The gift of the brew

I meant to start posting last week, but didn't... so there you have it.

For Christmas I was given the gift of a new hobby, I've been quite excited about getting it rolling! My new beginner brewer's kit consists of:
* 6.5 gallon primary fermenter
* 6.5 gallon bottling bucket w/ spigot
* lids w/ grommets for both
* 5 gallon glass carboy w/ bung
* a twin lever bottle capper
* no-rinse cleanser
* hydrometer
* siphon hose and shut-off clamp
* thermometer
* lab thermometer (like a flat one you put on a wall)
* brew paddle
* airlock
* auto siphon
* bottle filler
* bottle brush
* carboy brush

All that to say - just about everything I needed. I was also given a 16 quart stainless steel pot for brewing, which is plenty big for now; and a beer kit - an all malt brown ale.

Thanks to my own love of beer as well as some friends who were thoughtful and generous enough to drink beer of their own and donate empties, I now have (or will have via promise) upwards of 100 empty 12 oz brown non-twist-off longneck beer bottles ready to be, post cleaning, filled with delicious homemade beer. Considering a normal 5 gallon batch makes about 48-50 bottles, the math is easy enough to say a second batch should soon follow the first...

It took me a couple weeks of reading up and panicking about the potential of ruining a batch through the inadvertent introduction of bacteria somewhere along the way before being willing to actually try it out... but I finally did. I'll do that in a separate post on my brewing of the kit gift while I look for the camera with the couple pictures of the process that I took.

(Future) cheers!