In Anticipation of the Brew

While, I’m not new to home brewing, I definitely consider myself an amateur. As such, I am awaiting the near completion of the final stage of our Milk and Honey Stout with equal parts eagerness and dread. I can already point to some things that went wrong:

1. We probably waited too long after buying our kit to start brewing. I don’t know what the half-life of one of those packages of WYeast is but letting it sit in the crisper drawer for two weeks probably wasn’t optimal for the health of the critters living in there.
2. Our wort chiller was missing an adapter so we couldn’t use it. As anyone who has ever boiled a substantial amount of liquid will tell you, it takes FOR-F#@%ING-EVER for it to cool of its own accord. Impatience eventually got the better of us and rather than pitching the yeast at between 65-72 degrees like the recipe called for, we pitched it at 80.
3. We did not move the wort to a secondary fermentation in a carboy. Saturday was something of a s%&* show between my being sick and our having plans which required us to be in the Loop that evening. In asking the internet for advice, they suggested that all this bulls#&$ was just going to result in infected beer and that I was better off just leaving it in the brewing bucket until bottling day.
4. Probably bottled too early. The initial gravity of our beer was 1.061 and the final gravity was 1.030. Some rudimentary math shows that our beer, by those numbers, is going to end up around 4.1% ABV. That’s like, half, of what you expect for a milk stout. Not a good sign, but then again, it’s entirely possible I f@*$ed up one, or both readings. Or that said readings were off because of temperature differences in the wort at the time of the measurement.
5. Even though I scrubbed the s%&@ out of those bottles and sanitized (and re-sanitized) them, the things I saw come out of them will haunt my dreams. I’m sure they’re fine. Hell, I’m even planning on giving some to my friends and relatives. Needless to say I’m not drinking any of that s@&$ out of the bottle. It goes in a glass where I see it. I guess this is the home brewers equivalent of “watching the sausage get made”.

At any rate. I’m nervous about the results. We’ll see how Saturday goes.