A brewing story, accompanied by haiku

It's been a long time since I brewed any beer. Sad, I know. So when I got a flyer for 15% off from one of the mailorder places I have used in the past I figured it was a sign of beer to come.

As it's just starting to get hot for the summer, with plenty of heat yet to come, I went with a nice user-friendly wheat beer. Actually, I decided on a honey wheat. Anything for a little higher alcohol content, say I.

The box showed up Friday afternoon, right on schedule:



Thank you Uncle Sam
You know two hundred gallons
Is a lot of beer.

(It's legal for a head of household to brew 200 gallons of beer a year for household use.)

I unpacked it to make sure everything was there, and started the yeast going. For those unfamiliar with the process, the yeast package has an inner packet that holds the yeast culture. You basically pop that and the yeast floods into the awaiting sugar water, where it gets all excited and starts working. Once the package is all swollen up it's ready to use.



Small hungry creatures
Freed from a golden prison
Will bubbles appear?

Once the yeast was going I started mentally working through the process and trying to remember where I had stashed my brewing stuff. Anybody who hasn't brewed beer probably thinks it is an arcane and mysterious process, learned millenia ago by the ancient Egyptians. They aren't wrong - unfortunately this process is known today by a new name: Washing Dishes. Brewing beer is 95% cleaning and 5% cooking. So I started with the cleaning part, scrubbing out my brewing kettle and bucket.

Saturday morning I got up and started working on the brew. I finished up with the washing and sanitization and started heating up some water. Here are the ingredients from the kit:



Mixing chemicals
To alter your state of mind
Meth lab or brewhaus?

The missing ingredients in the picture are the yeast and the water. I now use bottled water, as there seems to be something in our tap water that makes my beer taste a little off. The baggy of crushed grains gets put into a sock to soak for about 30 minutes:



This is technically a "partial mash." But you don't care about that. After I finished with the sock, I added the malted wheat syrup and the honey to the kettle and brought it to a boil. Notice I have the kettle straddling two burners to keep the darn thing boiling good and hard. It was starting to get pretty hot in the kitchen.



If you are thirsty
In the home of Lucifer
Coors and Bud on tap

Then in goes one of the little bags of rabbit poops. No, really, they're hops pellets. They just look like that. When you add them to a boiling kettle it really freaks out. A big head of foam builds up and you really have to keep an eye on it (and a hand on the burner control) to avoid the dreaded boilover. (More on that later...) This is as close as I was willing to cut it before putting down the camera:




Scalding hot liquid
Throw in hops, answer the phone
Messy Boilover

At this point things slow down. This has to boil for an hour. La ti da... The other packet of rabbit poops goes in the kettle about ten minutes before the end of the hour, so I throw them in and set my chiller in the kettle to sterilize. You can put pretty much anything you like into the mix while it's boiling, but once you take it off the heat you are susceptible to infection in your beer. (Nothing like dumping a whole batch of beer just because you weren't careful...) Anyway, this way I don't have to do anything special to the chiller to sterilize it - the boiling wort does the work.

The chiller is basically a radiator-type heat exchanger. You want to cool the wort (it's technically not beer until you put the yeast in) as quickly as you can to minimize risk of infection as well as to get a good "cold break" - another thing you don't care about. I put it in the pot and foolishly put the lid on. Then, suddenly Claire needed help in the bathroom. Off I go with Claire.

Time elapses...

And when I return, Katy shows me what happened while I was gone:



So now I get to clean the stove in addition to the sink, counters, and floor. Hmm. Maybe *she* turned up the heat...

Anyway, no time to fool with that. I got the kettle out into the garage and started the chiller going. The input is connected to the garden hose and looped through a bucket of ice water to prechill. The output flows wastefully down the driveway. (What would Muad'Dib think?)



And here's the chiller on it's own:



After about thirty minutes it's ready to dump into the bucket. I strained it through a (sanitized) sieve to try to minimize hops crud getting into the fermenting bucket:



In the beer garden
Forbidden fruits now abound
O Reinhetsgebot!

Then I topped off the fermenter with water to get a total of five gallons and got the airlock and lid ready. The last thing I did before I pitched the yeast in and sealed it up was take a sample to find the original specific gravity:



Making beer at home
With municipal water
Chemistry lesson

Those of you who remember your chemistry will recognize this device - it measures how much sugar is in a solution. The amount of sugar in the wort can be translated into a potential alcohol content for the end product - assuming a perfect and complete fermentation. As you can see, this beer has a potential to reach 7% alcohol. It probably will end up around 5% though - I'll take another reading before I bottle it.

Then, of course, I had to clean the kitchen. Oh well.


Let's go back to www.flyingw.org