This batch is based purely on a brew kit someone gifted me.

Ingredients

• Cooper's English Bitter liquid malt extract thing (includes hops)
• 1# dry light malt extract also from Cooper's
• Cooper's packet of dry yeast

Brew day — 26 October 2015

I wasn't great about keeping time on this one, so all times approximate.

11:00

Put 2 gallons of bottled water on to boil. Once boiling, cut the heat and added all the LME and DME while mixing. Attached thermometer and brought it back to a simmer. Noted that the 100℃ point on my thermometer agreed with the boiling point for the wort. Left it simmering for 45 minutes. Made up 5 gallons iodophor solution in the fermentation bucket to sanitize the immersion cooler.

12:30

After the boil, cut the heat and first used the immersion cooler to cycle through the iodophor solution, which cut the temperature down to about 60℃. Then made up about 1 gallon of ice water in another bucket and cycled that through, which brought it down to just under 40℃. Added 1 gallon of bottled water that had been sitting in the fridge for about an hour, which brought it down to 30℃. Transferred wort to the fermentation bucket, added yeast, and topped with bottled water from the fridge. Took a reading at 2.5% potential alcohol by volume. Capped and shook up the bucket to get some more aeration.

Post-mortem:

• I was a little sloppy with sanitation this time.
• The thermometer appears to be correctly calibrated.
• The staged water bath seems to work well enough, although it did still take about an hour to get it down to the right temperature for pitching the yeast.

28 October 2015

The fermentation hadn't started, so today I re-pitched with one of the new White Labs strains that comes in a soft pack (British Ale?). Fermentation was proceeding nicely by the morning of 29 October. It's still going 1 November, but only one bubble every 20 seconds or so.

8 November 2015

Bottling day. Scrubbed and sanitized 48 bottles. The Cooper’s kit came with little sugar pellets to use for priming, and I boiled 50 of those in a pot of water and added a spoonful of yeast energizer as it cooled. Major note for next time, I need to use the 5-gallon fermentation bucket for bottling; the kettle is absolutely not big enough and I could have gotten another ten bottles if I had planned more carefully. Gravity reading after adding the priming sugar was 1% potential alcohol by volume, so this is shaping up to be the weakest beer ever made. The taste was actually pretty good, very malty with a touch of burnt caramel, although it did seem kind of watery. The yeast seemed very active; the beer foamed slightly when I was stirring up the priming sugar and I could hear air escaping from the bottles after I had filled and set caps on them but before crimping.

Tasting

Excellent carbonation, terrible taste. It turned out thin and watery, and what flavor there is musty.

For next time

• Get a spray bottle for sanitizer.
• Don’t use the boiling kettle for bottling; it’s not big enough.