I've entered the world of home brewing! I've been thinking about doing this for a while. It's fun, it's cheaper to do yourself then buying beer from the store, it tastes just as great, and it's all natural. Plus, it's a good inside activity to do during the winter months and it's actually quite easy.
I decided to do it after a friend at work (who recently started doing it himself) gave me one of his first beers to sample. All it really takes equipment-wise is a few pots, buckets, and vessels for fermentation. Northern Brewer out of the Twin Cities area is probably the best place to get started. I ordered the deluxe kit, which included two glass carboys for fermentation so I could watch the progress (versus giant paint buckets). The kit really was a brewery in a box - the only thing it didn't come with were glass bottles. I ordered those from Amazon and can reuse them several times. The kit came with a recipe for Caribou Slobber, a brown ale with hints of coffee and chocolate. This will be my first batch.
I started with steeping the specialty grains (the coffee, caramel, and chocolate flavors) for about 20 minutes while the water was heating up. Following the instructions, I added the wet and dry malt extracts and then added the different varieties of hops at the specified intervals over the 60 minutes it boiled. When done, I had made wort, the brewer's term for un-fermented beer. You can see my final wort in the picture below with the 6.5 gallon carboy and funnel after I had cooled it down with giant blocks of ice from distilled water jugs.
Then came the fun part of pitching the yeast, mixing it all up (aerating) by rocking the carboy back and forth, and then watching the yeast go crazy over the next two days (see middle picture at the bottom of the carboy on the counter top in the basement). During this
process they yeast are converting the sugars in the wort to ethanol and
producing carbon dioxide, which causes the airlock at the top to bubble
like crazy. To really appreciate how much the yeast worked, here is a video of the the active fermentation in my carboy. My First Fermentation.
The yeast activation is pretty fun to watch. There are some other pictures here that show some other things I did. I modified the fridge in the basement to be able to fit the 5 gallon secondary fermenter carboy in case I ever want to make a lager and need it to sit at near freezing temperatures for a long time. I also bought a hydrometer kit to measure and then calculate my batch specific ABV. You can see that water is exactly 1.000. I did take a recent sample and I'm probably somewhere in the 6.0% ABV category now. We will see where it finally ends right before I bottle.
What else...let's see. I've been doing a lot of reading and learning about the process and the different styles. I think I tend to like the styles either on the clean/clear/crisp side of the house (lagers like Stella Atrois) and ones that are on the maltier and darker side (like New Belgium 1555 and this Brown Ale). Through sampling some other types, I think I really dislike IPAs and any kids with a strong hops like Cascade or Chinook hops. To me, those are the ones that are bitter and make me feel bad. By doing this for a while I will definitely find which ones I like best, and then maybe start experimenting with my own recipes instead of doing recipe kits where everything is provided.
I've read a lot of stuff on home brewing. I'm practically already an expert and I haven't even finished my first batch. Ha. But I won't bore you about the details in my quest for the perfect batch. You can make a simple, good beer in 4-6 weeks this way with hardly any effort at all. That's probably all you need to know. For anyone that lives nearby and is reading this, please request your free bottle sampler. Each five gallon batch makes about 50 beers. I just ordered another kit to make an Amber Ale which doesn't take as long. At the end of March I'll have 100 bottles of beer ready to go. That would last me several months, so I'll be looking to give a lot of this away!
