The Fruits of my Labor

Saturday was the day.  I opened and enjoyed my first homebrew.  The Mr. Beer West Coast Pale Ale.

I chilled it in the fridge for an hour or so, and cracked it open at lunch.

It was a clear, fairly well carbonated beer, and the head stuck around for a normal amount of time.  After the first hesitant sip, I was pleasantly surprised.  For a Mr. Beer booster recipe, it was actually pretty good.  A very light, almost fruity beer, I could easily drink a few glasses full at a cookout or something like that.  It's not really the beer you're looking for during the dead of winter, but it's still a good one.

I give this batch 8 glasses out of 10.  It scores high because it's my first batch, and I'm very pleased that it's drinkable, let alone good.  I was wary about investing any more money into this hobby, since I hadn't even tried this batch yet, but after doing so, I'm very glad I did.  I can only imagine how much better my next recipes will taste.

The Real Deal

As with any new hobby of mine, I can't stop talking about it...  Well, I ran my mouth to the right person the other day.

It turns out that a co-worker of mine used to be into home brewing, and had an entire setup that he was looking to get out of his basement.  He asked if I would be interested in picking it up (at a considerable discount), and I couldn't say no.

A few days later, after he had gotten everything together and ready to go, I paid the man, and we loaded up my car.

It was less than 30 degrees outside, and icy, so I really didn't have too much time to look over my spoils, but later on at home, I could finally sit down and look at what I'd gotten.

I was looking at two 5 gallon carboys, an airlock for each one, a bucket for bottling that was full of all of the equipment I could need.  I had a hydrometer, thermometer, hoses and bottling wands, a carboy cleaner, even a few containers of malt extract he'd never used.  Plus, he had a bottle capper, two 12 bottle cases of 20oz brown glass bottles, and enough bottlecaps for a few batches.  I am now officially set up for serious buisness homebrewing...

All Bottled Up...

The two weeks that my beer was in fermentation dragged on forever it seemed.  I was spending my free time re-reading "The Joy of Home Brewing", and browsing through internet forums dedicated to the hobby.  I was starting to gather more information on hop varieties, yeasts, and grains than I ever knew existed.  I shopped for carboys, brew kettles, outdoor propane brew heaters (very practical in an apartment complex), hydrometers, and anything I could think of that I'd need.  Meanwhile, I had yet to even bottle my first batch of Mr. Beer...

I planned on bottling on a Sunday, but on Friday night, curiosity got the best of me, and I drew a small amount of beer from the tap on my fermenter.  It smelled, and tasted like flat beer, which was good, because that was what I was holding.  Since I didn't notice any off flavors in my beer, I decided that Saturday would be the new bottle date.

A fresh round of sanitation began in the morning, and again, before I knew it, I now had eight 1 liter bottles of my first pale ale. I stored them in a closet that I had cleaned out, and dedicated to beer storage, and closed the door.  Now phase two of waiting had begun.

I promised myself that I was going to take this hobby slowly, and develop at a manageable pace.  I hadn't even had a cold glass of my beer yet, there was no way that I was going to rush out and get a more advanced setup.  I vowed to brew at least one or two more batches of Mr. Beer before graduating into the next world of homebrewing...  Right...  Let's see if that works out.

The Morning After...

26 December started off easily enough, but I couldn't take it anymore.  Less than 48 hours after unwrapping Mr. Beer, I had to start brewing...

My girlfriend and I proceeded to spend the next hour or two cramped in my kitchen, trying to get the first brew underway.  My basic kit came with a West coast pale ale, enough extract and booster to make 8.5 US quarts of beer.  I carefully read, and re-read all of the directions (a huge milestone for a guy), and with great care, sanitized all of the equipment I was going to use.  Dissolved the booster in water, boiled, added the hopped malt extract, and added the wort to the cold water in my keg already.  I stirred, let the mixture settle in temperature, then pitched the yeast.  The whole process was probably only 60 minutes, but it felt like much less.  Before I knew it, the yeast was mixed in with the beer mixture, and I was ready to hurry up and wait.  I left the beer to ferment in the keg for two weeks, and on 9 January, I was ready to bottle.

And so it begins...

Oddly enough, I had the biggest present under the Christmas tree at my girlfriend's house this year.  I had been looking it over for a few weeks, trying to figure out what it was, but then on Christmas morning, I unwrapped what could be the start of a new hobby (read: obsession).  I had, in my hands, a Mr. Beer homebrewing kit.

Over the past three years, since turning 21, I have been religiously trying and loving new beers.  All in all, I've easily downed over 150 different bottles, cans, and draught pints.  Seasonals, IPAs, pilseners, ales, lagers, wheat beers, and my personal favorite, stouts.  I've read as much about the different kinds of beers as I cared to, trying to find out what made them taste the way they did, and how I could notice differences between two lagers, or ales.  Overall, I found some beers that I enjoyed (most of them), and a few that I most certainly did not.  I was always left wanting just a little bit more though...  This Brazilian Xingu would be better if it were just a tad less sweet.  Thailand's Singha is good, it just needs a little something to make it unforgettable etc.

Wherever there lies a problem, a solution exists, and I had one; I can just brew my own beer.  It wasn't until I tore into my Mr. Beer box that I realized how easy it seemed.  Sanitize your equipment, mix some powder and water, boil, and voila!  Beer!  This rudimentary kit does indeed make beer, but I was already intrigued, and was wondering what exactly was in the powder and extracts I was mixing together?  What steps had been taken already that were beyond my control in making my perfect beer?

Curling up with Charlie Papazian's "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing" immediately cast light on what exactly was happening in my sealed fermenter in my kitchen, and I was already beginning to formulate my master plan on how to zero in on that perfect pint.