Bill and Jon's Excellent Beer-Making Adventure

There's an old adage about food that says something like "if you make it yourself, it's always going to taste better than something someone else makes for you." I'm not exactly sure that's true (I've had some pretty delicious cheeseburgers prepared for me that I don't think I could recreate), but it is true that if you make something for others, they'll tell you it's good even if it's not. Unless you're at a restaurant or on Iron Chef, in which case no matter what you do, people will say it's not that great.

With that in mind, I decided that I wanted to brew beer. This was made especially easy after Kate got me a sweet brewkit for my birthday. Boil kettle, fermentation bucket, bottling bucket, siphon tubes, bottle wand, hydrometer, capper, the whole works. Plus all the ingredients to make my first beer! I could either use all the hops and aim for an IPA, or leave out the last hop addition and get a hoppy pale ale. I chose IPA. Might as well go all out.

To assist me in my efforts slash help me make a mess of the kitchen, Bill came up. I figure if one person with no idea what's going on can make a beer (according to my books and the guy at Brewtopia), then two people with no idea what's going on can make a beer that's twice as disastrous!

I started the first 2 gallons of water boiling before Bill arrived since watching water boil is about as exciting as... well, watching water boil. I also put the grain bag in there, so when he walked in (with a sweet Iced Mocha Latte for me!), there was already a nice grainy aroma permeating the kitchen. We quickly took care of our lattes and got serious about brewing, which basically means that we started drinking Pumpkinhead and let the water keep boiling. I kid you not, the first step in my instructions is "Relax. Don't worry. Have a homebrew." As this was my first batch of beer, no homebrew was available, but the directions said it was ok to substitute a different craft beer.

Once we hit the boiling point, things started to get crazy. Bill took the steaming hot grain bag outside to dump the grain while I started adding malt. And also the priming sugar, which I was not supposed to do, but I got a little over excited mixing things into the pot and it wasn't labeled. So that was mistake #1. I also stuck the first hop addition back into the grain bag, tossed it into the boil and set my clock for 60 minutes. I am not sure the grain bag is supposed to be used for hops, but I have no way to filter the hops out of the wort, so my options are a bit limited at the present.

Two more hop additions with 30 minutes to go and 5 minutes to go, and the "beer" was done. We put 3 more gallons of water into the fermentation bucket, I prepped the yeast and we started cooling our wort. Sadly, I was very impatient and only let the beer cool down to about 90 degrees before I decided to pitch my yeast. This was mistake #2. The ideal temperature for yeast is about 65-70 degrees, which I only learned about a week later. However, the yeast packet told me to activate it at 86-92 degrees, so I thought maybe things would be ok.

After about 9 days, the air lock on my fermentation bucket still hadn't done anything. Thinking that obviously I had killed the yeast with the high temperature, I picked up a second packet at the homebrew shop in Northampton where I learned an interesting fact. Apparently with the high humidity of the summer, sometimes the lid on the fermentation bucket can't seal completely, so the air escapes out the sides of the lid instead of through the air lock. The guy told me to pop the top and check for signs of fermentation. And it's a good thing I did (although I would have had to pop the top anyways since I was going to pitch a second yeast packet), as the beer had fermented! I decided to let it go a couple more days to account for the extra sugar and make sure the yeast had eaten everything. Go yeast! So it turns out that mistake #3 was thinking I had made a huge mistake and being wrong about it. Not too bad.

Finally, 13 days after brew day, it was time to bottle. I am a little paranoid about sanitation, so pretty much everything that touches the beer is doubled sanitized. Siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket was super easy (and a lot of fun) with my tubes, and I think I might get a second siphon to use as a pug sprayer. Then I started the bottling process. Bottling is also really easy, but I think next time I'm going to want a second person around to help. Or I'm going to need to evolve a second pair of arms. It was simple enough to fill a few bottles and cap them, but I think an assembly line process would just be smoother.

All in all, I ended up with 41 bottles of beer along with a puddle on the floor. That seems like a low total, so I'll have to check next time that I used enough water. It should be ready to drink by Labor Day weekend, so I'm pretty excited. You know, assuming that no hurricanes destroy it.

-Jon