So for Christmas I got a beer making kit. Basically they give you everything you need to make your own beer. What you might call a recipe for trouble. So last week the boy and I boiled up some water, followed all the directions, and put a small plastic barrel of what may someday become beer under the stairs.

For something that happens so slowly, it’s actually pretty exciting. Well, okay, the term “exciting” is perhaps a bit much. But still, it’s interesting, and I can hardly wait to drink some of this stuff.

The basic recipe is simple:
1) sterilize the heck out of everything
2) Boil up a pot of sugar water.
3) Add flavorings (hops, and malt, and wort … I’m still a little unclear on some of the terminology.)
4) Mix it with cold water to cool it down and then add yeast, I’m pretty you want it cooled down in order to avoid killing off the yeast.
5) Stick it in a spot out of direct sunlight with a stable temperature.
6) Wait a week. This is the hard part.

So at this point you’ve got something that’s, honestly, a pretty dubious concoction. It tastes like I’d imagine a tea brewed with old gym socks might taste. But this is where the magic starts. Remember the sugar? Remember the yeast? Like a 2-year-old kid, the yeast thrives on the sugar. And like a 2-year-old kid, the yeast eventually has to … ahhh, how to put this delicately … the yeast has to, err, excrete, shall we say. And what comes out is alcohol.

That’s alcohol from the yeast, by the way, not from the 2-year-old. What comes out of the 2-year-old is pretty much what you’d expect. The 2-year-old converts sugar to other stuff. Don’t drink it.

In any case, a week goes by.  It's a long week.  The plastic beer barrel is tucked away under the stairs. It’s actually a 2 or 3 gallon jug, designed to like an old-timey beer barrel, except that the old-timey beer barrel is big, rugged, and made of wood, whereas the homebrew kit is small and cheesy and made of plastic. Other than that, they’re identical.

So anyway, the barrel is there under the stairs, with the frothing mix within slowly turning itself into … something. When the next Saturday finally rolls around, we give it a taste. It actually tastes like beer. More specifically, it tastes like beer that’s been sitting out for a long, long time. Flat. Smells like the carpet the day after a keg party. But it is beer.

Next for the bottling. Apparently the beer is carbonated by the same process that makes the alcohol … a couple spoons of sugar in individual bottles and the beer goes in. My understanding, admittedly somewhat spotty at this stage, is that the yeast will again work its magic, only this time the carbon dioxide that is produced does not get vented to the outside but rather stays in solution.

We bottled up 8 quarts. On one of them I added a little extra sugar, just to see what happens. Hopefully this will result in a nice and strong, bubbly beer, rather than resulting in, say, a rupture of the plastic bottle along the seam and a persistent “country bar restroom” smell under the stairs.

And now we’re waiting again. This time for between 2 and 3 weeks. At which point we pop the bottles into the fridge to, I think, kill off the yeast. I’m planning on sampling one after 1 week just to see how it’s going. That’s in a few days.

Wikipedia, naturally, has a lot of good info on brewer’s yeast and the brewing process.

 

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