Long Time Drinker, First Time Brewer

Home Brewed Beer

I received a cheque for Christmas that I decided I would spend on beer making equipment. I bought a selection of miscellaneous stuff off of craigslist for $75 and then promptly sat on it for a couple of months while hoping to come across the remaining pieces that I needed for cheap and then finding a be-all, end-all recipe for a beer from scratch that would have me retire from commercial beer purchases forever. When I was casually discussing this with my neighbor as if it’d only been three weeks and he called me on it and said three months, I figured it was time just to order a brew kit from the Internet and get the rest of the components I needed while I was at it or all the equipment I’d purchased would just collect dust and eventually start its own unwanted growth.

It took two days before the supplies arrived and I dutifully carried them home from the post office like some sort of commando, awkardly holding a box of diversol and potassium metabisulphite, a brew kit and dextrose, a capper, some caps, and a tube full of other tubes that looked like a giant makeshift bazooka. That weekend, we set to work.

Making beer is actually really easy. If you can boil water and use a mixing spoon, the rest of the work boils down to patience. The hardest part is definitely cleaning and sanitizing all the equipment. Everything that the beer might come in contact with has to be cleaned and sanitized. Since I bought everything second hand, it was not nearly as clean and sanitized as it would have been had I bought it new. It doesn’t help that I used the fermenting bucket to transport dirt in my garden the day before either. (Ahem.)

I pressed the lid onto the bucket, fastened the airlock and waited. Shannon, who was invaluable at keeping me sane through this whole escapade, grew up with her dad brewing beer and wine, and distinctly remembered a horrible smell associated with it. Although over the week the fermentation was taking place left a sort of yeasty tang in the air, it wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as she remembered, most likely because we did it in an open space and her dad did it in a closed off room. Ideally, I’d like to have a heated garage to take care of everything, but that’s another story altogether.

There’s a bit of math and measurements involved, and I got to become reacquainted with hydrometers. Everything is well documented on the Internet as well as in the directions on the kit. I was simply amazed that the readings turned out exactly as I was told that they would, which meant that I’d done nothing to screw it up in the process. After a week, the fermentation stage was already complete and we were ready to transfer it.

Although I’d bought an auto-siphon as one of my online purchases, we somehow figured it’d be easier if I just used my mouth to start siphoning the beer into the carboy (the large, glass container where the beer would finish its work before we put it into bottles.) I’d never actually started a siphon before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Well, let me tell you, when you start sucking on the hose, it does not take nearly as long as you might expect, as within a second I had a mouth full of warm, unfiltered beer in my mouth, which I quickly spat all over the kitchen by reflex.

We were pretty discriminate about what was going into the carboy and left a couple bottles worth of sediment behind. Now we just had to wait some more, watching that little airlock bubble and wait until it didn’t anymore. This part was especially easy because we took off to Mexico and, when we came back, the process was almost done.

I’d collected more than enough beer bottles (that is to say, I continued to drink beer and stopped recycling) and then washed them up in my dishwasher. I’d read that this was not the best way of doing things, and what I’d read was true, as the dishwasher simply does not get inside a beer bottle the way you would like it to when you’re going to insert living organisms into the bottle soon afterward. It does, however, make it very easy to remove lots of labels and give things a good rinse, so I’m happy I have a dishwasher to aide in the whole process.

Soaking the bottles in the chlorine detergent and then sanitizing them individually became fairly methodical and with Shannon’s help, was actually kind of fun. I highly recommend having someone help you in the beer making process because it makes things far easier and, hey, you’re not going to drink alone, right? We transferred the carboy contents into a clean and sanitized bucket and were on our way to the last step of the process before I’d get to drink.

I’d watched a few Youtube videos on how to do the transferring of the beer into bottles, and they all had a tool that made the job much, much easier. Basically, it attaches to the siphon hose and then when it contacts the bottom of the bottle, it dispenses liquid, and when you stop pressing down, it stops. It’s called an auto-filler. It just so happened that I bought one, and I’m glad that I did because filling those bottles with a normal siphon would’ve been a total pain. I even figured out how to start the auto-siphon, and with both of these auto-gizmos, we soon had a nice assembly line where Shannon would fill the bottles, hand them to me, and I’d cap them with this giant red hand-capper and a bunch of bottle caps sitting in sanitizing solution.

We inspected the seal on the first bottle. I had read all over the Internet that you cannot put caps onto screw top beer bottles and all that I had was screw top beer bottles. I’d hate to have come this far only to be stuck with a bucket full of uncarbonated beer. They were sealed well enough that you could turn them upside down and nothing would spill out, but you could uncap them without any resistance by turning them. We hoped for the best, capped all the bottles and set them aside.

I’m happy to report that once the carbonation starts to occur inside the bottles that the force creates a much better seal. Cracking open the bottle gives a nice fizz and a beautiful cloud of beer vapor starts to rise up the neck of the bottles. So take that, Internet! You CAN use screw top bottles to bottle your home brew.

I’ve only drank one beer so far because it is supposed to wait two weeks and I only waited one before sampling. You are supposed to use dextrose, a corn sugar, before bottling the beer because it has a neutral flavor once the beer becomes carbonated. I had the exact quantity of dextrose delivered to me but part of it was lost when the bag ripped in transit, so I had to make up for it with sucrose (table sugar).

I’d read that sucrose would impart an apple flavor, which didn’t seem altogether bad, but my one week sample, even with 1:10 sucrose:dextrose had… quite the apple flavor. My beer tasted something like a lightly carbonated cider-ale-Chardonnay. I’m hoping that the flavor profile improves, but to be honest, I’m just happy that the whole process worked as well as it did and I produced something that was drinkable, carbonated and alcoholic. There wasn’t even a bunch of undesirable sediment at the bottom of the bottle, and the beer that I sampled was from a six pack I set aside specifically from the last of the fermenting bucket where the remaining sediment would be.

With the experience under my belt now, it will be much smoother and less stressful the second go around. It’s just a matter of deciding which kit to go with. I’m thinking I’ll try two simultaneously: a Belgian white and an English bitters this time. Eventually, I might try my hand at going from scratch, but if the kits produce perfectly desirable results, I see no reason to trouble myself.

The kit cost $19 and the dextrose cost $3.50. The cleaning and sanitizing solutions were another $4 and the bottle caps were $2. So, not accounting for the other equipment that I’ve bought, which will last indefinitely and are completely reusable, I made 66 bottles of beer (or 5 1/2 cases) for $28.50, roughly 43 cents a beer. Not an enormous savings considering the time involved in the process, but certainly justifiable.

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