My First Batch

I brewed my first batch of beer after work on Friday. I had an experienced brewer come and show me how it's done. I used the burner from a turkey deep-fryer to provide the heat source, and a kit of pre-measured and pre-packaged ingredients from a beer-brewing supply place.

There are a lot of different ingredients that go into a home brew recipe. First, there's water. Then, a generous amount of a syrupy substance derived from barley, called malt. The flavor of the beer comes from a mixture of grains like wheat, rice, or rye. There is this plant called hops that gives beer a distinct flavor, and acts as a preservative. Last is the yeast.

Yeast is a microorganism in the family of fungi, which is where mushrooms and blue cheese culture are found. Yeast is important for leavening of bread, and production of cheeses, as well as the fermentation of alcoholic beverages. Yeast eats sugar and craps out alcohol and carbon dioxide. The nice thing about yeast is that it makes spores, which are dormant forms of itself, which can be dried and stored away for years.

There is quite a bit of equipment required to brew beer. First, a gigantic steel pot and a source of heat is needed to get the water boiling. After cooking, it is important to cool down the mixture quickly, so there is a set of cooling coils made from copper tubing that you run cold water through. It goes into the pot after the heat is removed. A thermometer is used to test the temperature, so you know when to add the yeast. After cooling to the right temperature, the mixture is placed in a giant bottle, like the one found in a water cooler. It has a six-and-a-half gallon capacity. A rubber stopper with a strange s-shaped tube closes the top of the bottle. This lets gasses escape as the fermentation process proceeds, as the bottle sits for a week in a cool, dark place.

And that is just the beginning. There is more equipment needed later on, when the fermentation is complete. Mostly, it consists of another huge water bottle, this one with a five-gallon capacity. This is for the second week of letting it sit around in a closet or other cool, dark place. There is alos a siphon that facilitates the transfer of the pre-beer to the new container. After that, you need a large bucket to hold the beer as you bottle it. Did I mention bottles?

I started by heating the water to not quite boiling.Then, I addes the syrup and dropped a huge teabag with about two pounds of unknown grain into the pot. I steeped the grain, a lot like making tea, for about a half hour, then added some hops. I boiled the heck out of it at full blast for an hour and a half, adding more hops at different times. After the last hops were in, I used the cooling apparatus to get it down to the temperature that yeast is happy with. Then, I poured the warm mixture in the big bottle. I opened a tiny packae of dried yeast, and added it to a cup of warm water, and let it stand for a few minutes. Finally, I poured the yeast mixture into the brew bottle, stirred it in, and corked the bottle.

I put the bottle in a closet, and now I'm waiting for a week to pass to proceed to the next step. What will I find? Will I get a nice brew mixture, or a nasty, smelly mess that I have to throw away? Check back and see. My next post will be a progress report as I go inspect the bottle to see what is happening.