract, chocolate malt, cascade hops, and ale yeast) sterilized the tools, and got down to boiling. I am keeping a brewing notebook, so I won’t put everything on here as well, but there were a couple things that I should have done better.
- Wort does not pour well from a full saucepan… it’s too thick. So next time I’ll use the boiling pot or something with a pour-spout.
- The yeast needs to be pre-conditioned. I took it out of the fridge, opened it, and dumped it into the 90-degree wort. I’m pretty sure I thermal-shocked the yeast because it took around 6 hrs for the fermentation to start.
- Need to add the hops later in the boil. It turns out that most of the hops’ aroma and flavor actually get boiled away.
- Probably need to cool the wort more quickly. The faster the better. Pouring it into a fermenter pre-filled with cold water should be pretty effective, but it was still too hot and I ended up adding more cold water to cool it down. I may actually have diluted the wort too much by doing this.
A couple pics of the chocolate malt after steeping and draining:
