Recently, someone on r/Homebrewing posted asking to see more pictures of normal brewing process and results (as opposed to infected or otherwise ruined batches).

Turns out, I can’t add pictures to a post there, at least through the app, and no pics in the comments so thought I’d share some pictures and thoughts here.

Now, brew-day had already passed but in this case I did stop and take at least one picture. This is me dealing with the fact that I don’t have a pump to recirculate wort through my grain bed, to filter out solids before the boil.

Pretty boring stuff maybe, but I was enjoying the color so I snapped a pic to share with friends.

This was a creative brew, meaning rather than pick a recipe from some magazine or forum or whatever, I just went online at my LHBS and started selecting n lbs of base malt, and m lbs of this or that roasted malt, just selecting things I like and know that came together to taste nice in my head. It turned out to be more or less a porter. Now the next bit is what was directly relevant to the redditor’s request.

So that is my hydrometer, two weeks after brew day, taking a reading of about 1.014. That’s about as low as I have any reason to expect, so it’s “done” in many respects. 5.5% ABV. Normally I’d wait another week to move forward, hope for the yeast to settle down even more, but I wanted to have this ready in time for a visit so I’m charging ahead, moving to force carb.

I may come back and add a bit more later, but that’s pretty much it for now. I have some thoughts about what’s seen here, and maybe I’ll get to hear some (hopefully constructive) criticism, but yeah that’s just about it.