Project Homebrew

No, I didn't forget about you. How could I forget about you?

Perhaps you noticed (or more likely, not), I haven't posted anything for a while. Far from losing my passion for all things boozy, I've been taking some classes at Capital U this summer to further my alcoholic edification. The last eight weeks have been a bit like science boot camp. Their motto: "Eat. Sleep. Science". I don't recall sleeping much, but the rest seems about right.

My education hasn't been all theoretical, though. The day before classes began, I made my first batch of homebrew. I'm a big fan of  Dogfish Head Brewery, so when I saw a book by their master brewer, Sam Calagione, I snapped it up. Most homebrew books feature a simple (frankly, dull) brown ale as their first recipe. But this is Dogfish, and the name of the book is "Extreme Homebrewing", so the first recipe is the  boozy 9% abv A-Z Brown Ale, pumped up with molasses, brown sugar, maple syrup and Belgian candi sugar for those little yeast to munch on.

I bought my homebrew kit from Gentiles in Grandview, but was less than impressed with the service*, so I bought the actual ingredients for my brew at the Winemaker's Shop on High St in Clintonville. I was feeling a bit intimidated, but the hippie looking dude working the counter couldn't have been more helpful. I flipped open the recipe book and he boxed everything up for me in a few minutes. Nifty.

Brew day was somewhat less nifty. I had everything sanitized, and all the ingredients laid out in order on the counter, when I began to fill the brew pot with water. I had assumed the biggest pot in the house would be big enough for the five gallon boil. Turns out the pot was exactly five gallons, and a pot full to the brim doesn't stay full very long once it starts boiling. Adding to the indignity, I had already activated my yeast pack, and was starting classes the next day, so there was no chance to brew some other time.

After a brief pause to scream obscenities at no one in particular, I ran out to Gentiles and purchased a pot big enough to stew all of the yippy little dogs in our neighborhood at once.  Seriously, I can bathe in the thing. Once I finally got the water boiling, things went more smoothly. The book lists the times to add hops and sugars during the hour long boil, so if you can read a recipe, you can brew a beer. The nervy part starts when the heat is turned off.

At high temps, bacteria and wild yeast (causes gamey/sour flavors) can't survive, dimethyl sulfide (tastes like creamed corn) and dissolved oxygen (causes cardboard flavor) boil off  . Between 140 and 80, these undesirable microscopic critters thrive. The idea is to cool the wort off quickly in an ice bath, ideally within a half hour, and get the good critters (my American ale yeast) in the wort as soon as possible. Forty minutes later, my thermometer is stubbornly sticking above 90, and I'm out of ice. Luckily, I had sanitized the crap out of every possible surface in the kitchen, and I found some cold packs, so my beer doesn't taste like sour creamed corn on cardboard toast.

When I came downstairs the next morning, the airlock on the fermenter was bubbling away in the bathtub, meaning the yeast were doing their job turning sugar into alcohol. There is something very satisfying in the gurgle of that airlock, knowing beer is magically being created in your presence. Plus, it makes your guest bathroom smell like sourdough bread.

Two weeks later I was ready to bottle. I had, through much hard work and dedication, managed to empty two cases of beer bottles. The bottling process is also fret with biological terror, as the beer is very susceptible to bacterial infections. Siphoning the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket minimizes splashing and adding oxygen to the beer for the critters to feed on. This takes a bit of practice, as evidenced by the sticky, beery mess I left all over the kitchen floor.

Another thing to put in the, "Things to Remember For Next Time" file is the fact that the bottling bucket has to be above the level of the bottle to work (duh). Unfortunately, the kitchen cabinets protrude just enough to sit the bottling bucket slightly dangerously close to the edge of the counter, leaving five gallons of beer wobbling perilously above my head. Crap. Halfway through, just as I was getting a hang of using the bottling wand, I realized I had forgotten to add the priming sugar that gives beer carbonation. Double crap. I carefully emptied the case of beer I had bottled back into the bottling bucket, added the sugar and started again.

So how did it turn out? After two weeks, I was concerned. The beer had a nice roasty carmelized flavor, and the final gravity reading confirmed the yeast had done their job in acheiving a 9% abv. But the beer was flat and syrupy--kind of like drinking vanilla extract. Worried I had done something wrong, I did some research,and found out that high gravity beers take longer to carbonate, and that some Belgian brewers don't touch their Tripels for six months. I've been trying one every Friday since, and this last week I finally got something resembling a head. Still needs a few more weeks though.

The thing about brewing is, once you do one, you immediately start thinking about what's next. That's why tomorrow, inspired by 21st Amendment's awesome watermelon wheat beer, I'm brewing a kiwi wheat beer, a little wiser from my mistakes and certain to make a boatload more. So if in five weeks I've made a great beer, I'm sure you'll hear all about it. And if not, it's on to the next brew.

*Subsequent trips to Gentiles have been considerably better. It also sells take and bake pizza in addition to wine and beer making supplies, and I think I was dealing with a bunch of the "pizza dudes" instead of the "beer dudes" on my first trip.