Alright, here's my tl;dr home brew report. My first beer ever was a Fat Tire clone which was reasonably simple, except I had to steep some specialty grains which, I guess, would make it a partial mash? Anyway, here are my notes:
1) Steeped specialty grain from Northern Brewery recipe in 1 gallon of water for 30 minutes. Went over 170 (under 176, should've stayed under 170) for approx. 2 minutes twice. Poured into main cooker, added liquid malt extract (LME) set to a boil. Stirred until hot break.
2) After hot break, added bittering hops, set timer for 45 minutes. (Added 1/2 gallon water to main pot to make up for evaporation. Couldn't add to smaller pot, not enough room). Stirring regularly.
3) Added 2/3 of flavored hops with 15 minutes remaining.
4) Added remainder (1/3) flavored hops with 5 minutes remaining.
5) Cool wort to under 80 degrees F. Next time don't forget to pour the 2 gallons of extra boiled water into crock pot before cooling you idiot. Took forever to cool, had to go get extra ice, probably an extra hour. Not good.
6) Tossed back and forth 3 times between cooker and ferment bucket to aerate. Pitched yeast. Could not figure out how the damn gravity thing worked, so just lidded it. Wrapping the fermenter in a wet t-shirt and have a fan on it because my ambient temperature is a little high in the house, and I'm not spending extra money on a power bill at this point.
*If this turns out ****ed up, it's because my liquid yeast sat out for 4 days while I was on vacation because I thought I had dry yeast. It never got above 75 degrees, but I don't know if that's hot enough and long enough to screw it up. We'll see. Also, it took forever to cool it down, so nasties could've been introduced during this period.
Lastly, I've got a bung that I can't figure out how to work:
Similar to this. My hose doesn't fit it. It fits in my air lock thing, but I can't figure out the benefit to it, and since my air lock has a lid with holes in it for CO2 release, I left the cork in the box, much like those leftover screws when I'm putting together furniture.
Critiques, complaints and questions are welcome.
Last edited by Ineedaride2; 09-11-2010 at 09:17 PM.