Brewing Tips!!

Some quick tips.

The first is to brew on your back porch or in the garage or someplace that you can hose down afterwards. You cannot believe how quickly your wort can boil over and given that most of it is a sugar based liquid, it creates a nasty sticky mess.  A camp stove can be good for this. My brewing buddy and I use the propane burner off of an old gas grill. As an added benefit ... it is more fun to sit around a boiling pot sipping at an ale and occasionally stirring than it is to stand in front of a stove.

Next tip is actually several tips but they are based around water volumes.
When your wort is all in the fermentation bucket you should have about 5 gallons of liquid ... but you don't start out with 5 gallons. For one thing, your brew pot will only hold so much. The other factor is that it takes (roughly speaking) FOREVER to bring that much water to a boil!

So ... maybe 2 gallons of liquid to start with. Once it has been brought to a boil and you add your Malt Extract (NOTE: FOR SOME REASON BOIL OVER MOST OFTEN OCCURS WHEN YOU ADD STUFF TO YOUR BOILING WORT! ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ADD THE HOPS! THE WORT BEGINS TO BUBBLE UP RATHER FURIOUSLY! For that reason I recommend removing the wort from the heat as you add stuff, then putting it back on the fire once you have finished.)
The Malt is a very thick syrup so after you poor it in, add a little bit of hot water (from the tap) to the malt container and slosh it around to try and get ALL of the malty goodness out of the can/jug and into your wort! This will also add a little more volume to your wort so you need to keep that in mind when you start with your initial volume of wort.

Next water tip. Most recipe call for you to poor your finished wort into the fermentation bucket and then add sterile water to bring the volume up to 5 gallons. Then you have to wait for the temperature of your wort to come down to like 90 degrees before you can add your yeast. You will KILL your yeast if it goes into too hot a wort. So you wait. and wait and wait and wait.
NOT ME!
Some time before Brew day, we fill sanitized Tupperware containers with previously boiled water and make sterile blocks of ice! So when the wort is finished its boil, the first thing we put in the fermentation bucket is a several blocks of ice (about a gallon or so ... your mileage may very). Then you poor your boiling hot wort over that and stir. The ice melts in about 5 minutes and you got cooled wort, ready for the addition of yeast! You will still probably need to add a little water so if you got it too cold you can add a bit of warm water. I know some directions say NO ICE but we have done this for years and our beer taste GREAT if I do say so myself!

Another thing ... your finished wort will have a lot of sedimentary material in it (the hops). If you leave this in your fermentation bucket, when fermentation starts to get really going and foams up, this stuff can clog up your airlock. The result is that it can blow out the air lock. This might allow bacteria into your beer (which would ruin it) and also make a localized mess in what ever closet your bucket was sitting in.  The way we have avoided this was to strain our wort as we poured it over the ice. My buddy has this very fine, mesh bag (nylon I think) that we pour the wort through. Works like a charm but it takes one guy to poor while the other makes sure the bag doesn't get pulled into the bucket.
It is not only more fun to brew with a buddy ... it's also quite helpful!

Finally - just a bit on sanitation/sterilization/cleanliness. Most everyone places a REAL high premium on this. We've all seen what happens if you brew a mug of tea and then forget and let it sit out for a few days. Well this is like brewing tea ... but your going to let it sit out for a month! So yes, try to keep everything clean and contaminant free. HOWEVER ... keep in mind that in Inn keepers who couldn't read and rarely bathed, brewed up large batches of this stuff in open buckets in the cellars of their taverns. Sawdust and who knows what else fell through the cracks of the floors down into the stuff and yet ... they still ended up with beer!
If 14th century plague victims could brew beer, you probably don't have to worry too much about trying to maintain sterile, laboratory conditions!