In a shameless attempt to attract yet another new demographic to my blog, I'm going to start talking about homebrewing. John and I, well, we love us a good beer. How do we define good? Well, let's just say that in our world, "good beer" does not include anything that comes out a major brewery in Milwaukee or St. Louis. We're all about the microbrews, both US and European. Generally we tend to favor different styles. John loves stouts, porters and the occasional bock. Give me a pale ale or a hefeweizen (especially in the summer) and I'm a happy camper --when it comes to what I like, the more hops the better. We both will travel to great lengths to try a good Belgian ale. Whenever we visit a new place, the first thing we try to do is find a local microbrewery.

So it's probably no surprise that eventually we would get around to trying to make beer on our own. We were completely inspired by my dad who has recently gotten back into homebrewing (he did it a long time ago when I was small) and has had a couple of great batches of "clone" beer (clones being recipes designed to reproduce commercially produced beers). We were a little surprised when he told us that it was easy to make beer. Particularly when you have a kegging system instead of bottle. Thus, for John's birthday, my parents and I treated the ultimate hard to buy for guy to a complete homebrewing kit.

As a warning to everyone, this post is all about beer... if you're not interested you might want to click away now. I promise, there's nothing fiber related that you're going to miss.

So where do you start? Well the first thing you should do is find a good homebrewing store. We got John set up at Adventures in Homebrewing in Dearborn, MI. This is a great store and the guys who run it are incredibly knowledgeable and helpful. Have a question you need help with? Just give the store a call. Even complete beer-making newbies are treated with respect. I can't recommend them enough. They are also good at recommending and helping you put together recipes. Which is where any beer brewing experience begins.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale Clone Recipe

The beer that Dad and I started a couple of weekends ago is a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. After you have the recipe, you need to get all those ingredients. Gotta love all that malt sugar! No fermentation would be complete without something to feed the yeast. The grains add flavor and color, the hops add the bittering elements and other aromas. Most of the hops in this beer had an almost citrusy scent.

Steeping the Grain

The first thing in the process is to put all the cracked grain into a porous bag and to steep that bag in a gallon or so of water that's about 160 degrees Farenheit. Basically, it's like steeping your tea bag. Only this is a very large 2 lb tea bag! It actually smells better than you think it might.

Adding the Yeast Food

After you pull out your big tea bag, then it's time to add the malt sugar. This brew has about 8 pounds of malt for 5 gallons of brew, yet the beer isn't sweet. Why? The malt is there to feed the yeast. Basically, yeast eat up the sugar and they belch out CO2 gas and alcohol (and other nutrients). Essentially, when you make beer you're trading that sugar for the alcohol. Both yeast and humans become very happy. It takes a while to get all that sugar into solution, and it clumps a little bit (as you can see in the picture) but eventually it will all go in.

Boiling the Wort

The next step is to get the wort (i.e. the starting gamish that is beer) up to boiling temperatures. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is essentially sterilization of the solution. The other is to cause certain chemical reactions to happen with the alpha acids in the hops that create a lot of the flavors in beer. Most worts are boiled for an hour. You add hops depending on what you want them to do. Bittering hops are added early in the boil. Aroma hops are added towards the end. Basically, it's just chemistry in action. When you add the hops determines how far the chemical reactions with the alpha acids can go.

Sanitizing the Ale Pail

While we're on the subject of sterilization, one very important step in this process is to sanitize your fermentation container. There are lots of very nifty "one step" sanitizers that make this an easy process. Dad claims these things are one of the reasons he got back into it. Apparently the cleaning part used to be a much more painful process.

Cooling Down the Wort

Once you've finished boiling the wort, it's time to bring it down in temperature. After all, you wouldn't want to swim in a boiling sugar solution and neither do your yeast! You can just wait for it to cool down on it's own, but that can take a while and most homebrewers like to help it along. I knew there was something good that all that ice that accumulates in our automatic ice maker could be used for!

Wort Meets Ale Pale

Not so much left to do now. All you have to do is put the wort in the sanitized pail (some people filter at this stage, but you don't have to) and bring the volume of the wort up to 5 gallons (or whatever volume you are making).

Pitching the Yeast

Only one thing left to do now! It's time to "pitch the yeast". Ales are top fermented, so the yeastie beasties (please forgive a hold over phrase from grad school) are just distributed across the top of the wort. After that, you just put on the lid, and attach the bubbler (essentially a little contraption that allows the CO2 gas to escape but doesn't allow bad things to get into the beer) and let the first fermentation phase "hang out" around room temperature. Something I learned at this point: there is actually a difference between lagers and ales. Ales are fermented at what is mostly room temperature, right around 70 degrees Farenheit. Lagers are fermented in the cold (around 40 degrees Farenheit). You need to use different yeasts and sugar mixtures to make each one work right because yeast that can ferment ales at room temperature aren't necessarily the same ones that are good at doing the job in the cold.

For sticking with me through the beer making extravaganza, I'm also going to introduce a new feature here to my blog: AVI movies. This is just set up as a link so that you don't have to download if you don't have the bandwidth or don't want to. This little movie shows what the bubbler does once those yeast get busy with their yeasty business. I just love my new little camera! Click Here for my First Beer Movie

What comes next? Well, a bunch of fun things! But beer takes time so you're going to have to wait patiently just like we are to see the next installments!