a bit about beermaking

This was the label on Dan's beers in his Christmas 2007 samplers... loved it!

Probably most of you know that Dan has been brewing beer for the past year or so - and pretty successfully, I think! He's never made the same recipe twice, so we've had belgian ale, hefeweizen, porter, spicy christmas beer, red ale, Scottish cream ale, india pale ale, regular pale ale, pumpkin ale (made with real roasted pumpkin), brown ale, oatmeal stout, and there's a strong ale (just like it sounds) in secondary fermentation right now.



It's sort of a curious hobby, so I thought it might be fun to chronicle the life of his beer from start to finish. Beer is really just water, grain (or grain extract), hops, and yeast, plus whatever else you want to add to make it interesting. Most beers rely on different combinations of grains, hops, and yeast to make them unique. A chocolate porter, for instance, includes darker roasted barley, meaning the barley has been toasted to a dark brown, almost chocolate color (hence the name). A hefeweizen uses wheat for its grain and a special strain of brewer's yeast that lends it that subtle banana-type flavor.

First Dan smells the hops to make sure they're delicious (just kidding, but I love this picture - it's from the FIRST time he ever brewed beer and couldn't stop sniffing the hops).



Then everything boils together in our giant stockpot for an hour or so - at this point, the beer is called the "wort." The hops go in the pot in time increments - some get added at the beginning for bittering, some in the middle for flavor, and some at the end for aroma (nose). Dan does a "partial mash" version of brewing, which means he uses some actual grain and some malt extract (which is a liquid, sort of like maple syrup but extracted from the grain). It looks pretty disgusting, and honestly smells pretty bad, but you get used to it...



Once it's boiled for the alloted time, the huge pot quickly goes into an ice bath in the sink to cool it down a bit. Once it's just warm (not hot), he strains out the grain solids (which are mostly contained in a cheesecloth sock), "pitches" the yeast, and the whole thing then goes into a 5 gallon primary fermentation bucket, where he tops it off with water to reach the 5 gallon line. The bucket is sealed with a sort of gas valve, which allows the release of the carbon dioxide given off as the yeast ferments.

Once the beer has stopped bubbling (i.e., letting off carbon dioxide), Dan transfers the beer from the bucket to his secondary fermenter (a glass carboy that used to be my dad's when he made beer!). The beer sits in secondary until Dan feels inspired to bottle it - this can range from several weeks to several months. Generally, the longer the better.



Finally, he bottles it, which is really a two-person job. The beer gets moved from the secondary fermenter to a bottling bucket, and some corn sugar is added to feed the yeast again and get the beer to carbonate once it's sealed in the bottles. This is a somewhat sensitive step - too much sugar and the beer overcarbonates (and potentially explodes the bottles), too little and the beer is flat. After a few mishaps in the beginning, Dan seems to like to tend toward less sugar and then just let the beer sit in the bottles for longer.

Getting the bottles ready is actually quite a process - he first soaks them in a bleach solution overnight, and then washes them in a very hot dishwasher the next day. Then a tube with a special touch-sensitive point on the end allows us to fill the bottles just to the right level. The bottles are capped using an aptly-named "capper," and then they sit and carbonate for another while (week, two weeks, a month, whatever!).

And then we drink delicious beer.