brew number 1

So the first brew is fermenting as we speak. It's been a fairly quick few weeks since the madness of Christmas and due to the fact that the grainfather isn't going to be available in the UK until April at the earliest, we decided that we would just go ahead with starting a brew from a kit, ostensibly to test the setup, but in reality we just wanted to brew some beer!

Given our wives wouldn't be overjoyed at the thought of a beer fermenting in the spare room with the kids running about, we decided that the garage would be our base of operations.  The only problem - Scotland is cold..very cold!  So after talking through our options, including insulating a garden shed, having a look at what others are doing online and going for the 'lets just see what happens' approach, we decided on a fridge to keep the beer warm.

A strange thought you would think, but in reality a fridge is designed to be really well insulated, so it is the perfect solution.  I remembered having picked up a thermostat and soil heating cables for a propagator in a sale in B&Q a few years ago for next to nothing, so we figured we'd give it a go and use that to regulate the heat in the fridge.

A quick check on gumtree found a homeowner looking to get rid of a fridge just down the road from us (note: if you're going looking for a house in the middle of nowhere in the dark and with no mobile signal, don't rely on your phone's GPS!).  Once we got it back to the garage, out comes the drill and before long, we've hacked the fridge with a thermostat and heater.

Notice the sturdy plywood shelf - 25 litres of soon to be beer can be heavy!
The big day arrived, we got some tunes going and started into our first brew, a Youngs American Pale Ale, as recommended by the guys in The Brewstore in Edinburgh.  To be honest, it was really straightforward and not as exciting as we'd imagine brewing from grain is going to be in a few months time, but it gave us an idea of some of the processes and allowed us to test out the fridge experiment.  The fermenting brew went into the fridge fairly cold.  Our thermometer only went down as far as 16C and it was less than that.  We weren't really holding out much hope for the soil warming cables to heat up that much liquid to the requisite 18-24C we needed for the yeast to do it's work.

Lo and Behold, upon checking later that night, the brew was hitting 28C!  Praying we hadn't killed the yeast altogether, the door was opened to allow it to come back down to a more reasonable temperature and now it's staying steady at around 20-22C.  Things certainly seem to be happening, but watch this space..