cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Beer I made beer last night. A pale ale. In the interest of not making it all into a huge hassle I did cut a few corners that shouldn't amount to much. Like using a plastic fermenter instead of my good glass carboy on account of the carboy being a bitch to clean and sanitize compared to a big plastic bucket. That won't affect flavor, though. This will be done fermenting in no more than 5 days and then it's out of the plastic. Not nearly long enough to affect the flavor. Then there's the fact that I didn't sparge or filter at all when I transferred the hot wort into the fermenter. I'd put all of my hops in muslin bags that could just be pulled out and it's basically impossible to rig up a funnel with a filter going into the bucket (as opposed to the carboy). Trish went to sleep by that point and I didn't have an extra pair of hands to help hold the funnel. The consequences of this are that there will be a lot of random coagulated protein in there which would otherwise be filtered out. I don't really care much. Worst case scenario is that the beer will be a bit cloudy. But I used some Irish moss to counteract that. Besides, the Nottingham yeast that I'm using always produces an unusually dense layer of sediment at the bottom of the fermentation vessel. I bet most of that coagulated protein that precipitated as the wort cooled will end up trapped in that dense layer of sediment. I've done enough brewing in my life that I'm pretty comfortable saying 'fuck it' about certain things. There are times when I'm a perfectionist, but I'm not going to sweat the appearance of beer that I'm not making for a special event like a wedding or something. A little cloudiness is fine. Recipes mean less to me now than they used to. I mean, I still sit down with pen and paper and do the work in advance of brewing. But I sort of feel like most homebrewers take too much away from commercial brewing, with the idea that their recipes are supposed to be these unique, precious snowflakes or whatever. Like it's a brand. I approach it more like baking bread at this point. Huh. It's been 12 years since I made my first batch of beer. I was 17 years old when I first saw the terribly inviting display of brewing equipment in a back room at a local wine and beer shop. I walked a few blocks to the library and did a search on the internet about the whole thing. This was long before Google. 1995. I was using Lycos at that point. The whole idea seemed stunningly wonderful to me. Fuck trying to buy beer. I can just make it myself. A whole 5 fucking gallons at once! For only $10 a batch! The following weekend I spent something like 60 hard-earned dollars on a bottling bucket, a glass carboy, bottle-capper, funnels and other little supplies. Plus a book on homebrewing (Charlie Papazian's 'The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing') and 2 'Ironmaster' ingredients kits. One was for a pilsner and the other was for a pale ale or something. I took all of this stuff home and proceeded to read the entire book. My parents naturally asked me what in the hall all of this weird equipment was. So I told them that I was going to brew beer. 'Yeah right,' they figured. If I had brought home an actual 6 pack then I'd have been in deep shit. But because they figured that the chances of me actually managing to make 5 gallons of drinkable beer were basically zero, they did nothing to stop me. So a few nights later I started to actually brew. My father walked in the kitchen and asked what I was making. 'Beer.' Really? So I explained everything I was doing, all the different steps and some of the chemistry. I asked him to stir the pot while I left the room for a minute. Later I had him help me rack the beer into my fermenter and then we carried it into a hall closet to do it's thing. At this point he had actually assisted in making the beer so he could hardly put a stop to the whole thing even though it was becoming increasingly clear that actual beer could result from this. Then a week later it was time to bottle and I think my mother might have helped a little with that. I had no money for bottles so Trish and I had gotten the bottles by raiding recycling bins behind bars, sterilizing and de-labeling all of the bottles by hand. It was a lot of work. Finally, a week after bottling it was time to drink the beer. Which I did. I stood there in the kitchen at 17 years of age and drank a beer right there in front of my parents. And it was pretty fucking good. Everyone agreed that this was pretty damn good, especially given that a 17 year old had made it in his parents' kitchen. Now I know that I had a good thing going and I didn't want to screw it up. So I did not drink to excess. Never more than 1 or 2 in an evening. I was completely responsible with it. Besides, I'd worked hard to make this beer and I wasn't going to waste it by binging. I wanted it to last. This was a very, very good thing for me in retrospect. It taught me responsible habits with alcohol which I would not have established had my entire introduction to alcohol been that of, say, your typical college student. I also got a lot of chemistry out of it. I never took any classes on chemistry in high school or college so learning to brew was a big help there. I learned about enzymes and mash conversions and relative solubility of various alpha and beta acids. Some people told me that that I was wasting my money on the equipment, that I'd only use it a few times and it would never pay for it's self. However, I still have all of that same brewing equipment. I've since bought a few more fermenters for running multiple batches at once and I think I've broken a couple of hydrometers at this point. But I've made hundreds of gallons of beer with that set up and it has long since paid for it's self. And come to think of it, I still have a lot of the bottles that I used for that first batch. 12 years of reusing the same glass bottles is some serious recycling. 2:12 p.m. - 2007-12-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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