Changes

Once your boil has finished, you want to cool the hot wort to room temperature as quickly as possible to reduce the chance of infection. Many beginning brewers immerse their pot in a cold ice bath. Adding very cold water to the wort to bring it up to your target batch size (usually 5 gallons) will also help. More advanced brewers will use a chiller such as an immersion coil that runs cold water through a coil of copper tubing to quickly cool the beer. If needed, add water to the wort when you transfer it to your fermenter fermentor to achieve the target volume of 5 gallons.

The wort at this stage is very vulnerable to infection so you need to make sure that your fermenterfermentor, airlock, siphon tubes and anything else that touches the wort or yeast are thouroughly thoroughly sterilized. I use a solution of 5 gallons of water and small amount of household bleach to sterilize my equipment. However if you use bleach you must carefully rinse everything with hot water or you risk leaving your beer with a chlorine taste.

Your wort must be fully cooled to room temperature (72 F or so) and siphoned or dumped into your fermenter fermentor before you add (pitch) your yeast. Don't worry too much about all of the gunk (hops and proteins) in the wort - most of it will fall to the bottom during fermentation. Pitching yeast in hot wort will probably kill it off, so wait until your wort has fully cooled before adding yeast. I highly recommend the use of liquid yeast as it is far superior in quality to dry yeast. Liquid yeast comes in either a plastic tube or smack pack. The plastic tube type can be added directly to the wort. The foil smack-packs require you to pop an internal pouch containing the yeast several hours before pitching it to allow the yeast to grow in a self contained starter. Follow the instructions on your yeast pack to prepare it and then carefully add it to your fermenterfermentor. Once the yeast has been added and mixed in, close the top, fit your airlock (which needs a little water in it) and set your beer in a dark cool place where the temperature is steady.

Your airlock should begin bubbling within 12-36 hours, and continue fermenting for about a week. If you see no bubbles from the airlock, check the fit on your plastic pail and airlock. Often plastic fermenters fermentors have a poor seal on the lid that leaks. The bubbles in the airlock are CO2 produced by the fermentation, and will slowly tail off as fermentation nears completion. Assuming you have a good seal, the bubbles should slow to one every minute or two before you consider bottling. As a minimum I would ferment for a week before considering bottling a beer.