I recently had an epiphany while reading Charles Eisentein’s Ascent of Humanity (one of many epiphanies, it was an amazing book). My realization: one of the major problems with modern society is the sad reality that we are consumers of everything and rarely producers of anything. We have money in the US but no actual wealth. We’ve spent the last few decades making money instead of substance. This understanding has inspired me to begin making thing, lots of things that you’ll be reading about (and talking to me about) over the next few months.

Jane and Mandeep bought me a home-brew kit from The Home Brewery for my birthday back in July and I decided that this was going to be my first attempt at making cool stuff. I got my inventory list together and set off on my quest to become a brewmaster.

Using the American Lager kit from the aforementioned Home Brewery of Missouri, I followed the easy steps inside to produce what I’ll hope is an excellent first experience. If everything works out, after counting the initial investment in brewing supplies I’ll have spent $25 on 48 bottles of beer, costing me about 50 cents a bottle.

The first step involved putting 3.12 gallons of water in Jane’s 20-quart makeshift brew-pot. The American Lager kit is designed for 5-gallons of beer but I would need a 7-8 gallon pot (28-32 quarts) because of the likelihood of boil-over. I can boil the 3.12 gallons in Jane’s brew pot with all the ingredients while separately boiling the other 2 gallons which I’ll add to the main fermenter bucket at the end of the process.

After getting the water on the stove, I threw the grain from the kit inside the provided cheesecloth and placed it in the brew-pot. The grain must stay in the pot until my floating thermometer says its 170F. Once the temp reaches 170, the brewmaster must maintain the temp at 170 for 10-15 minutes while the grains soak in. If you go over 170, strange off-tastes will enter the brew. Once my thermometer hit 168 I turned the stove down to medium from high and that allowed me to steady the temperature at 169 for the whole 15 minutes.

After my 15 minute timer went off I removed the grains, removed the pot from the heat and poured in the malt, hops and other flavorings. The malt is really tough to dissolve in water, it takes a lot of stirring and it sticks to everything!

Once its all stirred in, the whole thing looks brown and then becomes amber, looking like beer. The boil-over didn’t occur as I had anticipated, I just stirred it vigorously as the pot reached a boil. After everything was good to go, I left it alone for 45 mins and then poured in the Irish Moss for additional flavoring. With 5 minutes left to go in the wort boil (the wort is what the beer mixture is called before it ferments) I added some finishing hops to lock the aromatic flavor within the mixture

While I was doing this, Jane was sterilizing the fermenter tub and grommeted stop-gap with the provided sterilizing agent. Beer making is a very intricate process that involves living organisms (yeast) eating sugars in the brew, producing CO2 gas and ethyl alcohol. We want the alcohol, the CO2 passes through the stop-gap (if you don’t allow the beer to vent, the tub will explode from the pressure!!). If there are unwanted visitors in your beer (molds, bacteria, other yeasts, bugs) strange flavors will be induced and the whole thing will turn out nasty and gross so sterilization is key. The bad guys won’t bother your wort when its boiling because its way too hot. They won’t bother you when the fermenter is sealed because they can’t get in. However, once the boil is completed, the wort must cool down to ~75F because the yeast won’t activate in higher temperatures. I don’t have a wort cooler so I had to use a sink full of ice and cold water. Let’s hope that didn’t mess the whole thing up.

this is what the wort looks like

I poured the 2 gallons of water separate from the wort into the fermenter first and then poured the cooled wort in. Then I added the yeast. As soon as the yeast hit the mixture, the CO2 started rising and it smelled rather unpleasant. I forced the fermenter lock on and poured a little vodka in the stop-gap to kill any bacteria that might try to come in through the air vent. All the air has to pass through the vodka, the CO2 bubbles out without a problem. I lugged the 5-gallons of my creation out to the garage and will check it in two weeks to see how we are doing!

The whole thing took just under three hours and it was a lot of fun! I’ll keep you updated! If this turns out successfully, I’ll be doing it quite a bit more.