Lessons Learned and Victory

[nhansen]

Count me in the crop of 2011 End Of Year new brewers. Got my buckets and kettle for Christmas and brewed my first extract the next day--a Belgian wit. Brewed a second batch--a nut brown ale extract recipe--a week later. Owing to illness they were both bottled at the same time after four and three weeks in the primary respectively.

Bottle conditioned for as long as I could take it--just short of two weeks--and had mixed results last night. Pretty sure the wit is screwed unless there is a fix for DMS. The beer has a strong wet vegetable flavor that is unpleasant.

I was a n00b and made a few mistakes with the wit.

First, and possibly not a big problem, I used water from our tap which is some really hard water. I used the filtered water up front but topped off with unfiltered water because I was rushing things.

Second, it was a truly cold and windy day and I had problems keeping a rolling boil so the boil had a lid with the lid cracked for at least half the boil.

Third, having not read the instructions that came with the propane burner, the flame would die at seemingly random times. If we had read the instructions we would have been aware that there is a stupid-proofing timer that shuts down after fifteen minutes unless a button is pressed. As it was, we were stupid and had a few stretches of time where the heat was off.

Fourth, I poured into the primary bucket and then tried a very ineffective water bath. Took me about an hour to get down to pitching temps. Sitting in a big tub with constantly flowing water is faster than sitting in a sink and splashing the sides of the bucket. Constantly running cold water tap bath using the steel kettle and counter-stirring the wort is more effective still.

The nut brown ale on the other hand, is tasty. The only possible mistakes were using hard water and taking a while to chill. I cannot decide whether to buy a grain mill or wort chiller next. If I had to fault the ale for anything, the mouth feel isn't as rich or creamy as I might expect and the head retention is poor. The flavor is outstanding though. I've got my first all grain (BIAB American Ale) in primary for a week and am finding it harder to be patient now that I know I can make good beer.

Anyway, thought I'd take the opportunity to toot my own horn, underline a number of the lessons repeated on this forum over and over, and thank HBT for being an awesome resource to the new brewer.

 

[rwinzing]

I would say chiller before mill. I do AG and have yet to purchase a mill (though it is on the short list) I could not imagine a brew day without my chiller.

The easiest way to get patience is a good pipeline of beer.

 

[Gduck]

I second the chiller before the mill. Homebrew shops can always grind the grain for you and for most of the more reputable places their crushes are pretty good. Also if you're going to do extract for awhile a grain mill is kind of overkill. Even after going AG it was probably 2 or 3 years before I purchased my own mill.

 

[aiptasia]

^ +1 to that

 

[azscoob]

It appears you have identified your issues fairly well, so aside from the cabbage wit things are going ok.

Get or make a chiller, then take care of that burner timer deal using this thread as a guide, then thank Nostalgia for that post, helped me out modding my burner!

 

[nhansen]

Figured the chiller was a more timely pickup. LHBS took forever to mill when I bought last week. I'll just make a point if budgeting the time.

 

[homebrewdad]

+1 on the chiller. You could always try calling the LHBS ahead of time to get them to mill.

I buy my grains from AHS, and it comes pre milled (by choice), but then again, my LHBS isn't particularly local.