First Post!

Here is my first attempt at starting a blog. I'm not much of a writer, so I'll see how much I keep up with this. However, I have been really getting into the brewing! Hopefully my excitement from that keeps me active on here. This blog will mainly contain the Schulz family brewing adventures...although I'm sure other useless ramblings will find there way here as well.

Leah and I got our home brewing kit for the wedding from our good friends Matt and Laura Smith, and Katie and Nereus (soon to be) Dooley. After Leah moved down here, it sat in our guest bedroom for the winter... Feburary rolled around, and I pulled it from the spare bedroom to our living room. We decided that sometime that month, we were going to finally start using it.

We started doing our research, since neither of us had any experience with this before. I found a great site that had in depth videos of the process: HomeBrewers.com

Right about the same time, one of my best friends from college, Timmy "Stubby" Axford, contacted me, and discussed the brewing Kalli (his wife) and he has been doing. They started their own blog: Northland Brewery. Tim's enthusiasm, as well as ours fueled us to get brewing right away!

We found out we have a local home brewing supply store, Home Brew Haus, in New Bern, NC. I went there one afternoon, and picked up a Kolsch Brewers Best kit. I've read that the standard dried yeast that comes with kits like this can be unreliable from batch to batch. In order to make sure I could get consistent results, I purchased a vial of German Ale/Kolsch (White Labs #WLP029) yeast.

Our first brewing experience I think went about as good as it could have on Feburary 28th. The starting gravity for the wort was 1.046, which was in the range recommended by the instructions. We didn't have any commercial sanitizing sollution, so we used a bleach/vinegar solution, to achieve an adequate sanitation. The yeast took over 24 hours to get started which scared me a little bit that I had done something wrong, but later that evening, the airlock started going like crazy.

We kept the Kolsch in the primary for a week, after the final gravity read 1.010 for a few days in a row. We then racked it to our secondary fermenter to clarify the beer a bit (but mostly to make room for our next brew!). The sample I stole from the primary smelled and tasted great! I can see how the patience part of this, can drive a person crazy!! I was thirsty for more!

Our second brew we started a week after the first. It was a Brewers Best Red Ale. We did have a few problems in our grain steeping this time. We lost control of the temperature (over 170 F), and likely extracted some tannins from the grain. This could lead to a harsh bittering of the beer, however from what I've read, for extract brewing, this could have a minimum effect. The rest of the process went great, and we used a English Ale yeast. The Red Ale goes into the secondary tomorrow. I've already smelled it, and it smelled great, so I'm excited to taste it when we rack it.

I need a cool sign off phrase,

Jeremy