How'd ya' know I was waiting for you to spill!
Haha let me preface this by saying you will not brew anything today. There are few things that you need to collect first.
The two most important things you need are a hydrometer for measuring gravity and sanitizer.
A hydrometer is a tool used to measure 'gravity.' "What the heck is that?" Basically, the specific gravity of pure water is '1'. Sugar is heavier, alcohol is lighter. How your solution compares to water is what you want to know. As your sugars ferment into alcohol, the gravity will drop. When the gravity stops dropping, you know you can bottle it safely. We'll come back to this later.
Sanitizer is SUPER important. You are putting a lot of sugar in a small, moist, warm place and bacteria will LOVE you for that. You need to kill them. :evil: Sanitize your counters, your stir spoons, your fermenter, your airlock, your stopper your hands, your shoes, the neighbors' house. (Why my shoes, you ask? I'm exaggerating for effect! LOL) Sanitize anything and everything that will potentially come into contact with your brew. Some people use bleach. I don't recommend it because it only takes a very very small concentration to kill your yeasties. I use iodine. I've used just plain boiling water in the past, which is fine, but you have to be really careful with glass, then. Iodine is probably the easiest thing to use. Once everything is sanitized, let it air dry, but do not rinse with tap water. If you use iodine, you don't even have to rinse at all if you followed the direction on your bottle.
Your fermentation will be in two steps - primary and secondary. You can do more if you really want to, but two is plenty for most brews. It can be tempting to go to your local hardware store and buy a 5 gallon bucket for your primary - don't. It absolutely has to be food grade plastic. (That's why I recommended the Hawaiian Punch jugs ^^) For the secondary, most people use glass carboys. These can be expensive. (That's why I recommended the glass wine jugs. You get to drink a gallon of wine and you get a free carboy for 1/4 the cost ^^)
Airlock. An airlock is a pretty simple device that let's the pressure out but doesn't let any air in. Fermentation produces CO2 and if you had a truly sealed container, it would explode in probably a few hours. Big mess, I'm sure.
Rubber stopper. You can either buy a pre-drilled stopper or you can drill your own. For the ten extra cents or whatever it is, ya may as well get the pre-drilled one. Your airlock goes in the hole, and the stopper seals your fermenter.
I'll make a list of those things.
Hydrometer
Sanitizer
Fermenters
Airlock
Rubber Stopper
Those are your ABSOLUTE essentials.
From then on, it's pretty simple. I recommended starting with plain mead and working your way up in complexity. Mead is probably the simplest thing to brew, then wine, then extract beer, then all grain beer.
There are approximately 2.59 billion recipes on the internet (I totally made that number up lol) for mead. You can choose any one of them, or go with my standard 3.5 lbs of honey and one gallon of water recipe. Mix your honey and your water together (this is called 'must' at this point) and pasteurize it. Basically, boil it for a while. While it boils, you will see some scum forming on the top. Scoop that out and discard it. Don't worry if a little bit of your must gets in the spoon, you'll have a bit extra from the volume of the honey. And don't worry about trying to get every single speck of it out; that would take you forever. Once it's boiled for about an hour or so, you can remove it from the stove. Cover it and let it cool to room temperature. DO NOT ADD ICE TO COOL QUICKER. Ice could have germs. When your must has cooled to roughly room temperature, you can pitch your yeast. Just like making bread, 1/4 water and some sugar, stir in your yeast. It will start producing foamy bubbles (sound familiar?
) once it's activated. When your must has reached room temp, read and record the gravity, pour it into your fermenter, add your yeast and forget about it for a month or so.
>>Make sure you get a yeast that suits your taste. Some strains of yeast die off in a relatively low level of alcohol, others are a little more hardy. Yeast will die off pretty early for a sweet wine yeast and stick around a bit longer for a dry wine yeast. What you get is up to you and what you like. I tend to use Lalvin brand yeasts, and for meads I use strain D47. Usually.<<
A month or so later, when you look at it, you'll see some stuff on the bottom of your fermenter. It's lees: the remnants of yeast that has done its duty and now rests in peace. Some active yeast are also down there, so some people save it, freeze it, and reuse it. I don't. I don't see anything wrong with it, but considering how cheap yeast is I just don't see the point. Anyway, this next step is called 'racking' and requires a siphon. You want to 'rack' your mead from your primary fermenter into your secondary fermenter, leaving the lees in the primary. At this point, read and record your gravity. You should notice it is a lot lower than when you started. You can taste it at this point if you want, but you probably might not like it. It'll be pretty dry and the flavors won't have melded together and you'll think you did a terrible job. You didn't! It's normal. If you notice that there's a lot of lees in your secondary, you may want to rack into a third. You should be alright, though. Leave it for about another month. Check your gravity. Then check it every week or two until you notice it's no longer dropping. You gotta be careful, though, because you don't want to be opening and closing your fermenter. Once it's bottled, forget about for a few months. Longer is better. For both ease and cost efficiency, pint size mason jars work great for bottling! And you can easily designate one for monthly tasting
.
That's the basics. I think I got everything. If it seems complicated or overwhelming, it's easier than making soap so you can do it! Let me know if you feel like there is a gap in information or if you need anything explained better.
