don't fear the beer

I come from Michigan. In Michigan it hits 90 maybe twice a summer. Winter lasts for nine months out of the year. So people have a lot of time to do thing...such as brew beer. Michigan is full of breweries and brew pubs, and people who home brew. But I never really understood why that was (beyond people wanting to drink more because winter is loooong) until this weekend when we tried to brew our own beer. I only say "tried" because we won't know for another few weeks if we were successful or not. I'm hoping we were:)

First off, it took us much longer than we thought. Brian leaves for work around 5:30am, so between 9-10pm is our normal bedtime. We thought if we got started after dinner, that we'd still make it to bed on time. In reality Brian took a nap around 11:30pm, and then we finally turned in close to 1am.

Second, it was much more confusing than either our friends who encouraged us, or the guy at the brew store let on. In his book, "How to Brew" Palmer relates making beer to making cupcakes, and says if you had never baked before, making cupcakes would be really confusing. Well he was sure right, because cupcakes aren't half as hard as making beer was.

We sanitized everything with iodine, and then boiled the water. After that you let the grain soak in the water like a big tea bag. Then you boil again and add the malt. More boiling, and then what really caught us up was the "hot break". I think we were both expecting something more...drastic? Pretty much after an hour of boiling and waiting for the hot break, we realized that the hot break was just the tiny bit of white foam on top. So then we added the hops, and more hops and then more hops. Then we had to get the wort (the "pre-beer") from boiling down to around 80 degrees as fast as possible. Brian insisted that we buy four bags of ice for this step, which I thought was a little excessive. But good for Brian, we needed almost all of it, packing it in water around the pot in our sink. Then when we got it to around 80 degrees, we transfered it to our bucket, added the yeast, and sealed it up.

That was Saturday. As of Monday it was 'bubbling', which means it is generating it's own CO2, and so far all is going according to plan. But we've got to keep it at a constant temperature, and that would be much easier during a Michigan winter where you have the heat on all the time, than it is here in Texas where we're struggling to not turn our air on this early. And since we had a cold front go through Monday night, Brian is worried the cold might have killed our yeast, and that we might need to add more. We'll have to see what the guys at the home-brew store recommend.