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Heck YES I’m making beer! What, you thought I was playing? Boo, I don’t play when it comes to Germany’s greatest invention. (Was beer invented in Germany? I should look that up. ::wikipediates:: Looks like it was invented in Mesopotamia. How about that.)

Anyway, I’d been wanting to give it a try for a while, so last Friday I headed over to How Do You Brew?, the nearest supplier of hardware and whatnot for making beer and wine. The gentleman in the shop, Joe Gallo, was EXTREMELY helpful, and I ended up staying about an hour, talking about the process and various tools. I bought the various tubs, tubes, and attachments, along with a kit containing the malt extracts and various hops and sugars. I wanted to make sure I had something super simple, that I couldn’t screw up.

Well of COURSE I screwed it up. C’mon, now.

The process starts with boiling a lot of water; various recipes call for various amounts in the initial boil. Almost all home recipes are designed to make 5 gallons of beer, but some call for you to boil all 5 gallons, some call for as little as 1 gallon of boil, and you just add the rest of the water later. This recipe called for a 2 gallon boil, and I happened to have a 2 gallon jug of spring water available, so I poured it in and gave a righteous boiling. While I did this, I filled a 7-gallon fermenter bucket with water and mixed in some sanitizer powder, and stuffed in all the various equipment that would touch the beer during the fermenting process.

When the water boiled, I poured in the two massive cans of malt extract (the kit supplies this so you don’t have to grind and steep your own grains, a complexity I may be ready for at a later date) and brought the mix back to a boil.

Here’s where I made my first mistake: the recipe was very clear about watching the pot to make sure it didn’t boil over. I took this to mean that as the boiling went on, various starches and things would make a foam on the surface that I would want to make sure didn’t spill out. So, thinking nothing of it, I dumped in the first package of hops.

Apparently hops and water and malt react violently, because roughly 2 pints of water exploded out all over my kitchen.

After the boil calmed down, I moved the pot over to another burner, because I was going to have to completely disassemble the left side of my stovetop to clean all the beer out of it. This kept me busy for about 15 minutes, and then I poured myself a large glass of gin.

The boil continued, and as boiling liquids are wont to do, much of the water steamed out into the air. I watched bemusedly, and wondered how, if I boiled this thing for an hour, I was going to end up with 5 gallons of liquid, since I appeared to be losing about a cup of water every 15 minutes (ignoring, for the moment, the quart I’d lost when the brew exploded). I pored over the directions to see if I was supposed to keep the pot covered, and could find no useful information. So I left it uncovered. Whatever. Towards the end of the boil, I threw in the last little bit of hops (very, very carefully) and began to ready the fermenter.

Unfortunately, I had made another sizeable mistake: the recipe called for me to use 5 gallons of spring water (tap water, being chlorinated, would kill the yeast), which I didn’t have. It also called for me to rapidly cool the mixture before adding the yeast, by sitting the fermenter full of liquid in a tub of ice until it got down to about 70 degrees; I did have plenty of ice, due to buying roughly 12 bags of it for a party and saving 4 7-pounders in my freezer. I remembered in the Good Eats episode on beermaking, Alton used an amount of spring water PLUS an amount of ice IN THE FERMENTER and that way immediately cooled the mixture to a temperature that wouldn’t kill the yeast. Brilliant!

My mistake was made in misjudging the ratio of ice to water. I was SURE that Alton had put all the water in the initial boil, and used about 3 bags of ice plus a few additional pint bottles of water. So I put two bags of ice in the fermenter and poured the hot wort in; it rapidly cooled to about 40 degrees and didn’t come close to melting all the ice. Dang; now I had overcooled liquid that was still a gallon short of the amount of water! I managed to stuff the rest of the ice in, and poured in some pints of heated spring water, but it still wouldn’t completely melt. Dang; I feared if I added the yeast to this mixture, the cold would screw it up somehow. Oh well; let’s put the cover on and sit it aside, and after rehearsal I’ll come back and it’ll be a nice toasty 70 degrees and I can pitch the yeast.

So I left, and came back. The ice still hadn’t melted. Hells bells, as my father would say. Oh well. I went ahead and bloomed the yeast anyway, poured it in, and put the top on. I had some problems getting the bubbler (a little device that allows CO2 to escape the bucket, but doesn’t let air in) working, and in the end I think it was allowing air into the bucket for the better part of a day, so hopefully the beer doesn’t taste like a monkey crapped in it. I measured the specific gravity of the beer on Saturday, and it was about 1.040, about where it was supposed to be; as of today, it’s at 1.010. The recipe says it should get down to 1.007 or so, so I’ll keep an eye on it and hopefully get it into bottles this weekend, after which it needs to “age” for about 3 weeks. Yay beer!