Ok, so lacking the proper equipment and a grain source for all grain brewing I decided to try another extract kit. This time I went with Munton's Premium Bitter and enlisted the aid of a friend to help things go smoothly.
Which didn't really help... it seems that I had forgotten that the 1.5L of the kit threw off the total amount of water and we ended up using too much again :(. At the time I worked through the water math a few times to make sure that I didn't screw it up and I forgot about the bloody kit again... gah. This time I was also using the glass carboy that I got with the kit. I wanted to watch the beer brewing instead of trying to peer through a translucent plastic pail.
As a fix for the extra water we decided to add some more sugar to the mix. The gravity came out to about 1.034ish and we added another 150g of sugar to try and raise it. The kit mentioned 1.040 in the instructions, but we only got up to 1.036 with the addition of the sugar :P
I figured that it was going to blow over when the yeast started, so we placed it into the plastic pale to catch the overflow. The pail ended up being a good idea for catching the overflow, when I came down the next morning there was tons of foamy yeast sitting on top of the carboy and some wort in the bottom of the pail. The bad part of using the pail was taking the carboy out to clean off the overflow. It slipped out of my hands as I was setting it down... glass and concrete don't really like each other so it's a good idea to prevent the two from meeting in any sort of impact...
Several hours later with some cussing, some lacerations, some pumping, some moping and some more cussing I had manged to clean up the mess of 24L of glass shard infested wort. During the process I had somehow manged to misplace the sediment trap for the pump as well as hit my head on just about every low lying beam, air duct or light bulb in the basement as well as get soaked by the insolent pump (with beer and water) whenever I pumped too hard...
Suffice to say I shall no longer be using glass for primary fermentation for anything over a gallon.
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