New Kid, First Beer & Mistakes

[PortlyPorterGuy]

This week was a monumental one in my life. My 3rd kid, Timothy Michael was born on Wednesday. Even though this is #3, it's still freaking amazing. A slightly less important, ok much less important event happened this week as well. I bottled my first homebrew, a Nut Brown Ale from extract.

The recipe/instructions that came with the kit are clearly geared toward the newbie and leave a few things out I guess to keep it simple. Unfortunately even after reading lots of material and after listening to countless hours of TBN programming I made a couple of mistakes. My question to you guys/gals is, what will these mistakes do to my beer?

Mistake #1 - I steeped the specialty grains past 170F. I now know that this will extract tannins. The kit instructions said to steep up to the start of the boil.

Mistake #2 - I left only 1/2 inch of head space in my bottles.

-Portly
http://mytimetobrew.info

[Lufah]

It'll be fine. You can worry about fixing little shit like that later. For a first batch it'll be great.

Travis

[seanhagerty]

The only thing I really know about home brewing is NOT to listen to lufah!


But in this case, pay attention to what he says. You will be fine...and so will your beer.

[Push Eject]

Ditto to Trav' and Sean. Your beer will rock. What are describing are not problems but ... "finesses..." (is that a word?).

More importantly, CONGRATULATIONS on bringing another brewer into the world. Your wife is a fucking champ and you are a loser schmuck. Nicely done.

Push Eject

[Speyedr]

Yeah CONGRATS Portly! My Wife and I had our first on June 3rd and for the life of me I can't figure out how you managed to bottle less than one week afterward!

I used to be the cleanest most retentive brewer around. Now I have 3 empty kegs waiting to be cleaned and 20 gallons waiting to be kegged... I MIGHT get to them this weekend....

[PortlyPorterGuy]

Congrats to you too!

I bottled while my wife was in the hospital. I couldn't stay in the hospital at night, my other kids were at my wife's parents and the baby was in the hospital naturally so what's a guy to do? Bottle his beer of course. Now the problem is finding a few hours to brew again. Well shit this hobby is turning into an obsession.