Home Sweet Homebrewing
Drinking beer is a lot of fun, and if you are a semi-craft-beer geek like me, then part of the joy of beer is that there are so many brands and styles to choose from nowadays, it’s almost endless. Most of these breweries are putting out high-quality product, and the biggest ones do so with high degrees of consistency, which is a feat in itself because beer is made with all-natural ingredients that vary from year to year. The best way to gain a further appreciation for the art of brewing is to do it yourself. Most of the best brewmasters in the country started off brewing beer in their home kitchens and backyards before entering the professional world. You never know, with enough work and dedication you could be the next Sam Calgione (Dogfish Head) or Ken Grossman (Sierra Nevada).
I dabbled with homebrewing for years during and after college. In that time I experienced many of the failures and few successes that are part of homebrewing, and make it all the more rewarding when you get a good batch. Having the right equipment is key, but also some external factors like ambient temperature, water source, and proper sanitization areas make it a challenge to make brewery-quality cervezas. Nevertheless, I learned a plethora about the art of beer, and I would recommend it to anyone who has enough time, patience, and love for beer. It also helps to have enough space to brew, because brewing can get very messy and smelly at times.
You can get started in homebrewing with a pretty basic setup, and make beer that is palatable for a little less than the expense of buying professional beer at the store.
The checklist is as follows:
Two clean 5-gallon buckets with tight-fitting lids and an air lock.
Siphoning tubes with stoppers, for transferring wort and bottling.
A big pot for boiling wort, must be at least 7 gallons.
A way to heat up the kettle, like an outdoor range or even your stovetop.
Long-handled metal spoon for stirring.
Bottle capper, bottles, and caps (only option if not kegging).
Sanitizing solution.
Hydrometer and floating thermometer.
Beer ingredients: yeast, hops, malt (extract for beginners, whole grains for advanced).
A good recipe with instructions.
You can obtain all of this stuff for less than $200 online or at the local brewing store. Recipes usually cost about $50-60 for a batch of 5 gallons or about 2-3 cases. I would also recommend investing in a wort chiller ($20-50) so that you can bring your finished wort down to fermentation temperature in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise you sit and wait for hours with the ice-bath method and all that hop aroma you just added could be cooked right off.
Ideally, having the ability to keg the beer and serve it from a kegerator is the best option, because sanitizing, filling, and capping bottles was always my least-favorite and most time-consuming part of the process. With kegging, you can drink the beer (ale) after about 10-14 days with forced carbonation. With bottling you would have to wait for the beer to bottle condition an extra two weeks. You can always fill a growler if you wanted to take it somewhere. One time my friend and I left a case of bottles we brewed in a very warm laundry room and all of them started to explode from (we believe) overactive yeast and overcarbonation. I also never knew if we cleaned out the bottles enough between batches, and it always seemed like there was residual cleaner solution that sat on the bottles after we rinsed them, and I wondered if it affected the taste of the beer.
The hot side of the homebrewing process is the easiest part. Dissolve the malt completely in the kettle, bring to a boil and make hop additions over the course of an hour. Where it gets tricky is the cold side: pitching the yeast and telling when fermentation is completed. We always managed to get a nice, active bubble in our fermenter, but could never tell if it was fully attenuated. As novices, our hydrometer calculations always confused us. Our Georgetown apartment was not the most consistent temperature during the winter and maintaining the right temperature is very important in brewing. Too cold and it might stop fermenting, too hot and the yeast might be too active. I once tried to brew a “steam beer” when I lived in San Francisco by leaving the fermenter on the back deck. The style was rumored to have been brewed outdoors in the old days, so I figured it would work again for me. It didn’t. From then on, it always stayed inside.
My homebrewing days are mostly behind me. With a growing family and a busy work schedule, I haven’t brewed a batch in quite a while. Most of my experience was with entry-level equipment. In college, I used to have to go to a guy’s office in an industrial business park near Alexandria, Va., to get equipment. There he ran his side business selling homebrew supplies. In 2009 in San Francisco, there was only one homebrew shop with an owner who looked like Santa Claus but knew seemingly everything about brewing. But today as I search online for homebrewing equipment, there are hundreds of companies selling the most basic to the most elaborate homebrewing systems I’ve ever seen. Some of them look like mini industrial systems, going for thousands of dollars. Oh, how the times have changed.
Brewing good beer at home takes a lot of practice and dedication. When I tried the first batch of beer that I made with my own hands, it was super exciting and something that I will never forget. Sure, it tasted like sugary hop water, but it did the trick and I was proud. I think that anyone who is serious about beer should give it a try. Maybe it won’t work out, but maybe you will be very good at it. In the end, you will have more knowledge than you had before, and it will make you appreciate how the pros do it.
