This is going to be a bit of a long post, but I’m
okay with that, since I haven’t posted in a year and a half, and it was a year between
posts before that. I promise to be more frequent and less longwinded going
forward.
A few of years ago, mrs. robertus got me a homebrew starter
kit for my birthday. It was really basic set up – a 5-gallon pot, a couple of
5-gallon buckets, various assorted tubes and doodads, and a recipe kit with
some powders, syrup, and steeping grains. It ran about 200 bucks, all told,
from the homebrew store. Thus began Nolanbrau.
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| Check the mad phat photoshop skillz, yo! |
Brewing, for all the mystery that surrounds it, is a pretty
straightforward:
·
Bring a couple gallons of water up to about 155
degrees.
·
Put some crushed up grains into a cheesecloth
bag, and steep it in the water for about half an hour, like you were making
tea. Afterward, toss the bag.
·
Bring the liquid to a boil, and add your malt
extract (the powders and syrup mentioned above). Boil that for an hour.
·
Add hops at various time points (usually right
at the start, about halfway through, and with about 10 minutes left).
·
Use an ice bath to cool it down to about 75
degrees.
·
Pour into bucket. Add enough water to make 5
gallons.
·
Add yeast
·
Seal bucket, leave it in dark place
·
Wait
·
Explain to wife why the house smells like wet
grass, and why there’s powder all over the stovetop, and that the organic
chemistry experiment in the basement is a good thing.
We brewed a couple of batches from kits immediately. The
first (an Irish Red) was okay, but our mistakes obvious (it took us a month to
get the beer stains off the walls). The second was a much less dramatic affair
that yielded a 9% Christmas ale, which we gave away at parties over the
holidays.
The third, a porter (“Fat Boris,” after a
character in
a D&D game), was somehow also cidery. Which is odd for a drink that's supposed to taste like coffee. But, we figured that maybe it was off because we'd burned the bottom of the pot – we didn’t take the pot off the heat
before pouring in the Liquid Malt Extract, which caramelized on the bottom of
the pot instead of dissolving into the wort. These are rookie mistakes, but we
were rookies.
I took a year and a half off after that. We needed a new brew
pot, and mrs. robertus, pregnant with Claire, was hypersensitive to smells
(like wet grass), and then we had a baby. Last November, I brewed my fourth and
fifth batches, a Brown Ale from a kit and from the local homebrew store,
respectively. The brown ale was yeasty, which was a terrible result for what
should’ve been an easy drinker. The stout had some of the same characteristics,
but less pronounced.
The Brown Ale was a kit, we reasoned, and like the kits
before it was cidery, fizzy, and sharp. So, obviously, something must be wrong
with the kits – old ingredients, maybe, or a bad yeast. But the stout wasn’t
from a kit. I’d pulled all the ingredients off the shelf myself, and they were
all reasonably fresh. Something else was going awry.
After spending entirely too much time on
Homebrew Talk and reading up, we
hit on the likely culprit. The instructions with the kit and from the homebrew
store had told us to leave the bucket “at room temperature,” when “room
temperature” was really 10 degrees warmer than it should have been.
So, thusly informed, I put Batch 6 (an Octoberfest) in the
much cooler basement. We’re bottling it next weekend, and should be able to
tell whether we’ve solved our problem.
We’ve put together the materials for a swamp cooler for
Batch 7, an Anchor Steam clone that we’re brewing as soon as Batch 6 gets
bottled. But that’s a whole nother post.
