Brewing my own Ale: Day 01 (woo!)

I would like to mark this as the day I first started what is hopefully going to be a long and illustrious history of brewing my own ale. As we speak, the ale has been 'pitched' and is sat in the garage doing its stuff.

I have never done this before, so I will understand if it is not great when it turns out in a few weeks. But hey, fingers crossed. I have followed all the procedures I should have done, so there is no reason why it shouldn't work. So here is what I have done so far, for all of those (all of you i guess) who are unfamiliar with the steps leading up to 'pitching' your ale.

First, I had to sanitise EVERYTHING. This was quite hard, as I was working in a garage full of other crap. If my beer falls down on anything, I think it is most likely to be contamination. Anyway, that aside, I had to wash what is essentially my entire brewery with water, and then soak and mix it all around with a bit of sanitising agent. To make things even harder, you have to actually wash the sanitising agent off all the stuff you just sanitised, unless of course you are attempting to poison your ale with chlorine- which i'm not.

I then dissolved a whole can of dark ale syrup and 1kg of brewing sugar in 2 litres of boiling water. I then topped it off with hot and cold water (to keep the temperature between 18 and 30 degrees, which is what yeast likes best) to reach just over 20 litres of ale. After much mixing, it was all ready to go. The mixture of all your ingredients before the addition of yeast is called the "wort" (pronounced "wert"). I read this mix is really vulnerable to contamination from anything that touches it, so I had to be really careful...

Unfortunately I dropped the lid of the syrup can in the wort. This can't have helped. I hope it didn't do too much harm, after all, i did fish it out with a sanitised brewing spoon. That makes it ok, right? Right?

As for the fermenting process, I am as of yet not there. Being a brewery noob, I thought if the yeast was happy it would start brewing straight away. To my alarm, I saw no activity in the water grommet (no bubbles).
I then went on home brew forums, fearing I had ruined my ale after only about 2 hours. Thankfully, I have been reassured that the yeast takes a little while to "wake up" even in perfect conditions. So I could see bubbles by morning, or by next morning realistically. Some brewers like to "wake up" their yeast beforehand in warm water and sugar, so I might try that next time if this doesn't go to plan.

The worst bit is the worrying about your mistakes, and the time factor. Right now, my barrel is sat on a heat mat with a blanket around it to keep cosy in the garage. I'll keep the blog up to date with how it is going, right up to the day I (hopefully) drink my first home brew ale.