We had all the ingredients for what could be the perfect day of easy beer making:

All that AND the kitchen sink

• Cold, snowy day (with the prospect of much more cold snowyness)
• Kit from the Brooklyn Brew Shop for making Chocolate Maple Porter (hops, grains, and yeast)
• Authentic Ohio maple syrup (not included in kit!)
• Brewing-on-a-snowy-day soundtrack (Modest Mouse, The Moon and Antarctica; Black Keys, Turn Blue; Patsy Cline, Best of)
• Brewing beers (Nitro Left Hand Milk Stout)
• Fuzzy socks

It started out well: I laid out everything I would need, I looked up the instructions online, I actually read said instructions. But then, what was all this nonsense with heating the grain in water and straining and re-straining? (It’s mashing in and sparging, smarty pants!) I’ll just use a grain sock like usual, I thought, feeling rather smug at having found a shortcut. I consulted with Ben, just to be sure, and he said that was fine, making that swatting nah gesture that you often see old men making.

Having thus combined steps one and two, I spent the hour the grain was to be soaking anxiously taking the temperature of the mix every four minutes or so. I was occasionally within 10 degrees of where it should be, but mostly wildly off. I would adjust the stove accordingly and push the sock of grain around with my comically oversized spoon. I consulted with Ben, just to be sure, and he said that was fine, this was a pretty inconsequential step and then he did the frowny thumbs up.

During the hour-long boil, I only needed to stir it every ten minutes, so I decided now was the perfect time to make candy buckeyes. When else would I do it? So every six minutes or so I would stir the concoction, leaving peanut buttery fingerprints on the long spoon handle, and then I would sample the candy, just to be sure.

The kit makes a small batch, about one gallon, but the amount of liquid in my comically oversized brew kettle barely met that line. I remembered that directions existed for this and reconsulted them. I was okay. I could add water now to reach a gallon and to help it cool off at the same time. The copper coil we’ve used before to help cool the brew was far too large for a gallon of beer, so I thought about putting it out on our deck in the snow for a bit. I nestled it into a drift and tried to finish up the buckeyes. The peanut butter mix was now so soft it couldn’t be rolled into balls and I had to spend a while licking it off my palms.

A few hours later, buckeyes in freezer and me well into my second beer, I sat up straight in the middle of my turn at Scrabble: the beer! Ben said he’d get it, and since it was still freezing rain out there, I let him be the hero. I pulled my trusty meat thermometer out again and took the temperature: comically far below the 70-degrees it should have been. No little yeast dudes would survive that. We went to bed.

The next afternoon we poured the now-room-temperature beer into a fermenter, added the yeast, and shook vigorously. Then we put it in the corner of the garage where it presently bubbles away. The instructions said to wait two weeks, then bottle it, then wait another two weeks before enjoying. I read this and looked at Ben: nah.