Starting again

So its been many years since my last home brew, as this blog shows. The motivation to finally get back into it is for my wedding. Its all about people bring their own made things and favourite things, so it seems only fitting that I should bring some home brew myself. therefore I'm back at it.

The long break does bring with it some challenges. First of all I have forgotten everything I learnt, so thats no ideal. I've been back to googling things and following the exact instructions. Secondly all my gear hasnt been touched in years. I toyed with just buying a new starter kit with new bucket, stirrer, tubing etc, but given the urgency of needing several brews inside a few months I wanted to get started straight away.
 
 I chose a Coopers Stout from the packs I got for Christmas to start with. The good part of this is its the cheapest so if I ruin it, its not quite as painful. The bad news is its a one can kit and I'd never done one of those before. I also don't have quick access to anything but white granulated sugar, so opted to add the full 1kg of white sugar as instructed, rather than brewing sugar, MLE or any of the other things google talks about.

 I had bought some fresh sanitiser, and set to work on swishing round freshly booiled water and then some cold and then sanitising power, and then filled it up to allow the whole bucket to soak along with the hydrometer, brush, stirrer and thermometer. I think there is a high probability that this brew fails due to something getting in the beer somewhere, what with the old gear and the faffing as I haven't done it in ages. We shall see. When I finally started I poured the 1kg of granulated sugar into the bucket, and poured a kettle of boiling water. I then reboiled the kettle so that I could pour some over the tin and stirrer and then opened the tin and poured that in. Even after filling the tin with boiling water to get more out it was obvious that lots was left in the tin still. After another boiling water I opted to fill the rest of the bucket by constantly refilling the tin with cold water. This worked with the tin being mostly clean on the inside in the end. Before getting to the fill level on the bucket I took a temperature reading and found it was 21 and still falling slightly. Its very cold outside at the moment so the tap water would have been very cold. Given I was only filling with cold water and needed to add another few litres yet I boiled the kettle again, twice, and along with some more cold water while waiting I tested again at 23 and when finished it was 24. It took longer than I would like but it was done.

There was a pretty big head from alll the splashing and stirring but I seem to recall from the back of my memory that you were supposed to get as much air in as possible at this stage. Next I took a gravity reading, which was really tough given the huge head, but after some faffing I think it was pretty close to being bang on 140. I then nearly made a dreadful error - I put the lid on and started packing up... only to then see the yeast (if I hadn't brought it in half way through the job I might have forgotten completely). I sprinkled this in, and gave it a heck of a stir ot try to get it all mixed in. There didnt seem to be any floating on top so i figured I was finally done.

Now I will try to leave it alone for a few days, but keep an eye on the room temperature at least - its been fairly cold recently so I'm now wondering if I should be keeping the heating on a lot of the time.