"Relax... Don't Worry... Have a Homebrew!"

-Charlie Papazian

Ready to throw in the towel so soon?

So, as I mentioned in the first story, I bought my first equipment set on a shoestring. I think I spent around 60-80 dollars for all equipment and my first batch of beer. It was a sunny weekend afternoon when I decided to embark on my first journey into homebrewing. My small apartment was equipped with an electric stove, so I filled up my 2 gallon enamelled pot with a gallon of bottled water and waited half an hour for it to come to a boil. I then dumped in the can of extract and spent the next few minutes trying to scrape out all the residual syrup (I didn't know to warm up can in water). Then the inevitable happened; I turned to do something and then heard the sound of hot liquid wort hitting the heating element of the stove. Yup, I was experiencing my first boil-over. I turned off stove, but it was still boiling! (curse those slow-cooling heating elements) So, I scrambled for pot holders and pulled the pot off the heat. I lost quite a bit of wort, but couldn't do much to remedy the situation, so I started it back up. This time I kept a close eye on the wort (unfermented beer, pronounced wert) and it eventually settled into a stable boil. In went hops and I boiled for a little while longer (maybe 20 minutes total). I pulled pot off stove and set it in the sink with some ice and ran cool water around it. It took what seemed like a year, but was actually around 30 minutes, to cool. I then transfered to the plastic bucket and pitched the yeast that I had re-hydrated. I then snapped the lid on fermenter and put on airlock. Then I stepped back and wondered where I should set this fermenter. The apartment was small enough, maybe I could just set the beer out on the back patio? Sure, makes sense to me! So, I set it out there, where the temperature stayed fairly steady at 70-80 degrees. The next week was agonizing. I wanted to play with the beer as much as I could. I took an original gravity reading of 1.040 and each day after that I was popping the lid and taking another reading. It slowly dropped to 1.025 by day seven and wouldn't drop any more! There were still a few bubbles on the surface, and I didn't know about waiting for the beer to clear, so I gave it another week to ferment and I bottled it after two weeks. I bottled with all brown 12 ounce bottles except for two clear "bomber" bottles. These were my test bottles. I would watch the beer clear and was going to sample when beer was all cleared. This took another three weeks, and was only lightly carbonnated. I popped a top cautiously and sampled.

This is the point where I damn near threw up. It was HORRIBLE! It was supposed to be an Irish Red, and tasted like a combination between an old tire and a garbage can. It emitted hideous odors and had no head. Stunned, I thought I would let it age a bit. A couple weeks went by with no improvement, except it did get more carbonnation. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong. I kept a case of this beer for two years and it never got much better. I did try most of it, in futile hopes that it would improve. 11 of the 12 ounces were dumped down the drain.

Frustrated, I had serious thoughts on dropping the whole hobby. I mean, I could buy cases of "Gobel" beer at $4.99 and be drinking better beer than THIS!

As a last-ditch effort, I decided to buy a book. It was a little-known publication by this unpopular gentleman by the name of Charles Papazian. It was entitled "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing." By now, you should know I'm joking on the popularity of the book, but I had honestly never heard of it! Ater reading this book, I found most of my flaws. Read on to see how I handled this new information.

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