First Beer attempt

A friend of mine, John, and I took a road trip all the way north to Red Hook, NY a few weeks ago. We are interested in brewing our own beer and this place, Party Creations, came highly recommended. To make that story short, we ended up spending about 2 hours there and I came home with all the equipment and a beer kit for brewing an Irish Red.

On Sunday, the 22nd, we got together and started the brew by mixing and boiling this and that. At the final stage you're suppose to being the temperature of the brew down to about 65 to 75 degrees. Well, this is where we made our first mistake. It said to take the brew pot filled with the wort, which had just been boiling about 2.5 gallons of stuff and put into a cold bath. This should have cooled it down in a few hours, by replacing the cold water bath occasionally. Well, we actually added the other 2.5 gallons of stuff and then started to cool it. It took over night to cool it down, which I was just told is about right for the mistake that we had made.

Anyway, it got placed into a 5 gallon bucket with an airlock on top. This allows the CO2 to escape without anything else getting in there. about 48 hours later the bubbles started happening.

The second mistake made was that we really should not have started this, because I'm going out of town for a few days. So, do I bottle it before leaving or do I just let it sit until I get back. Fortunately the people at Party Creations are very helpful with this stuff. I called and was told exactly what I should do prior to bottling it before we leave. YIKE, time will tell.

Fortunately, I had planned this batch to be an experiment so if it does fail, not all that much will be lost except maybe some undrinkable beer..

I'll let you know as time goes on...