Beer - My New Hobby

It's been quite some time since I've posted something here, and I actually have about three things to post. This one is top of the priority list because I'm most excited about this subject. About a month ago, Darren Ashmore and I began talking about brewing our own beer. A friend of ours has been brewing beer for quite some time. After tasting a couple of his beers, Darren and I decided that we wanted to get into this hobby ourselves.

We got together one night and began researching home brew kits and found the one we thought would work well for us. The company that sells the brewing equipment also sells beer ingredient kits. So we bought a beer kit at the same time we purchased the equipment. Both Darren and I like a little bit of a darker, stouter beer. We are both big fans of Southern Pecan, which is a product of the only Mississippi brewery. The beer we chose as our first batch should somewhat resemble Southern Pecan. It's called American Nut Ale.

The equipment and ingredients arrived last Tuesday, October 21. We brewed the beer yesterday. The first step is creating the wort.

This is basically all the ingredients that came with the kit, except for the mesh bag and crystals. The crystals actually looked like saw dust.

To create the wort, we started by putting a few gallons of water in a boiling pot and bringing the temperature to just under 200 degrees. At that point we added this mesh bag that was filled with crystals, or flavoring. This picture was taken just seconds after we dropped the bag into the water. So the coloring turned pretty dark rather quickly. After this steeped for 20 minutes, we got the liquid up to boiling. At that point, we added the malt. We had two cans of liquid malt, which looks a lot like molasses and then a bag of dry malt.

The wort has to boil for an hour. During that hour, three separate hops have to be added at different times throughout the boil. So to keep from completely messing the process up, Darren kept a close eye on the recipe.

This is me mixing in the finishing hops toward the end of the boil. Luckily, we didn't have a messy boil over. We came really close to having one, so we learned quickly that we have to keep an eye on the heat. Because we had a sugary mixture boiling, we also took care to stir the mixture often so the brew didn't burn to the bottom of the pot.

Once the wort has boiled for an hour, this is what it looks like. This is basically a non-alcoholic beer. This mixture smelled really good. The only thing missing from this is alcohol, but Darren and I took steps to remedy that.

This last picture is of the yeast just before it is dumped into the wort. This is a delicate step in the brewing process. The wort has to be at an acceptable temperature. Too hot or too cold and it kills the yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and converts it into alcohol. You can see that we dumped the wort from the boiling pot into what's called a fermentation bucket. We took the wort through a double strainer because there is so much sediment in the wort. Last thing we want is to be picking sediment out of our teeth after drinking a bottle of beer. The fermentation process is where the sugar becomes alcohol. Darren and I were really worried about this step because the temperatures on the wort and yeast mixture weren't exactly pairing up. So we decided to dump the yeast and cross our fingers. The bucket has an air-tight lid with a cylinder on top that is very much like a percolator of an old coffee maker. Once the yeast eats the sugar, it produces CO2, which escapes through the cylinder. If the cylinder is percolating, that means alcohol is being created. Darren called me this morning and happily told me the percolator was popping.

We should have beer that is ready to be bottled in about 6 more days. The bottling process will be a bit tedious. We'll have to sanitize all our bottles (the kit should make about 50 beers), rinse them out and then fill them with the beer mixture. By that time the beer will have been transferred from the fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket, and a sugar agent will have been added so the beer will carbonate once it's in the sealed bottle. Once we cap the bottles, they'll need to sit for about two weeks. Though the beer should improve the longer we let it sit, I'm sure Darren and I will not have the patience to wait any longer to taste our first batch. We're already planning what our next batch will be, and we can't wait to share what we hope is good beer with friends and family!