Homebrew

[RunDownHouse]

I just kept typing so this was really long. Summary: I tried brewing beer for the first time this weekend. It took over two hours start to end, most of which is watching the beer boil. I found it fun and interesting, and even though I messed up a couple times, I'm hopeful about the beer that will be ready to drink in about 4 weeks.

My birthday was a couple weeks ago and I was ecstatic to find that a good friend had ordered me this homebrew kit. I've been reading about brewing my own beer for some time now, but between long hours at work, trying to get lots of hands in for the accelor-8 bonus, and general distraction, it was pretty easy to put off actually going out and buying what I needed to get started.

For those who don't know, brewing can be distilled down into a couple basic steps. First, boil your ingredients to provide fermentables and flavor. Then, add yeast and let the little suckers go to work for a few weeks. Obviously things can get much more complicated once you get into the chemistry of what's happening in each stage and the finer points of flavor, color, mouth feel, and so on, but for beginners it really is almost that easy. The ingredients I had were for a beer called "Portland Pale Ale."

Something that is emphasized in every brewing how-to is that the most important thing during all steps of the process is sanitization, so I started by filling my fermenter with sanitizer and dumping in my stirring spoon, a measuring cup, my wort chiller, and everything else that would touch my brew after it was done boiling. While that stuff soaked, I filled my 30qt. brew kettle with about 24qts of hot water and set it on to boil.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited. It took over 30 minutes for me to bring that much water to a boil. If I'd bothered to time it out beforehand, I could have scheduled my day a little better. Another tip: cover your stovetop with some aluminum foil before you get things going. This will save you a ton of trouble later if you have a boil-over. Once the water reached a boil the first time, I took the pot off the heat (electric stove) and added the liquid malt extract. This is malted barley that has been processed into a very syrupy liquid. It contains lots of sugars that are released over the course of the boil, and these provide the fermentables on which the yeast feed. This stuff was really thick, and I had some trouble pouring it out while stirring with my other hand. I got some on my arm and it tasted sweet, but in a different way than maple syrup.

Once the liquid malt extract was dissolved, I put the kettle back on the heat and brought it back to a boil. I then added the bittering hops. Hops, in general, give beer its bitter taste. Lightly hopped beers, like porters, will have more of a sweet taste, while highly hopped beers, like India Pale Ales, are generally very bitter. Bittering hops are those used early in the boil to give the beer most of its hop flavor. Flavoring hops are added right at the end to give it a finishing taste and aroma. Once the hops were in, it was time to sit back and stir the beer occasionally. I had a couple close calls with boil-overs, but nothing too serious.

After boil, you have to cool your wort (pronounced "wert," its the concoction of water, boiled malted grain, hops, etc) as quickly as possible to help prevent contamination. From the moment the wort stops boiling until the time it is in a bottle or keg, every step is done with preventing contamination in mind. Since I was going to be cooling such a large volume of water, I bought a wort chiller, which is a copper coil that you hook up to your faucet. Running cold water through a chiller is much more efficient than using an ice bath, so if you're going to have more than 3 gallons of wort I definitely recommend it. After a couple minutes of using it, I noticed that the joint between the rubber hose coming from the tap and the copper tubing had come loose and was leaking tap water into my wort! I turned off the tap and tightened the fitting as quickly as I could, but some water got into my wort. That was my first big misstep.

As the wort cools, all the coagulated proteins and other detritus falls to the bottom of the pot. Forming a layer called the trub, leaving this in your beer for too long will make it hazy and cause off-flavors. The kit I got said it had a siphon in it, but when I went to look for it, all I found was some rigid plastic tube and no hose of any kind. I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I was supposed to siphon with that, and since I didn't double-check before I started, I didn't have any way to siphon my wort off of the trub. I ended up just dumping all of it in to my fermenter, slowing down at the end to try to leave as much sediment as possible behind. This was big mistake number two.

After the wort was in the fermeneter, I added my brewer's yeast and shook the hell out of it. At this point you want to get as much air mixed in solution as possible, for the yeast to use. Then I sealed up the fermenter and set it in my kegerator, which I had adjusted to hold at 64 degrees, to ferment. Its going to take about a week, after which time I'm going to siphon it into a secondary fermenter. Hopefully I'll leave all the trub behind this time, and the beer will both clear up and mellow in taste a little bit. Then I bottle it for a week or two to get it carbonated, and then its drinking time. It should come out to somewhere between 5 and 6% ABV.

Overall, it was pretty fun. It made my whole apartment smell like the boiling wort, which is a pretty unique smell that I can't really describe. I can't wait to try this batch out, and I'm definitely looking forward to getting more kits and trying to brew different styles. Hopefully I'll soon move into kegging, since I've got a lot of the setup for that already and its much less of a pain than bottling.