Weekend Zymurgy

This past weekend, I finally took the plunge into homebrewing. It's a nice way to reach back through the years and have fun with tradition. Back in the 17th century, the folks on the Mayflower brought beer with them to the New World and, in fact, they ran short. And so homebrewing started in this country shortly after white people landed. Wisconsin has a long tradition of brewing which I've detailed elsewhere. Prohibition put the kibosh on things and it wasn't until the late 1970s that homebrewing became decriminalized. From RealBeer.com:

It began before California Sen. Alan Cranston introduced the legislation to legalize homebrewing and President Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1978. "It was more a matter of decriminalizing it," said Charlie Papazian, who became the evangelist for the movement. "It added a comfort level for the shops selling ingredients. People were more willing to stock good ingredients, to advertise they had them."

Having German blood, there is little doubt in my mind that I'm following in the footsteps of my forebears.

The first thing I did was get a bunch of brewing equipment from my buddy Ed. I then bought a beer kit from the Wine and Hop Shop. I chose Warbler Ale, an American Pale Ale (I'm part English too). I just felt all hoppy that day. The kit sat around for a while but I finally got my ass in gear last Saturday. The first thing I learned was to make sure you have shit everywhere.





Valves, tubes, a thermometer, a hydrometer, buckets – just keep it all at hand. Next, I began to sterilize my fermentation tank. By this I mean fill up a 6.5 gallon bucket with bleach water. I also threw the thermometer, the bucket's lid, and the fermentation lock into bleach water in the sink. I filled my pot with the requisite amount of water and put the grains from the kit in the cheesecloth sock and brought it up to 160 degrees.



Next I weighed out some hop pellets. Mmmm…Fuggle hops…



The grain was barley and it filled the kitchen with a wonderful smell that made me think of Grape Nuts cereal. I'm under the impression that this part is just to impart extra barley flavor and doesn't actually influence all the chemistry of the brewing process that much. After cooking for the prescribed amount of time, I pulled out the sock and added the malt extract.



Now I had me some wort! The malt extract was a concentrated sludge of, well, malt. A bunch of barley was allowed to germinate and then dried and roasted. This process creates a bunch of enzymes in the barley and these enzymes help convert the starch to sugar. The barley is then crushed and thrown into water and boilded. (This is called "mashing".) The mashing process convert the starch to sugars. The liquid is removed in the lautering process. I suppose it is here that more water is removed and the malt extract results. Back in my kitchen, I boiled the wort for 45 minutes before adding the first bit of hops.



The precious bitter hops imparted their flavor. The wort also started to smell like beer instead of Grape Nuts. I let it boil for another 14 minutes and added more hops and let it boil some more.



The last bit of hops was then thrown in and I let it boil another minute before removing the pot from the stove and putting it in ice water to cool down to 75 degrees or so.



As my wort cooled, I emptied and rinsed my bucket. The next step was to put 3.75 gallons of cold water into the bucket. When the temperature was right, the wort was added.



I then added my yeast and brought the bucket to the basement where it would ferment. At this point I had beer! I affixed the lid and put in the fermentation lock. The fermentation lock is this twisty tube hoolie that you fill up with water. As the yeast eats the sugars, it converts them into carbon dioxide and alcohol. The lock allows the CO₂ to escape without allowing air to enter. I was brewing ale and this meant that the yeast was top-fermenting.



The instructions say to let the beer ferment for 7-10 days. I'll have to get the hydrometer out this weekend and check out the specific gravity of my brew. This tells me how much sugar there is still dissolved in the liquid. If there's still a lot of sugar, my reading will show that the beer is denser than distilled water. As the yeast does its job, there's more alcohol there and alcohol is less dense than water. I'm a bit nervous that I forgot to sterilize something or that the yeast or wort wasn't at the right temperature or whatever and so I have this nagging feeling that I completely fucked up this batch. At the worst, I'll have to dump it out and start again. If I'm lucky, I'll be bottling soonish.

Overall, it didn't really take too long and it was actually quite a lot of fun. Plus there's just that DIY spirit to it. Boiling and stirring and pouring and waiting instead of just heading to the liquor store and pulling a sixer out of the cooler. I don't even know if the stuff will be drinkable yet I still have this sense of self-satisfaction that it's me that's making the precious beer, it's me embracing tradition and following in the footsteps of my forebears.