mikeShriver

I have a lot of respect for crafty people. I like the kind of people who own sewing machines, or buy darkroom chemicals from ebay; the kind of people who hammer old silverware into jewelry, and paint; and who make music, and make musical instruments, and fix everything first before buying new. I’ve never considered myself all that crafty. In fact, I kind of write myself off as being too lazy to really get into something long enough to really learn it.

A friend mentioned that she is taking a cheesemaking course from WSU, recently. This is strange, and awesome and made me want to try to learn my own craft. I’ve had an idea that I wanted to try homebrewing for a few years, now, and I think that comment gave me just enough of a kick to try it out. I nabbed an old kit from craigslist for fifty bucks, got the ingredients a week later, and brewed everything up last weekend:

This is what beer started out as: Malt extract, specialty grains, hops, and yeast (that white package is actually corn sugar used when bottling. Just pretend it’s yeast, and let’s move on).

The steps to make beer are pretty basic. It’s all about variations on this theme:

1. Steep the specialty grains in a muslin bag.
2. Add the malt extract.
3. Boil the resulting ‘wort’ for about an hour, adding hops at a predetermined schedule (for flavoring, aroma, etc).
3. Seal the sticky mess in a five gallon bucket and let it sit for two weeks.
4. Drink that shit (well, you still have to bottle it, and let it sit some more to give it the carbonation, that get’s called ’stage two’ of this adventure).

See photo documentation below (special thanks: technology!):

The final result was five gallons of a thick, sticky liquid that smelled of grain and is now bubbling away merrily in my closet amongst my shoes and dirty laundry (yum):

Tags: Beer, Hobbies, Homebrewing