The coolest thing I've ever done is brew my own beer.

That's not entirely fair. You see, my first brew is in bottles, still carbonating, not yet ready to drink. I'll uncap the first bottle a week from today, Wednesday Sept. 21st. I'll uncap my first homebrew next week.

This blog is about my fermenter, my wort, my yeast and my beer. I homebrew. I write about on nextweekbrewery.blogspot.com.

How the fuck did you come up with the name Next Week for a brewery? Wait a fucking minute, this is a homebrewing opperation and you're calling it a brewery? The answer to the second question is 'yep.' The answer to the first question is that I'm not telling exactly. It has to do with procrastination and planing, but that's all I'll say.

Let's roll back the clock, let's talk history. No wait. Let's talk now. History is for later.

Over in the corner, next to my bookshelf are two boxes of bottles, each filled with carbonating hopsy goodness. My first homebrew. An IPA. This brew was made from a nice little brew kit, Brewer's Best IPA kit. The process is simple. You should stop reading, bookmark this blog, brew some beer and come back here while you wait for fermentation to complete. Anyway, this kit came with to cans (6.6lbs) of light malt extract, a pound of 60L Crystal Malt, 2oz. Northern Brewer's Hops (7.1% alpha acid) for bittering and 1oz. Cascade Hops for finishing. You mix all that up according to a recipe no harder to follow than that for your favorite soup-from-scratch and toss it in a fermenter. My fermenter is a bucket, lid and a small rubber hole for an airlock. Siphon into fermenter. Ferment. Wait. Bottle. Drink... next week.

Okay, not everything went totally right in the brewing. There was a bit of scorching on the bottom of my five gallon stainless pot, but I don't think it hurt anything. I don't think it did because I tasted the warm flat result of my secondary fermentation after I bottled it. It tasted like warm, flat IPA. Ah, what promise.

The original specific gravity was too low and the final specific gravity a bit high. So the attenuation (rate of sugar to alcohol conversion) wasn't perfect. I think I'm looking at about 4.1% ABV, about 1% lower than the predicted yield. The low initial gravity is probably a failure to get all the wort into the bucket--I mean fermenter--because I didn't have a good strainer. I've fixed that glitch in the brew process now. In the second case, I'm not sure why the attenuation was low--might be that I pulled the beer into secondary fermentation too early.

Waiting is not so fun. That's why I went and got a second set of fermenters. So I would have something to do--brew more beer--while waiting. There are two buckets next to the boxes of bottles. More on those soon.