Berta and I have started making beer at home. It’s actually not that hard, and it’s pretty rewarding as far as hobbies go. The effort is only a couple of nights out of a month, and the result is something tangible that you can enjoy and share.
We’ve actually been making beer for a little while now, since the beginning of June. Berta bought me a beer making kit from Artisan Homebrew for my birthday. The kit was a starter kit plus some extra parts. Altogether it included two brewing buckets, a glass carboy (basically, a big bottle with a stopper), some tubing, sanitizer, a siphon, a bottle capper, and some miscellaneous stuff essential to the brewing process.
Our first beer was a Brewer’s Best Witbier kit. A witbier is just a wheat beer - a very basic recipe. I like the lighter beers; the ones that aren’t too bitter. This Wit was easy to make and very tasty.
People have asked how long it takes to make the beer. There are a couple of answers. The process of boiling the beer ingredients and transferring them to the fermenter takes about 3 hours to set up and tear down. The fermenting process takes a bit longer, including a transition that moves the beer from the primary fermenter - where you first start the fermentation process - into the secondary fermenter, where the beer clears up and develops more deep flavor and finishing characteristics. Finally, the veer is bottled, and since we’re using natural carbonation, it has to stay in there for a while to get bubbly. Altogether, it takes about a month to make a simple beer.
Our second beer was not bad, either. It is a Saison - a farmhouse ale. The recipe is very simple, mostly owing to the fact that this type of beer was given to workers in older times as a beverage while working on a farm, since drinking water that wasn’t purified could lead to illness. We added a bit of black currant tea to the boil at the end, which gives the beer a slightly unusual flavor.
Also, we assembled the beer recipe at the shop. This is kind fo neat. Rather than using a kit or trying to match an existing recipe, we simply pulled ingredients off the shelf, plugged them into the computer to see what they would do, and made sure that the end result was predicted to be within the standard parameters for a beer of this kind. It turned out pretty well for not following any explicit instructions.
One thing that surprised me was how much Berta seems to enjoy making the beer, too. I thought that mayb eI would just have the equipment and make the beer myself, but she’s not only helping a lot, but really seems to be into making the beer. I’m glad. It’s something that lets us spend time together at home that we enjoy.
We currently have two things brewing in our little beer factory in the basement. The first, which will be ready to bottle next week, is a stout. I think we messed around with the formula for this one a little much, but we’re going to tough it out and see what happens. The conecpt is to produce a stout that is higher in alcohol than a usual stout, but keeps a more grainy flavor than a hoppy one. I chose some grains explicitly for the purpose of retaining a roasted character, including some small portion of smoked grain, which you usually don’t find in a stout. Then we added hops, but only an ounce, which doesn’t overpower the grain. The trick is that there is so much malt in this wort that the beer is likely to be a bit higher in alcohol content than even I planned, and the flavor of the alcohol has nothing as strong to offset it. I’m only a bit worried, but I’m anxious to see how it turns out.
In the primary fermenting bucket we’re making mead. Neither Berta nor I have ever had mead, so this could be interesting. I hope it’s decent. Mead is kind of in-between beer and wine-making. You mix ingredients like beer, but there’s no boil. The fermentation time is long - we won’t bottle until November, and the full character of the mead may not be realized for another 6 months. Mead is made from honey, rather than grains like beer is. The mead we’re making is a sweet mead, and I’m hoping that it turns out like I imagine it.
Next on the brewing schedule is pumpkin beer. If we start shortly after the mead moves to the secondary, we’ll have pumpkin beer throughout October. Pumpkin spices are used to give this ale its flavor. It’s certainly seasonal, but it’s enjoyable. I found a recipe that looks pretty good. We’re likely to try to gather fresh ingredients for it sometime next week.
Beyond that, I’d like to try to make an IPA, but I have no interest in drinking it. 5 gallons of beer is a lot of beer to give away. We had a tasty raspberry ale this past weekend from Sly Fox that would be fun to try to reproduce, but raspberries are likely to be out of season when we get around to it. We’ll see.
In all, it’s been pretty fun, since we get to both make and enjoy drinking the beer.
