Homebrewing: Batch brewed, lessons learned, part one

Friends, since my last post, I have embarked on the homebrewing journey.  For better or worse, I have joined my wonderful wife in playing with microbes here in the "House of Fermentation."  She makes sourdough, yogurt, kefir, and kombucha.  She also soaks grains before cooking with them, just to get a touch of fermentation going and increase digestibility.  Perhaps more to the point, she looks like she's having a hell of a lot of fun, and I gotta say, the results are darn tasty.

I had thought for months about joining the microbial circus by homebrewing, but I would stop myself by thinking about the simple fact that there are a lot of wonderful beers out there.  Did I really need to make beer when there are so many lovely ones to drink?  Eventually, I answered "yes!"  I just couldn't shake the idea!  So, I went to Adventures in Homebrewing in Taylor, MI, where the helpful folks set me up with an equipment kit and ingredients to make English brown ale -- it's a style that I know and like, and the recipe kit was labeled "easy."  I also attended their Teach a Friend to Homebrew Event, where I mingled with novice and expert homebrewers alike and got a lot of good tips.  I was ready.  I was inspired.  I was thirsty.

The next day, I commenced my journey.  I read the instructions and laid out the ingredients in their handy little packets.  As the clerk at Adventures in Homebrewing told me, making beer is not rocket science.  Perhaps not, but by the end, I knew that it might take a minute to learn to brew a beer, but it takes a lifetime to master.  Othello, anyone?

At the homebrewing shop, I had contemplated buying a 5-gallon stock pot, but I was told by one helpful homebrewer that for the boil -- the only step where the pot is needed -- I could get away with a 3-gallon pot.  Hey, we had one of those!  Yes!  Money saved!  Alas, another homebrewer -- one of the super-experts -- had talked about rinsing steeped grains in warm water, which would add to the volume.  And yet another had mentioned that getting into homebrewing to save money on beer is like buying a fishing boat to save money on fish.  It just doesn't work that way.  So, in hindsight, it was misguided to try to go with the 3-gallon stock pot, but try I did.

I put 2.5 gallons of Ann Arbor's finest water into my 3 gallon pot, brought it up to the designated temp, and put the muslin bag of malted grains in.  Glorious!  It steeped to make an aromatic barley "tea," and that was my first hint of what it would become.  Homebrewing is a process of constructing a beer while deconstructing your idea of beer.  Just when you think you know about beer, homebrewing breaks it down to its components, and for me, smelling that steeped barley was a signal moment.  There would be other such moments, like when I broke open the bags of hops, but the first was powerful.

After steeping, I ran warm water through the bag of grain just like one of the homebrewing experts told me, nice and slow, rinsing those additional sugars into my developing wort.  No, I wasn't getting a lesion on my hand or foot.  I mean wort, pronounced wert, which is basically beer pre-fermentation.  It was time to add the malt extracts.  In this recipe, there were liquid and powered malt extracts.  Before pouring in the malt extracts, it occurred to me that the pot was looking awfully full.   But what the hell, I thought, and poured anyway.  All I can say in my defense is that it didn't overflow.

OK, now I had a really full pot of hot, sweet, barley-sugar water.  As in, up-to-the-brim full.  Crap!  I needed a 5-gallon pot right then.  Turns out that these are somewhat harder to find than they should be.  Or than they used to be.  My 5-year-old was standing there, and I asked him if he was up for a little adventure.  As usual, he was, and off we went.  I'll spare you the details, but let's just say he was a total trouper, and after running all over town, we found what we needed.  As an aside, I'll mention that I'm convinced that the relative unavailability of 5-galllong stock-pots is due to the decline in American home cooking.  Several merchants mentioned unhelpfully (but with very helpful looks on their apologetically-smiling faces) that they used to carry them.

Anyway, we finally got a pot and ran home again.  For his troubles and help, I promised my 5-year-old that I would name this beer after him if it turned out.  He appeared pleased at this and then went off to do something more interesting, like play knights or police or something.  There was a ginger transfer of the hot liquid to the new pot, and I was off and running again.  A bit humbled.  Perhaps even ashamed.  But still in business and full of hope.

The rest of the boil went well.  I kept time precisely and added bittering, aromatic, and flavoring hops on schedule.  The aroma was amazing and seemed right.  Simply right.  Fabulous!  After the boil, I cooled the whole shebang in a sink full of cold water, draining and refilling that several times until the wort was at the right temperature.  Then I transferred it without incident to the sanitized fermentation pail and pitched the yeast and aerated it.  I breathed a sigh of relief, but one remaining moment of total shock came next.  I was pressing the airlock into the lid of the pail when some of the water in the airlock went over the edge and into the beer -- totally predictable, given the fact that I was pressing that sucker into a small hole in an otherwise air-tight bucket.  Well, dear reader, I hadn't sanitized the airlock.  I had sanitized everything -- EVERYTHING -- else.  But not the airlock.  It wasn't a lot of water, but let's just say that the same medium that yeast love so much is a wonderful place to grow bacteria.  After some choice words under my breath and some basic relaxation exercises, I shrugged (que sera, sera) and put the pail in the laundry room with a space heater to keep it at fermentation temperature.

Time would tell.

Time did tell.