Below are the enthusiastic responses from my first test subjects. Reactions ranged from “This tastes like wet dog.” to “Why are you in my kitchen?”

Note: this beer did not cause Kelsey’s stye. I’m not really sure why I took a picture of that.

The beer was good, though. It was slightly sweet, not very bitter/hoppy at all, and it had a mouthfeel that made if feel a little thicker than it was. Supposedly with a few weeks in the bottle it should clarify and age. This is supposed to improve the quality a lot, but I’m too impatient to let that happen. I already packaged up a case to take with me to a housewarming party in Colorado this weekend. Home beer for home warming, it’s just too good to pass up.

The setting is a dark, unfinished basement in an old house in Ballard. Indie music blares lethargically from the speakers of an old boom box. A dense cloud of 20-something hipsters mills around, their motions mirroring the mundane cycles of their lives; A weather system of humanity fueled by the dreary indie music and a fridge full of watery beer. It leads them outside for a cigarette, back inside for a beer, back outside to vomit in a bush, and take it from the top.

But who is this tall, handsome stranger? And what does he carry in his hand, but a case of homemade beer! Instantly faces light up, attitudes change and the party’s death flow reverses. Hipsters find new meaning in their lives as they crack open a bottle of a flavorful home brewed ale. Someone changes the music to a lively dance song, people begin to congregate on the dance floor and move their bodies in ways that are new and lifegiving. Another dreary party saved from the cusp of collapsing under it’s own angst. A hundred hipsters turn their eyes to me and ‘Prost!’ and I am regarded as hero.

I put my first batch of home brew in bottles yesterday. This is the final leg of the journey.

These bottles were unscrupulously scrounged from the depths of my friends’ recycle bins (thanks, Joe). People always ask how I get the caps on the bottles after filling them. The caps come uncrimped, and there is a tool that clamps them down on the lip of the bottle.

Now that I’m done, I have about 50 bottles of beer. It will sit here for about 10 days while the last little bit of yeast consumes the priming sugar, building up pressure and carbonating the beer. then, barring exploding bottles, infection, or malfeasance, they will be chilled and aged for a few more weeks before being ready to drink. Perhaps I will have a party.

I’ve had a few suggestions for naming this brew. I think for now it will remain unlabeled. After all that went into brewing this, designing and printing labels just seems like too much work.

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):