For my birthday Lisa got me a home brewing kit from South Bay Brewing Supply in Torrance and had picked out a wheat beer.

With some help from Alex, Tom, and You tube we set out to create the first batch

It didn’t seem like the stove could get things hot enough to keep this at a full boil so I was somewhat worried that the flavors wouldn’t turn out right.  On top of that when we  pour the wort into the fermenting container I think we got too much of the bottom gunch and was worried that the flavor would end up weird.  But we packaged it up and let it ferment for 2 weeks

After 2 weeks I took the top off and saw this

I wasn’t too sure if this was a good thing or not, but continued on.  I siphoned the beer into another container and added the priming yeast and sugar.  Here is my bottling operation

I tasted it here and it was not good, but continued on with the bottling and let it sit for 2 more weeks.  I was pretty certain that I messed up somewhere.  After 2 weeks Alex and I tried a couple bottles.  It fizzed when I opened it so I knew I didn’t kill the yeast.  The color is pretty nice and best part it tasted pretty good.   The next week we had an opening happy hour on the  roof.

One 5 gallon batch makes ~50 bottles of beer so now I have a full fridge of beer in the garage!

So the beer tastes pretty good, but I’m not too sure how much alcohol it has in it.  According to my measurements the starting gravity is less than the ending gravity, but it is supposed to be the other way around.  If I play with the numbers a bit it might be a 3.2%, but who knows and it still tastes good.

This Memorial day we had some great weather and got to beach it and some burgers on the roof.  We put a good dent in Batch #1 and due to my outstanding success I hope to make another batch of beer in time for July 4th!