First Batch! Mr. Beer American Light
So the journey to destroy the ring begins....damn it can't be making this blogs directly after watching a Lord of the Rings marathon. I know what you are thinking....can this guy be any cooler...the answer? Hell yes I can. Once I am an all grain brewing masters MOFOS!
My first two batches of beer consisted of malt/hop extracts from Mr Beer that were in the original kit. My kit came with American light. Now for this first blog I am going to go into a lot of detail of what I went to buy and all the instructions I followed. For further brews with Mr beer I will mainly highlight things I improved upon and errors that were made so we can discuss the repercussions to the beer that these errors cause.
So the goal of course in the end is all grain brewing. The end result of all grain is called wort which is basically what is inside this tins. The creation of wort and sanitization are basically the two most difficult and most important steps in home brewing. In your Mr beer kit you have a tin of wart and also two more crucial items. These are....
Mr Beer No-Rince Sanitizer
and Mr Beer Carbonation Drops
Ok so side note rant on sanitization! This as I have learned is crucial to your beer ending up actually tasting good! If you have ever partaken in a friends home-brew and you thought it had a hint of Skunky spray as the surprise ingredient....then most likely this person had a problem in either sanitization or temperature control during fermentation.
Ok rant complete. Mr Beer thankfully makes sanitizing your equipment super easy. Ill post a video link here to the instructional video of Mr Beer!
For every one of their batches the instructions remain the same. Which is awesome!
So lets dive into the hard truth of things I did wrong during preparing the concentrated wort and bottling! One of my least skilled areas in life is...pouring liquids out of pots....I know man problem! So the hole on top of the Keg is kinda small which is good to prevent to many chances for contamination of the wort. But also kinda hard to pour into! I may have spilled a good quarter of a cup or more of wort. Now this stuff is precious! The yeast takes every bit of sugar in the malt/hops extract and converts it to alcohol. So once I taste it I will see what happens.
Two weeks later after fermenting is what i called flat beer day. Mr Beer suggests on the two week mark you take a small taste of your beer. If its sweet most likely you need to ferment longer. If you have off flavours panic this batch might be nothing more than grain water down the drain...and IF your brew tastes like flat beer...WE ARE GOLD!!!! So I personally found on the two week mark it most certainly tasted like a flat Budweiser. So now its time to bottle.
My kit was a deluxe kit which included enough bottles for one brew batch (750ml x 11 bottles). At first I was not happy because they are plastic bottles. The more I have read though I am not so upset about it. They are extremely reusable. These ones are free of those leaching toxins and are oder resistant as well. So all in all as long as tasting day goes well I will continue to use plastic bottles to store and simply pour into a pint glass...because in my opinion it must be at least consumed from glass in the end.
After I started to do multiple batches on the go at once I bought extra bottles and went for the 500ml Mr Beer Bottles because they are more like a regular serving of beer. But really you can go with glass bottles that you can cap yourself as well at many local brewing stores!
This is when carbonation drops come into play. These drops are basically hardened formed sugar. Most bottling processes require bottling sugar to create carbonation. The small amount of yeast remaining in the bottle will convert this sugar to carbon dioxide which will then carbonate your drinks. Mr Beer offers these tabs so that the measuring is made easier. 1 drop in the 500ml bottle and two for the 750ml. As I read and search the internet a lot of other home brew companies give bottling sugar to put in the batch before you bottle it or simply say put in these many tablespoon\teaspoon of sugar blah blah blah.
So now my American light beer is in the bottles. I let it sit for two weeks at room temperature away from direct sunlight and once those two weeks were over I moved the bottles over to the fridge. Mr Beer recommends two weeks in the fridge for proper flavors to develop.
After about two days I decided to have a taste (Rule breaker eh? Not very Canadian of me...Mr Dress Up is crying that he failed me...). Here is my memory of that day. It tasted good! Very smooth. But some issues were there for sure. It was too sweet. It most likely could have used another few days fermenting or perhaps this beer just is too sweet for me. Usually a sign of more Malt (grains) vs Hops I believe (Let me get back to you on that one I am still learning). Another note was very disappointing carbonation and very little head retention. The head of the beer just shouldn't disappear that quickly! Damn it I thought I was going to be an instant pro (insert sarcastic tone). I read some more and I think I know what I may have done wrong. First thing is it actually needs that two weeks of aging in the fridge for the CO2 to become properly saturated in the beer. Second I may have allowed too much head space at the top of the bottle. If the CO2 has to much space to fill then it wont be forced to saturate the actual beer itself.
So after all the the moral of that story is BE PATIENT!!! I am hoping at the end of these two weeks of fridge aging the beer will have better carbonation. If not then learning from my mistakes is the key! I refuse to give up. I have wanted this for way too long. Besides who doesn't want to be the guy who has great beer around at all times? This guy sure wants to be that guy!...If I say guy one more time in a sentence I am pretty sure I will be attached by an online troll.
Ok everyone that is all for this post. If you have any questions or comments please feel free. I will be tasting the American Light with come friends on Tuesday August 25th so stay tuned for that. I am actually going to be taking notes while that happens. I actually have been considering doing some video recording. Maybe we will see. Alright brewers keep drinking!
