Like most beer geeks, I've always wanted to take the plunge and brew my own beer. After reading up on the process for years, my wife and I decided to pull the trigger and go for it. After re-reading the instructions for your first batch in Charlie Papazian's The Joy Complete of Homebrewing (the best book I've found on the subject), we were ready to track down the equipment and ingredients we were going to need.
Luckily for us, it turns out there is a terrific brewing supply store just a few miles from our apartment. Brew It Yourself, run by Ray Philbrook, sold us just about everything we needed. Since its generally my favorite style, we decided to make a Stout. And as my father-in-law had a heart transplant Sunday, we decided to name it Young At Heart Stout.
Here's the equipment we used:
- 22 quart kettle (sourced from Wal-Mart)
- Large plastic brewer's spoon
- Six-gallon bucket with airtight lid
- Fermentation lock (aka bubbler) with a stopper to fit the hole on the bucket's lid
- Hydrometer
- Sampler for hydrometer
- Probe thermometer
- Measuring cup
- Unscented bleach
- 1 four pound can of Edme Extra Stout malt extract (with hops and yeast added)
- 20 ounces of dark malt extract
- 1 pound of light brown sugar
- 1 packet of dry ale yeast (Safale S-04)
- 5 gallons of spring water (3 of them chilled)

At the end of the fifteen minutes, we put the kettle in the sink and filled it with cool water from the tap. The initial temperature was around 145°F. While waiting for it to cool, we rinsed off everything else that had been sanitized and added the yeast packet to one cup of 95°F water. After around thirty minutes, and several water changes, the temperature of the mixture in the kettle had dropped to around 97°F. We poured the three gallons of chilled water into the fermentation bucket and carefully added the cooled mixture.

Now we wait...
In about a week, when it's time to bottle, we're going to need to have about 55 twelve ounce bottles ready to accept the beer. A long time ago, I decided that I wanted to use New Belgium bottles, so I've been saving them off and on for a while now. I'm about twenty bottles short, so I guess I'm going to have to get drinking.
You can read Phase Two (Bottling) here
You can read the review of the finished product here