BEER SCHOOL
One-day classes offered for different levels of brewing experience
The art of brewing beer is not as easy as it looks, but Southwest Grape and Grain, which is one of New Mexico’s largest suppliers of equipment for brewing beer and wine, is offering courses to teach novices how to get a start in homebrewing and beyond.
The beginners’ brewing encore seminar, “The Art of Extract Brewing,” is on Jan. 14. In the class, participants will use extract kits, which contain either dry or liquid malt extract, according to Southwest Grape and Grain owner Donavan Lane. An encore class was added after the course on Saturday, Jan. 7, sold out.
“It makes it very easy for someone who is not familiar with the process and doesn’t have all the different equipment to brew a beer from scratch,” he said of extract kits. “They can start with those extract kits and with some very basic equipment, a fermentor, a 4- to 5-gallon pot, they can make beer on their stove in their kitchen. In this class, we sell beginner extract kits and we kind of walk people through the process of doing that, show them what’s involved in those kits and just answer any questions.”
Lane said people can easily be overwhelmed if they grab a homebrewing book and have no knowledge of the process.
“Those kits make it pretty simple, and we just try to show them that anyone can do it,” Lane said. “If you start doing it the simple way and kind of build from there, you don’t have to start out brewing everything from scratch and using barley and hops and stuff from scratch; you can start with one of those kits and learn different processes.”
The intermediate brewing seminar, “Fine Tuning Your Technique,” on Jan. 21, will go into the process of saccharification, the process of converting the starch in grains to sugar, which is converted to alcohol, Lane said.
“We talk about the different types of ingredients, the different types of grains, the different types of hops, the different types of yeast,” Lane said of the intermediate class. “For that beginner who has done an extract kit, this is kind of the steppingstone of being able to brew a batch of beer from scratch completely.”
The advanced brewing seminar, “All-Grain Brewing,” on Feb. 4, will go into the different types of equipment and different techniques of brewing a batch of beer from scratch, Lane said.
“At that point, you’re beyond buying an extract ingredient kit, you’re buying the various types of barley, the various hops, the various yeasts and formulating your own recipes and doing everything from scratch,” Lane explained. “In this class, we’ll talk about that and how to come up with your own recipes and the different techniques involved in doing that process.”
The kegging seminar, “The Art of Dispensing,” on Feb. 18, wraps up the seminars. In this class, participants will learn about the different equipment and different techniques for kegging beer. The course also will cover setting up your own kegerator and some of the problems you can run into dispensing beer from a kegerator, according to Lane.
“Most homebrewers, when they start out, they’re bottling it, which is a great way to start, but as people get more and more into the hobby, bottling can become more of a tedious thing,” Lane said. “You gotta wash all of the bottles, gotta make sure they’re sanitized, and go through the process of filling them, capping them and when you’re bottling it, you’re naturally conditioning that beer in the bottle and it’s carbonating in the bottle so that’s more time-consuming. A lot of homebrewers who really get into the hobby and get advanced will end up getting a kegerator or building a kegerator themselves. In that class, we talk about the different equipment and different techniques for kegging beer.”