Boil a gallon and half of water.  Then turn off the heat and allow the grains to soak for maybe a half hour.

Once complete, you will want to squeeze the water out before disposing of the grain bag.

Warm the malt extract in a pan of water to make it easy to pour.

Along with the malt extract, place the bagged malt and hops into a large pot.  Some recipes call for finishing hops that are put in at the end, but this kit does not call for them.

Boil wort for an hour or two depending on the instructions.  You want to stir it regularly and be sure not to burn it.

Cool wort.  This is how I've done the initial cooling, followed by pouring in bottled water.  Now I'm leaning more in the direction of pre-cooling 3 to 4 gallons of water in the freezer until it is near the freezing point.

Place 3 gallons of pre-cooled bottle water in the carboy.  You can see my girlfriend's dog, Laika, is taking a sniff to see what the excitement is all about.

Normally, I siphon the wort into the carboy.  In this instance, I noticed there was very little sediment on my first pale ale, so I poured it directly into the carboy.

The reason why you want to avoid pouring boiling wort into an empty carboy is to avoid cracking it.

Fill the carboy with more bottled water until you reach the five gallon mark and then add yeast.

I oxygenate with 100% O2 through 0.2 micron filter.  Doing so will create healthier yeast cells with thicker cell walls.  The result is, the yeast will live longer and convert more of the sugars, and result in a higher alcohol content.

O2 is pumped through a 0.5 micron diffusion stone for a couple minutes.

A water trap has been inserted into the top of the carboy to reduce the probability of contamination.

Then the carboy is transferred into the refrigerator where the wort is kept between roughly 72 to 76 degrees fahrenheit.

This is from an earlier batch of stout beer and you can see there was blow off that past the water trap.  If it gets into the water trap, it is important to clean the trap and replace it to reduce the probability of contamination.  Some home brewers use a blow off tube for the first part of fermentation, but I've found it unnecessary so far.  The trap was cleaned prior to taking this picture.

Once fermentation is complete which might take one to three weeks, I then transfer it into two 2.5 gallon kegs.

Now it is setup to force CO2 into it.

Here is picture before the start of cleanup.  I didn't let it soak long enough, but got most of what you can see here.  I then filled it up with bleach water and let is soak overnight prior to finishing the cleaning proecess.