Back in mid-August I brewed my first batch of beer!

To get in the swing of things, I purchased a two-stage starter kit from Northern Brewer online, and one of their Irish Red Ale extract kits. Michelle, my wife, gave me an “I owe you” for my birthday in May, but I put it off a little while because I didn’t want to drop the $200 for the equipment, ingredient kit, and brew kettle. Nevertheless, she convinced me to spend the money and I was so happy that I did! To be honest I felt like a 5 year-old on Christmas day when it arrived on our door step.

Along with the starter kit, I purchased on of Norther Brewer’s Irish Red Ale recipe kits. I decided on this kit because it appeared to be one of their most popular beers, and didn’t have a long fermenting process. Here’s the basic recipe:

Irish Red Ale

Specialty Grain:

• 0.5 lbs. of Dingemans Caramel Pils
• 0.25 lbs. of Briess Special Roast
• 0.125 lbs. of Dingemans Biscuit
• 0.125 lbs. of English Chocolate Malt

Fermentables:

• 6 lbs. of Gold Malt Syrup

Hops & Flavorings:

• 1 oz. of Willamette hops (60 minute)
• 1 oz. of US Goldings hops (30 minute)

Yeast:

• Wyeast 1272 American Ale Yeast II

Process: 60 minute boil, 1-2 weeks primary, 2-4 weeks secondary, 1-2 weeks bottle conditioning

Estimated O.G.: 1.044

Ready: 8 Weeks

Brew Day

That following Sunday was brew day. I unpacked my ingredients, I prepared and sanitized my equipment, I read through the recipe, and I was ready to go!

I started by adding the first 2.5 gallons of water to my brew kettle. I bought two 2.5 gallon bottles of purified water from Target, since our tap water is pretty hard. I then turned the heat on high, and steeped the specialty grains until the temperature reached 170°F. This took approximately 20 minutes.

Steeping in the Boiling Pot

I then removed the specialty grains and brought the small-wort to a boil. Once it hit the boiling point, I removed it from the heat, slowly added the Gold Malt Syrup, returned it to the heat and brought it back to a boil.

Once boiling again, I added the Willamette hop pellets. After 30 minutes of boiling, I then added the US Goldings hop pellets.

At the end of the next 30 minutes, I turned off the heat, and cooled the wort in an ice water bath. Once the wort cooled to a pitching temperature, I added the second 2.5 gallons of water, the cooled wort, and some additional water to bring to total volume up to 5 gallons.

After swirling the liquid in the carboy, I took a sample of the wort and got an O.G. of 1.036 at 78°F — much lower than I anticipated. In hind sight, I’m not sure if this was a “first-timer” error when taking my hydrometer reading, or if I didn’t let the specialty grains steep for long enough at higher temperatures.

I then pitched my yeast, capped the carboy with an airlock, and called this first brewing day a success!

The carboy right after pitching the yeast.

Fermentation

During the primary fermentation, I grew to be concerned about the ambient temperature of my house. Living in Florida, our house temperature is around 78-80°F with the air conditioning on — however, the yeast that I used in this batch has an optimum range of 60-72°F. Not so ideal for the warm Florida climate.

Not knowing what this could do to my beer, I posed the question on the HomebrewTalk forums about the potential dangers of brewing out of temperature range, and received some great feedback. I ended up keeping the carboy in the darkest, coolest corner of my house, and did longer primary and secondary fermentations (2 weeks and 4 weeks, respectively) to combat the potential off-flavors.

Fermenting away in the corner.

Bottling & Conditioning

Hoping for the best, I was excited to bottle these bad boys! I dissolved and added 5 oz. of priming sugar (dextrose) to the beer, and was able to bottle 47 12 oz. bottles. It took a while, but I felt very accomplished when I was through. I placed the bottles in some banker boxes, and stored them in the closet for two weeks.

Tasting

I won’t lie. I cracked my first beer open after one week into bottle conditioning.

You can’t blame me — I was just too excited.

After tasting the first beer, I was happy that it tasted like beer, but I was a bit disappointed in the mouthfeel. It tasted watery, and not as malty as I was hoping. But then I waited another week and tried my second beer…

It was pretty darn good! The mouthfeel improved, the maltyness appeared, the carbonation was better. Overall it was a better beer.  I would have hoped for a bit more hoppy bitterness, and a bit more full-bodiedness, but it was pretty darn good.

On a scale from 1 to 5, objectively I would give this beer a solid 3, perhaps even a 3.5 — but considering this was MY first homebrewed beer… ever… I’m giving this beer a 5-star rating!

Eat that Killian’s! I think I may call this beer, Iankill’s Irish Red — see what I did there. 🙂

First pour of the Irish Red.

Brew Stats