It all started by discovering Reddit's Homebrewing community which led me to read howtobrew.com and to Corrado's in Clifton, NJ where I bought my first kit and ingredients. The kit came with The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition by Charlie Papazian.
I started from the "Cincinatti Pale Ale" recipe from the howtobrew.com tutorial and slightly diverged on a few points:
The fermeter was kept at room temperature (between 65 and 68 F) for 2 weeks exactly and was bottled with 300ml of Light Malt Extract with 490ml of water (boiled for 4 minutes). The gravity before bottling was 1.020, which serves no purpose to mention since I forgot to measure it before fermentation.
Notes: The beer is very good to my standards, maybe just a little too bitter, which is probably due to the hopped malt extract syrup. v1.1 should use a slighly darker mark instead of the added syrup. While the head was huge in the first couple bottles, it settled in the following ones and is now perfectly acceptable.
Last updated: 2010-04-15