Adventures in newbie homebrewing
PART 2: THE PROS OFFER TIPS
We’ve taken up a few new hobbies — including homebrewing — in recent weeks to distract ourselves from the state of the world. And as we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, our first brewing experience has been fun, fascinating — and a tad frustrating. As you read this, we are transferring our seven glorious little beer bottles from the counter, where they have been conditioning for two weeks, to the fridge, so they can be served cold. And no, we do not know what “conditioning” means. We’re just following the instructions that came with the kit, unfamiliar jargon and all. (Turns out “pitching yeast” does not involve curveballs. You just sprinkle it in. Those baseball guys are doing it all wrong.)
But back to the instructions: Although we wrestled with a number of things — siphoning, sediment and, ahem, accidentally shooting great streams of liquid across the kitchen when the siphon tubing disconnected — we nailed capping. Those bottles are definitely capped. Also, labeled. There should have been more than seven, but oh well. (See: siphoning, sediment, great streams of liquid going everywhere.)
But we’re much smarter now (or least less clueless) thanks to the many veteran homebrewers who wrote in to share their wisdom — and their favorite Bay Area homebrewing supply stores, including Morebeer and Hoptech Brewing Supply.
LESSON ONE: Go local.
“The best way to learn more is be around people that know what they are doing,” says Bay Area homebrewer Emily Pool. “I’ve only been brewing a few years, but I have found home brewers are a passionate crowd of beerdrinking nerds. Ask away and you will instantly be saturated in information! More Beer! has several Bay Area showrooms and a wonderful staff that genuinely love helping people. I wouldn’t still be brewing if it weren’t for the hours they spent helping me through the adventures of homebrewing.”
We ordered a relatively inexpensive Northern Brewer kit online — $58, including ingredients for a Kama Citra ale. So if this is the only beer we ever make, the per-bottle cost is about equal to one Pliny the Elder or 11 Pabst Blue Ribbons. Until last summer, Minnesota-based Northern Brewer was owned by Anheuser-busch. It’s now held by a holding company. But the people are nice, and we got answers to our “help!!” questions via email two days later. It’s just that when the siphon tubing separates and the wort geysers, you kinda need an answer right now.
Bay Area shops offer not just equipment, but friendly, in-person expertise — well, in person normally, by phone and email now. During the California shutdown, Morebeer‘s Los Altos and San Leandro showrooms are temporarily closed, but they’re doing curbside pickup at the Concord showroom. Morebeer’s starter kit ($55, including ingredients, with free shipping) is similar to what we used.
Dublin’s Hoptech Brewing Supply carries a homebrewing kit ($113, ingredients sold separately) with considerably more bells and whistles, and these magic words for us siphon-haters: “You never have to siphon the beer. Siphoning the beer is one of those things that frustrates even experienced brewers. This is accomplished by the inclusion of spigots for each bucket.” And Morebeer’s deluxe 5-gallon starter kit ($140) has spigots, too.
That sound you hear is a chorus of angels singing spigot hosannas. Seriously.
LESSON TWO: Spigots exist. LESSON THREE: There are other ways to do this.
“These days, it’s easy to make beer in 1-gallon batches, so you can try something out in your kitchen without needing a huge rig and a garage,” says a reader who posts as Billstewart2012. “I tried a liquid extract kit a couple of times (really easy), brewing from dry extract (also really easy), and brewing from grains a couple of times (more work, needs a couple more 2-gallon pots to boil stuff in, and takes more time, but still not hard). Think of it as baking, but wetter.”
AND LESSON FOUR: Everyone frets the first time.
That thick layer of sludge we were convinced represented an epic siphon fail? Apparently that’s normal — and it’s called trub, says Palo Alto resident Richard Swent, who took up homebrewing a few years ago when he retired. He started with a Kama Citra kit like we did, although he renamed it Ionic Pauling Ale, an IPA that honors Linus Pauling. Since then, he’s moved on to a wide variety of other beers, and named them all after famous scientists or scientific phenomena. (We’re calling ours True Grit, in homage to the sludge.)
Swent laid careful plans for the current shelter-in-place. “While some people were stocking up on toilet paper, I was stocking up on barley and hops!” he says. “The junk in the bottom of your jug is probably not a problem, as long as you leave it there and don’t transfer it into the bottles. If you ‘cold crash’ your beer by putting it in the fridge for a couple of days before bottling, it will help condense things that make your beer cloudy and will produce a very dense cake in the bottom. That makes it easier to siphon the beer off the top without disturbing the trub.”
Thanks, guys.
“The junk in the bottom of your jug is probably not a problem, as long as you leave it there and don’t transfer it into the bottles.” — Richard Swent, Palo Alto homebrewer, talking about trub, pictured above