Home Brewing: The Joy of Beer
For a true beer lover the time spent mastering their technique and perfecting their recipe is something they take pride in and enjoy doing. While a beer lover may enjoy a cold brew, for many of us crafting the perfect brew and sharing it with others is the ultimate expression of our love for beer. After all what better joy can a beer lover experience than the look upon the faces of others when they realize that you have brewed a true masterpiece?
For me my love of beer began at a young age as my friends and I would spend our nights at very pubs and bars having a good time. While drinking with my friends was a lot of fun, I soon began to wonder if I had what it took to brew my own beer. It seemed simple enough, some hops, barley, and malt and presto instant beer right?
Well, I can tell you from experience it’s hardly that simple. The first time I tried to make my own beer the putrid liquid that I concocted wasn’t fit to wash my shoes with. It was terrible, bitter, and something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Did I quit? Did I decide that I simply didn’t have what it takes to become a brew master? No, I simply realized that it would take a little more work than I anticipated if I wanted to brew my own beer at home. Looking back I can tell you I should have known better. After all if brewing your own beer was easy then everyone would be doing it.
Do you want to know how obsessed I was with beer? Actually obsessed isn’t the right word, it implies something that is unhealthy. My love of beer is the opposite of that, it’s a part of my life and a hobby that I truly enjoy. My love of beer is so great that whenever I could take some time of off work I would plan trips to tour breweries and famous pubs. Beer was a central point in my life and being able to sit back in a famous pub and have a cold brew was my own personal heaven. I took even greater joy from being able to walk through and see the magical process that turned a pile of ingredients into the amazing and refreshing beverage that we know and love, beer.
As I walk through a brewery it’s hard to explain the rush of emotions that overcome me. I guess the best way to explain it would be to compare it to a kid walking through a candy factory. The aroma in the air is all consuming as you watch and wait for that magical beverage to finish brewing and be deposited into a bottle where it waits until some lucky person gets to open it and drink it.
As much as I enjoyed walking through and experiencing the sites and sounds of a brewery, this simply wasn’t enough. I wanted to experience the magic myself, I wanted to craft a brew that surpassed all others. Despite my initial failure I wasn’t about to give up, it may not be easy but brewing your own beer was possible. In fact there are countless examples of home brewed beers becoming major successes. While I wasn’t setting out to make a fortune brewing my own beer, I certainly wouldn’t mind if I could make some money with my creation.
But, I was getting ahead of myself. My first attempt at brewing my own beer was less than successful, in fact it was an outright failure. I decided that this time I would take a different approach. This time I invested in a much more complete home brewing kit, and instead of just diving in I started to do my research. It turns out that being a beer lover does not necessarily make you an expert at brewing.
The first thing I learned about home beer brewing is that you need to treat it as a process and take notes. Even though taking notes may not seem like fun, the only way to keep track of your successes and failures is to keep a record of what you are doing. This will enable you to keep from duplicating failing recipes, but more importantly it will enable you to reproduce anything that you consider a success. Imagine the frustration you would feel if you finished your brew and discovered that it was simply the most amazing beer you had ever had, only you couldn’t remember how to recreate it.
Rather than risk this make sure that you document everything. It’s best to treat brewing beer like a science experiment and be precise when listing ingredients and cooking times so that you leave nothing to chance. Remember that brewing beer takes time, and you are going to need to be patient. In fact it may be several weeks from start to finish, which means that you may spend a lot of time on a beer that is truly horrible. Instead of becoming frustrated if this occurs, it’s best to chalk it up as a learning experience.
After reading and doing what seemed like countless hours of online research, I was as ready as I was going to be. Let me tell you that I was both excited as well as a little intimidated. I consider myself a beer expert. I drink beer, I critique beer, and with my knowledge and self proclaimed expertise failure simply wasn’t an option. I couldn’t have my friends drink my own home brewed beer and think that it was anything but the best beer they had ever tasted.
While I had set my standard unbelievably high, I was confident that I would succeed. I would try, and if necessary try again and again until my beer met my high standards. While I knew that I had a lot of work ahead of me, I didn’t quite realize exactly how much I had put on my plate.
If you decide that you want to try home beer brewing these are the steps that you’ll need to take.
1. The first thing you need to do is to get your ingredients and equipment together. Remember that you are brewing something that people are going to drink, so make sure that all of your equipment is clean. This means that you need to sanitize everything with bleach, rinse it, and then allow it to dry before you even get started. In terms of ingredients you are going to need malt extract, specialty grains, hops, and yeast. While you can add some other ingredients to your brew, when you first start out making your own beer you should keep it simple. You need to be able to make a simple beer before you start to try to create something unique and different. Once you master the art of beer brewing then you can begin to experiment with adding your own unique ingredients to give your beer a distinct flavor.
2. The next step in the brewing process is to put your grains into a bag designed to contain them and then combine them with your malt into a pot of boiling water. Once the pot begins to boil you should start to add hops to the mixture. You should experiment with adding hops at different stages since this can impact the flavor and bitterness of the beer. Like everything else in the process make sure that you take notes so that you can either reproduce or avoid the process you use in the future. Generally speaking if you add hops when the liquid first begins to boil it will cause your beer to be more bitter. Hops added toward the end of the boiling process will add more aroma and flavor to your beer, but it will do so at the expense of less bitterness.
3. After finishing boiling the liquid, which is called wort, you need to get it cooled as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do this is to simply take the pot and place it in your sink surrounded by water and ice. Make sure that you have a clean thermometer handy so that you can closely monitor the temperature of the wort. Once it reaches about 80 degrees you need to poor the wort into a fermenter and if you need to go ahead and add a little water to the mixture to make sure that you get the batch size that you want.
4. Once the mixture is in the fermenter you should add your yeast, and then seal it. It’s very important that you have a tight airlock on your fermenter, if the container is not airtight the fermentation process will fail and you won’t end up with beer. You should allow the fermentation process to continue for around 1 to 2 weeks.
5. After the process has finished you should transfer the mixture to another container and add corn sugar, or another type of sugar to prime it. Now all that’s left is to bottle it, and then let it age at room temperature for around a month. During this time the yeast will ferment the sugar, creating carbon dioxide, which will carbonate your beer.
Now comes the fun and exciting part, tasting your beer. I’d rather not say how many times I attempted and failed to make a drinkable brew, but it was more than a handful. As you open the bottle it’s hard to explain exactly how you feel. It’s taken a lot of work and months to get to this point, so if you take your first drink and it’s terrible it’s a huge letdown. But while failure is definitely possible, there’s also the possibility that you’ve created a truly magnificent beer. It’s possible that you hold in your hand a beer that will change the world!
Before you take that first drink, especially if it’s your first batch, you need to try to temper your expectations. If you allow yourself to get to excited and it turns out you’ve made something awful the emotional letdown can be crushing. You can’t allow a single failure, or even a lot of failures to make you give up. If this is your dream then pursue it and don’t let a little adversity stop you. The honest truth is that the first beer I made, if you can call it beer, was awful. The second and third weren’t really drinkable either, but they were better. Progress took some time, but if you keep at it you can make a beer that is uniquely your own, and flavorful and refreshing.
You know I could tell you my secret recipe and each step that I take when brewing my masterpiece, but I won’t. Not only is it mine and not something I’m willing to share, but if I gave you the easy way out it would take most of the fun out of it. The creative process may not be easy, but it’s a process that will help you to become a better beer maker. It’s taken me a lot of time to go from a beer drinker to a home brewing master. When I first started I thought that it would be easy, and boy was I wrong. But you know what, the journey has been worth it. As much as I loved visiting different breweries and drinking at famous pubs, there’s nothing quite like crafting your own masterpiece. If you want to brew beer at home remember that it’s going to take some time and patience, but in the end the hard work will be well worth it.