Mr. Beer

This weekend I popped my cherry. I had my first homebrewing experience.

I had been toying with the idea for several months but had never really gotten around to it, due to lack of materials, infrastructure, or time, until I finally decided that enough is enough.

It was with a Mr. Beer Brew Kit, offered to me by my girlfriend. 

Mr. Beer offers several different types of kits, most of them for beer even though they also have one for hard cider and another for root beer. 

The contents of the beer kits vary but in general they include a fermenter in the shape of a keg, some hopped malt extract, yeast, and eight bottles with caps. You can also purchase hop pellets, unhopped malt extract and different strains of yeast in case you want to take it one step further and even closer to what the grown-ups do.

I however, being a newbie and knowing full well that you do not play with your beer (unless you know how to), did not wish to take it one step further.

The process is pretty simple in those conditions. The first thing to do is to sanitize all of the instruments you are going to use, to prevent contamination and weird flavors in the beer. The next step is to mix the hopped malt extract with boiling water, and then put the mix into the keg together with a lot of refrigerated water.

Once this concoction (the wort) is adequately blended together, you just sprinkle the yeast, screw the tap on the keg and store the whole thing in a warm and dark place for a couple of weeks until the first fermentation concludes.

After the first fermentation takes place, you bottle the beer with a little sugar for another week or two, thereby fermenting it a second time and carbonating the beer. At that point, the beer is ready, although Mr. Beer recommends you condition it by keeping it in the fridge for a few more days.

I brewed myself a Diablo IPA and, from what I can tell, everything went well but I guess I will only know for sure when I try it... so more on the result in about a month. My hopes are high though.