Opening first bottle tonight!

I put two bottles of my first batch in the fridge this morning. It's been two weeks today since bottling. Still not quite sure what it is I made. It will be interesting to see how it came out.

Now that the warm weather is approaching I'm going to have to make some changes. I don't want to have to run an A/C all day to keep my brews at the proper temperature. I think I'll have to start storing my primary and secondary in the front stairwell. It is always several degrees cooler in there. The problem is that the front stairwell is where I am storing all my equipment when it's not in use. I guess I'll have to spend some time rearranging things.

I'm most likely going to brew this weekend. I've been checking out posts on various homebrew forums about pitching the harvested yeast. Some people say make a starter and others say that if it's only been in the fridge for two weeks to just pitch it with out a starter. Some say pitch it cold right from the fridge and others say to take it out a few hours before to let it warm up. This will be the first brew that I am steeping grains, but I don't think that will be a very big deal to do.

I'm thinking that my next batch after this weekend will be an all or partial grain attempt. I'm not sure how I'm going to do this exactly. It's either, mash on the stove and hope I can get the temps (step mash) right, or, step by adding more hot water to the mash. I still have to get another bucket to make the Igloo/double bucket sparge tun.