Once we got the idea to make a one gallon batch, we bought most of our initial home brew supplies during one of our trips to Flying Barrel while making our wine. That first trip of stuff was:
sanitizer
6.5G fermenting bucket
auto siphon
airlock
wort aerator
bottle washer
grain steeping bag
Smack-pack of Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan
We had originally planned to buy a 1-gallon wheat beer kit from Northern Brewer, but at some point after the Flying Barrel trip, we decided to just buy the ingredients ourselves. I also read more about the benefits of racking to a secondary fermenter, and decided we needed a carboy. And we figured out that our scale wasn't specific enough for measuring the right amount of hops to go into a one gallon batch. The next trip was to Annapolis Home Brew:
Spray bottle for the sanitizer
1 gallon glass carboy w/ plastic top w/ hole
test tube for measuring gravity
dry wheat extract
german hallertauer hops
scale that measures to the tenth of a gram
And finally we had everything we needed! Actually, not quite. We stepped through the process looking over our equipment, and realized the auto siphon didn't come with any plastic tubing. I also started to realize that just using 8qt stock pot wasn't going to work, since all the boil-off and other losses meant we needed an initial boil volume of at least 2G to do a full volume boil. One more trip, this time to Maryland Home Brew:
5' of plastic tubing
2G fermenting bucket
20qt brew kettle
Okay, finally now we did have everything, and it was time for our first ever home brew!
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