Adventures in Homebrewing Take 2

My first batch may or may not have turned out very well. I've had 4ish bottles of it so far that weren't very good much earlier this week, and a taste today of a bottle that was really good this afternoon, so there might yet be hope (it was sacrificed to the chili gods, more on that later). So yesterday I endeavored to take another crack at it in the hopes of salvaging my brewing self-esteem. Also, due to the number of questions I've received as to what's involved with homebrewing, I've hired a shoddy camera man to document the process! Shoddy camera man played by, erm, me.

Steeping the Grains
Steeping grains is exactly what it sounds like--you get a bag, stick some grains in it, and stick them in hot water much like you would tea or coffee. This step gives the finished beer more flavor and complexity, or so say the gurus of homebrewing that I listen to. I may in fact try to do an all-extract beer just to find out if it's true or not.

I'm not cool enough to do all-grain brewing but that's an awful lot more involved and I'm both broke and lazy.

Adding Extract
So this would be the lazy step--I get all the malt extract sugary goodness without mashing or needing weird sounding tools like "lauter tuns". If it looks like a syrup, that's probably not a coincidence since it is a syrup--not that I'd stick it on my pancakes.

The other bonus about using malt extract is that you don't have to worry about screwing it up and not getting enough fermentable sugars in the solution (brewers call this a "wort"). Believe me, if there were a way to screw up using malt extract, I'm certain I'd find it.

Hops
I am the first to admit that I had no clue what "hops" were before I started brewing. I am also the first to admit that prior to brewing, I was blissfully unaware of how completely and unbelievably nauseating their smell is. Seriously, I can't remember the last time a smell so wretched came out of my kitchen. See, I'm used to cooking where you take a buncha stuff that's probably pretty good by themselves and stick them together in a way that is cool. Typically, you don't go more than a few minutes without something that seems good to eat. Hops, on the other hand, take weeks to get the edge off at which point it's a good balance between the malty sweetness that you'd be left with otherwise. It's still sort of mystifying and exciting to me that you take this liquid...stuff...and stick it all by itself with some yeast to munch on it and you end up with something as awesome as beer.

Cooling the Wort
Next, to avoid yeasticide, you need to chill your wort to a reasonable temperature. I was able to take this pot of about 2.5 gallons from 209 degrees where it was at a rolling boil to about 80 degrees in about 20-25 minutes in the sink. This is not to say that it's either easy or fun but I haven't dumped the $40 on a wort chiller that hooks up to the sink yet (I may actually build one if I get crazier). A proper wort chiller is sposed to work in 8-10 minutes so really, other than the extreme inconvenience of sink-chilling, I don't see a huge need.

For those out in the "Real World" who might be trying this at home, here are two tips that will make this far easier for you: 1) keep the wort moving in the pot, and 2) keep the water moving in the sink. I cheated though and used bottled water to top off the wort which I cleverly fridged beforehand hovering around 30 degrees which brought the entire thing down to just under 65 degrees all told. Hopefully bottled water doesn't have any nasties.

Primary Fermentation
This would be the first stage of waiting, typically one week as the yeast do their crazy thing. I opted for the plastic bottle this time instead of the plastic bucket because I've been reading posts about how cool it is to watch yeast work. I have no idea what they're talking about. I can't see anything in there through the murk and I wrap the bottle in a towel most of the time anyway to keep the light out. I'm probably going to go back to the bucket next try since it's far more convenient to move.

Astute readers might wonder why the bottle is only partially full. The bottle therein is a 6 gallon bottle and most batches of beer are only 5 gallons. In this phase, if the yeast are particularly lively, the foam head can apparently be quite large and it'll spew all over the place through the bubbler on top. Also not helping matters, because my last beer was on the weak side, I opted to only go with 4.5 or so gallons instead of 5 to increase the alcohol content (same amount of fermentables...less water...seems good to me).

One more thing...
Five gallons of beer requires around 50 12oz bottles. Most people (myself included) don't really think about bottles much.

Welp, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

Yeah, you can buy bottles at $10 for a set of 24. At $35 for a set of 24 with BEER in them...well...you figure it out.

The chili gods are restless
I ran out of chile powder about a month ago. I make my own. These would be chile shreds in preparation for cooking, roughly 100 pods worth of various types. It takes some effort, some dedication, and more than a little bit of pain but it appeases the chili gods.

In fact, they're looking for worshippers now. I, their humble servant, best not keep them waiting.

Weekend Cooking

In a feeble attempt to steer this blog away from how much I hate my job, I present to you, A Weekend In Cooking. I'm also going to try to use the image upload doohickey.

Adventures in Homebrewing

For those not familiar with the brewing process, it typically goes a little something like this:

brew a proper wort and pitch your yeast

wait 1 week

rack (transfer) to secondary fermenter

wait 2 weeks

bottle the beer into, um, bottles

wait 3 weeks

get really drunk
Astute readers might notice that there's an awful lot of waiting around. I'd be on that last one right now one week in. Technically I bottled last weekend, not this one, but I also hadn't gotten to update here either.

Bottling went OK if a little long and messier than anticipated EXCEPT that my triple scale hydrometer decided to make a bid for freedom. Now I get to randomly pick shards of glass out of my feet in my kitchen which is nowhere near as much fun as it sounds (ow).

(For those wondering why the glass is mostly empty...I'll leave that to your imagination.)

Things You Shouldn't Do While Watching Tivo

That, on the right there, is a very burned yet still somehow very tasty pancake. I make these occasionally when I'm not trying to diet like right now. The Tivo, sadly, isn't even hooked up. These would be the 40 odd episodes I've had recorded since I moved here in February of 2005. The Tivo is very not happy with me but I don't have a phone line to hook it up to. (For the nit pickers out there: I also don't have a wireless network nor do I have an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from the den to the TV even discounting the fact that I'd trip on it every time I went downstairs.)

Right about here is a better one.

I make these from scratch and, minus the inevitable burning part, they are the tastiest pancakes I've ever had. Yesterday I even splurged on a gut-busting bottle of Grade A Amber maple syrup--a taste from my ever-so-blocked-out-of-memory childhood. If you haven't had maple syrup--real maple syrup--you're totally missing out. Seriously. I'm not just saying that because I grew up in a place where we put spigots in trees.


Ok, one more.

Probably the first real dessert I could ever make and oddly enough, probably the only thing I can bake consistently and effectively is cheesecake. Those would be attempt #48,123 (roughly) of mocha cheesecakes. I had previously given up on these thinking them to be a culinary oxymoron of some sort but then on Friday night at one
Hubbard Avenue Diner where I tend to frequent, I had a slice of mocha cheesecake. Oddly enough, it wasn't even that good, but it did convince me to try again. So there on your right is attempt #48,124.

No clue how it tastes since they're still cooling, but the batter was pretty tasty with just a tiny bit of coffee and a whole huge amount of dark chocolate (Hershey's Special Dark in this case). Two of the bricks of cream cheese was played by a similar amount of Ricotta which I'm told they use in Italy for their cheesecakes--so I figured, what the hell.

I didn't get to the granola mostly due to laziness. I might just survive this distubring lack of oat-snack, just maybe.

Homebrewing is Like Pipelining

In an attempt to convince you of my not-saneness, I offer the following. This transcript somewhat modified to protect your hardworking bandwidth.

[16:16] ktorrek0: somehow i've managed to find $60 worth of brewing supplies THAT I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT
[16:19] ktorrek0: it took all my willpower to not buy another recipe kit too, let me tell ya
[16:19] ktorrek0: but i did buy another secondary fermenter so i can dangerously have two batches going at the same time
[16:19] martiank9: that can't end well
[16:19] ktorrek0: considering i barely have enough bottles for the one batch, it sure can't
[16:20] martiank9: i think that means you have to buy more bottles
[16:20] ktorrek0: or drink more beer
[16:20] martiank9: and really, can't you be content with one batch at a time?
[16:20] ktorrek0: um, no
[16:25] martiank9: I don't think this is a good hobby for you
[16:25] martiank9: there's too much waiting
[16:25] ktorrek0: this is why i need more bottles
[16:25] martiank9: how will more bottles help? Do they accelerate time?
[16:26] ktorrek0: no but you can keep more beer going so that you get a new batch every week
[16:26] ktorrek0: think of it like pipelining
[16:26] ktorrek0: which is probably not something that anyone's ever done
[16:27] martiank9: you can't be the only home brewer who has wanted to stagger batches so they get new beer every week
[16:27] ktorrek0: yeah but i'm probably the only one who's ever tried to explain by using an obscure microprocessor reference

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, Pipelining is roughly defined as breaking up a big instruction into multiple baby-steps so you can keep every unit of the processor doing something rather than hanging out waiting for the next instruction. No, that sentence wasn't run-on. Bear with me here.

In the bad old days CPUs did an entire instruction from start to finish in one clock cycle. This worked pretty well except that, hrm, those math units are sitting around doing nothing most of the time, and arg, that memory subsystem is just hangin' out there and...well you get the idea. So we can make this thing better, stronger, faster by chopping up our instructions into smaller bits that can all be done in parallel putting those lazy units to work! Hence pipelining.

Your old instruction took N microseconds to complete for pretty much every instruction. NOW you get N microseconds for the first to complete then N/pipeline depth microseconds for every additional one...in the ideal case of course. So now in your ideal case you can get more work done per unit time. Woot.

Enter Homebrewing
Now, I'm a total homebrewing n00b (I've had my first batch going right now for about a week). The basic phases of brewing beer defined as "me having to do any work", are primary fermentation, secondary fermentation, and bottling. In places where I read about such things, the generally accepted rule of thumb is 1 week in primary fermenter, 2 weeks in secondary fermenter, and 3 weeks in bottle before consumption. Basically. So we're talking six weeks per batch here...and jeez if I'm not killing myself just waiting around...*lightbulb*.

So enter a couple pipeline registers (gigantic bottles to hold not-quite-ready-beer) and I can now have multiple batches going at the same time. Granted, 5 gallons of beer in a week is a bit excessive even for me so I'm probably going to wait another 2 before starting the second batch.

So there you have it: Homebrewing is Like Pipelining.