Adventures in beer making

I think beer is neat. I like reading about the history of beer, the sociology of beer, the science of beer. I like drinking beer. I thought for quite some time that I should totally brew my own beer. So, I totally did. I bought a beer making kit. But before I ever made beer, I used the kit to make wine from the grapes in my yard... but back to the beer: I sanitized all of my equipment, boiled two gallons of water to sanitize ... itself.. and then put all of that hot water in a six gallon carboy. Which is a fancy word for a huge, heavy glass bottle. Once the water cooled a bit, I sat the carboy outside in the snow. Because this water has to get cold. The colder the better.








And then, I boiled more water. Three gallons more. The pot I have to use is gigantic.

I added a malt extract to the boiling water. This is a concentrate of all of the sugars and things that makes beer delicious. There's a very scientific method to all of this, but that's not important at this point because once I started boiling the malt extract my entire house smelled of a delicious combination of baking bread and beer.

I boiled my delicious smelling concoction, now called a wort and added it to my previously-boiled-and-then-made-cold water. Last thing to do- add the yeast. And that's pretty much it for a couple weeks. The yeast eats the sugars in the beer, making alcohol. It looks creepy and gross for a few days, and then you have to transfer the beer to a clean container. I decided to use an opaque beer bucket so I wouldn't have to see the carnage of the yeast feasting on the microscopic bodies of my beer's sugar.

This is about the time my attention span wanes. The beer sat in the carboy for a couple weeks, I transferred it to the opaque beer bucket to clear for another couple of weeks, and in the meantime, I've drank half a dozen six packs of store-bought craft beer.

I finally bottled my beer, using the bottles I saved from those six packs of store bought beer. Recycling! I felt like I had done my planet justice... and then, about halfway through bottling I realize that one of my favorite brewery's bottles have too wide a mouth to accept my bottle caps. I was bottling in a snowstorm... but that didn't stop me from walking to the neighborhood liquor store to get more beer, drinking several beers, sanitizing the bottles, and replacing them with my own brew.

A wise homebrewer once told me, "You should use kegs. You'll get sick of sanitizing and bottling entire batches of beer." After drinking a few beers in the service of making more beer, I understood exactly what he meant.

As I had mentioned before, I had lost my beer making excitement a few weeks prior, so once the beer got in the bottles I really didn't care where it went. So, it sat in a cold storage room for a couple weeks. Unfortunately, (and this is where the science part comes in again) the room was too cold for the yeast to finish its job of carbonating the beer.

I've since moved the beers to a sufficiently warm room, but I've sampled the flat beer and the flavor is magnificient. Once the beer has carbonated, I'll have to update on the finished product.

-That's the cool thing about beer making though... time can really work to your benefit... because craft beers aren't filtered, the more time they have to clear, the better they're going to taste. And thank god for that.