The ambient temperature of the garage is about 16 degrees celsius so it's too cold to brew this particular beer without a little help. I bought an electric "brew belt" for about £17 when I bought the starter kit so I'm hoping that this will suffice in maintaining the required temperature for fermentation.
I've sanitized the equipment and the can of concentrated malt extract has been warming in the sink. This extract, having had about 80% of its water removed back at Mr Cooper's house in Oz, is a very thick treacle-like substance. Warming the can in water helps the extract pour.
Now it's time to add it all to the fermenter and brew some beer!
The warmed extract goes in first which is like pouring Golden Syrup from a tin. I add a bit of hot water to the tin and swirl it around so I can get most of the residual extract out. I add the bag of brewing sugar (1KG) along with 2 litres of boiling water and stir it like crazy until it's all mixed together. I now fill the fermenter up with cold water up to the 23 litre mark. Apparently it's important to aerate the mix when filling up at this stage as the oxygen helps the yeast in its early days of fermentation. Luckily my cold water tap expells in every direction other than straight down so aeration is no problem.
I have now created WORT! (pronounced WURT and not spelt WART). If you are doing this yourselves and have ended up with a WART then I suggest you have somehow strayed off-subject and into something else, perhaps, a little unsavoury. Keep them to yourselves please.
Ambient temperature in the garage is 15.2 degrees. I check the temperature on the stuck-on thermometer and it says 21 degrees. This is bang-on the bottom of the recommended 21-27 range where the supplied yeast works best at (although it says that the yeast can work its magic between 18 and 32). I plug in the electric Brew Belt, wrap it around the fermenter and tighten it a little. Hopefully this will get the temperature up a little to my preferred 24 degrees and maintain it at that level day and night.
Now to add the yeast. I open the yeast sachet and sprinkle its contents over the top of my wort and immediately screw on the lid tight. I previously assembled the bubbler airlock and grommet into the hole in the top of the lid.
Note: When I was inspecting the contents of the starter kit just after I bought it I did notice that the grommet was split and, not wanting to risk spoiled beer because of something so small, I searched for a replacement. After hunting high and low, well during my lunch-hour anyway, I managed to purchase a similar sized replacement from a car auto-factors. I had to buy a packet of them so at least I have some spares. I guess that it's silly things like this that can hold-up or spoil the production of a good beer.
OH CRAP! I forgot to take the Original Gravity reading before I added the yeast! The Original Gravity (OG) is the density of the brew before the yeast has been added and is used to calculate the alchoholic strength of the beer at the end. I wonder if taking the reading just after the yeast has been added matters too much? Surely it's not going to affect it so quickly? I have read that the time between creating the wort and adding the yeast is the time when it is susceptible to infection so that's why I got the yeast in there so quickly. Ah well. Too late now.
I take the reading by filling up the hydrometer's holding tube thingy with wort from the fermenter's tap and gently drop in the hydrometer itself. Taking the reading is more difficult than I thought it would be because the hydrometer keeps spinning around slowly just as I'm about to read the level. I manage it and it reads 1052. I switch off the lights, close the garage door and hope that it all works after all the effort.
So that's it! My first homebrew started courtesy of that nice Mr Cooper. And to quote him 146 years after he started his business:
'We are now engaged in the Brewery business....'
Well. Sort of.
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