Tag Archives: home brewing

When Two Hop-Heads Fall in Love…

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Last year's ripening hops

Four days from our wedding and I find myself sitting in the dirt of a mostly unplanted garden, wishing I could turn the hose on myself. Ben and I have just finished uprooting an entire row of hops plants from his parents’ old home and replanting them at my family’s place out in the countryside of central Ohio. Bill, my parents’ orange cat, is rolling around in the dust next to me, but knew enough to not get too close. It is so hot and sticky and dirty and we haven’t even set up the trellis yet. But if we want to make beer right ourselves, we have to do it right. Ourselves.

Hops on a trellis

Hops are a climbing perennial plant, much like grapes, only taller. They grow in rows on trellises about 12 feet high. They are said to have originated in China, but apparently no one there thought, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I threw this in water and drank it after several weeks!” There are records of the Dutch processing hops as early as the 1400s, which is how it got some fun-to-say phrases attached to it like “oast house” (drying barn) and “scuppet” (flat spade for turning drying hops).

We knew the plants were pretty tenacious and spread easily, but we did not fully grasp how hard they’d be to move. First, I have to admit here that I’m not exactly the most experienced of gardeners. So when I was handed a shovel I eyed it warily before pushing at it ineffectively with one tennis shoe. Fortunately Ben’s father saw I was struggling (as much as you can call not trying “struggling”) and took the tool from me — clearly this was not a two-person job for these particular two people. Continue reading →

Issues of Connotation in the Phrase, “Beer-Themed”

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Beer-themed invites...so subtlety is not our forte

When I saw the phrase “beer-themed” noted on the wedding photographer’s invoice, I felt surprisingly embarrassed. My stomach fell in a way it hasn’t since the Fritos incident of 1988. Yes, the wedding is beer-themed, though we had never used those words to describe this momentous occasion. I felt “beer-themed” better described certain dude movies like Beer Fest or, you know, real beer festivals (which, coincidentally, are actually dude-themed).

As a beverage, beer has earned a certain reputation — that being that it is not wine. Or champagne. I believe I’ve soap boxed before about beer being my drink of choice to cheers with for celebrations large and small. But how do we differentiate between a “beer-themed” celebration of a union of two people in love and a thinly veiled (sorry) excuse get blotto. …Perhaps the larger question here is: does it really matter?  Continue reading →

Brewing for the Masses: Always Be Prepared

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Wedding beer label prototype

Ben and I are attempting to make our homebrew as non-beer-drinker-friendly as possible. We are getting married in a month (…a month from tomorrow, exactly. Holy shit.) Anyway, the plan is to craft our Matrimoni-Ale with home-grown hops and lots of love and to have enough to send everyone home with a bottle. It seems strange that we would be friends with many non-beer drinkers, but family had to be invited too, or so I was told.

There are a number of differences between homebrewed and store-bought beer, some which may frighten off the uninitiated. Par example, sometimes there is a weensy bit of bonus beer sludge at the bottom of a bottle. In my opinion, not nearly as gross as a worm in bottom of my tequila, but what do I know, I won’t eat any dead animals, in bacon form or no.

Scientifically known as "beer sludge"

When you let your homebrew sit and stew for a minute, a sizable amount of sediment settles out of it into a righteously gross sludge on the bottom. It’s composed of yeast, hop detritus and other nontoxic beer-making byproducts, but discovering a bit of this roughage in the bottom of the bottle really freaks some people out, especially if they’re used to crystal clear, ice cold, virtually tasteless, but very well-marketed American lagers. We are siphoning our beer off the yeast bed from one fermenter into another carboy a few times to have as little of this harmless but unappealing phenomenon as possible. Continue reading →

Beer-Making Take II, Featuring Brita and The Bavarians

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My baby is already two weeks old!

I was told beer-making was easy, and based on the Spaghetti-Os-heavy diet of the dudes who told me this, I believed it. After all, your basic beer has (or should have) only four ingredients: water, grain, hops, and yeast. This has been the basic recipe for hundreds of years. Despite our mutual distaste for following the rules, Ben and I embarked on another brewing adventure with this in mind, even as our first attempt still sat in the basement, sulkily maturing into an adolescent IPA. (They grow up so fast!)

First, of course: water. After having soundly lost the Brita vs. Tap Water battle last time, I fished the pitcher from the fridge and began the grueling process of filtering water and pouring it into the kettle. Now, I am not known for my patience…but this takes FOREVER. I’ve got to say, there really is something to be said for boiling water, like, that it sterilizes things. I’ve heard that way back in the day, before germs and public sanitation were discovered, everyone drank beer because it was safer than the water. Everyone! Or so I’ve heard — this would take far too long to actually research.

Barley: not just for horses

Next comes the grain, in our case barley. Barley is the grain of choice for most beers, rye and wheat beer being obvious exceptions. This wasn’t always the case. Before the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, or the Reinheitsgebot (geshundheit!), laid down the literal law about what could go in beer, it was anything goes. Afterwards, only water, barley, and hops were allowed in beer. (Wild yeast fermented the concoctions, but those little guys weren’t given any credit till discovered in the 1850s.) It was less purity of the drink they were actually concerned about and more the price of bread; that is, ensuring a sizable-enough quantity of wheat and rye that they could be bought cheaply and made into affordable bread …that is, for relatively little dough (eesh, sorry). Continue reading →

Making Your Own Beer, Step 1: Have a Beer

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The gloves are on: no more messin' around

By far the most time consuming step of last Tuesday’s brewing process was the argument that took place before even pouring water into the pot. Nothing serious. Just a tap water vs. Brita-filtered water disagreement; a this-is-going-to-take-forever vs. it-will-taste-like-ass-otherwise spat; a so-you’re-too-good-for-city-water-now? vs. and-here-I-thought-you-were-a-real-brewer quarrel. Turns out it takes just as long for Ben and I to reach a draw as it does to pull five gallons of water through a filtered pitcher made for drinking water. Whatever.

Ben -- I call him The Sanitizer

The first, most important ingredients for any decent batch of home brew are the beer you will be drinking and the music you will be playing while cooking it up. We chose a classic craft beer: Dogfish Head 60 Minutes, and one of my favorite snowy-afternoon albums: Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica. During the approximately seven hours it took to watch five gallons fall drip by drip into the pitcher, we used a one-step sanitizer to clean everything that would come in contact with our future brew, including both of us up to the elbows and a good deal of my sweatshirt. By then it was time for another beer and The Kills’ Blood Pressures.

Stew of dirty socks and thermometer

The first step in which something actually happens is when you heat the water to between 150 and 160 degrees and steep the grains. The difficult part of this is, of course, taking the temperature of the water. In our case, brewing is less of a science and more an engineering project. To save us from burning our hands, Ben rigged our thermometer on wire that he wound around both pot handles so it dangled in the middle of the hot water. Clever boy, this one. The barley grains are knotted into a bag made of cheese cloth-like material that is, when floating in an increasingly dark kettle of liquid, reminiscent of a soaking pair of dirty, balled-up socks.  Continue reading →