Brewsday

I managed to finally get a batch of beer brewed. It was a long process and I made quite a few mistakes, but overall I think it went okay.

I decided to make a wheat ale. I have a 3.3 can of liquid wheat malt extract, a 3.3 Light LME and about a pound of golden light malt extract added to 2.5 gal of boiling water. I added 1 oz. of 4.6AA Willamette hops at 60 minutes left. After this I made my first mistake, I added the next .5 oz of Willamette hops at 40 minutes left instead of 30, not too major but a boost to the bitterness. Right after this I realized that I had not added the 1 pound of belgian candi sugar, so at the 30 min mark, it went in. This broke the boil for a minutes or two. To make up for the early hops I added the last .5 oz of Willamette at the 5 min mark instead of 10.

I took the OG and it was 1.072 which is pretty freaking high. I probably didn't need the DME or the candi, but I had read some things that they added to this style well, so we'll see.

Next I pitched the yeast as the wort was cooling. My starter from the previous night had fizzled, so I hydrated some dry active brewers yeast but misfollowed the directions slightly. I don't think it damaged the yeast though.

My major mistake is that I added my yeast soon after this, forgetting to take the wort temp. I figure it was in the high 80's when I pitched it, which is not very good. I really wanted to wait until the low 70's. I may have killed off some yeast there.

I originally had a blowoff tube attached to the bung on the carboy, but it was too cumbersome to set up in the space I have. When I was switching the blowoff tube to an airlock though, I almost pushed the cork all the way down completely through the neck into the beer. I still dont know how I am going to get it out, but it is bubbling every 15-30 seconds or so now.

One last thing though, it is considerably darker than I had hoped as well. We'll see if some of the color mellows during fermentation. I tasted the wort. It was pretty good actually. We'll see what it's like after I rack to secondary.