Homebrewing

Back in June my friend, LordAsteroth, and I started homebrewing.



We started with a batch of mead from honey I brought home from work a couple years ago (two gallons that was going to be trashed, I asked and was allowed to bring it home).  We went really simple: water, honey and champaign yeast.  There were some missteps along the way, and we ended up repitching after the initial pitch didn't start, then adding honey after we realized we'd screwed up on the ratio of water to honey through poor mixing.  Finally, when it seemed done, we bottled without stabilizing and ended up with a sparkling mead... *sighs*. It does taste quite good though and we only lost a couple bottles, with the majority of the cost being negated by the honey being free, though, we did come out ahead on the costs as that much mead would have come out more than the hardware, water and yeast costs.  We started in June and finally bottled in August, the result wasn't what we originally expected, but was quite enjoyable and we did learn quite a bit from our mistakes.

Our second outing was the Brewer's Best English Brown Ale kit.  We got quite some help from having instructions to walk us through the steps.  We learned the process quickly enough from this and it really came out well, but some missteps, specifically in the mixing department again, came in to bite us in the ass and we ended up  with less beer than the kit is supposed to make.

Our third beer was the Brewer's Best Robust Stout kit.  We again benefited from the instructions and again it came out quite well.  These kits are quite a great way to learn the process, and it gave us a good insight into the way beer is made.  I don't remember now what happened on this one, but here too we ended up down a few bottles from our expectation (a running theme so far).  I personally think we're overestimating the amount we'll end up with because we're assuming the total 5 gallons when calculating bottle needs, but I could be wrong.

Around this time I tried a mini-experiment in a personal interest, a green tea malt beverage.  This had issues from all the loose tea leaves in the brew stage (I treated the tea like hops) and again from tea leaves in the fermenter (I treated the tea like hops for dry hopping).  I got a lot of greasy green scum during fermentation, which I now think was tea resins.  I have three bottles of this still sitting unopened, which I'll try sometime before year's end, and want to give this another go now that I have better knowledge and insight.

Also around this time the last of my garden came in and I went ahead and started the fermentation of a combo of cayenne and jalapeño peppers for some homemade hotsauce in the Tabasco style.  They are now ready (having sat six months in a duct tape covered 2 pint Mason jar whose lid has a hole punched through it and and airlock and grommet fitted) and will be ground into vinegar soonish (the fermentation has stopped, but there isn't a real hurry there).

Our next outing was a Pinot Noir wine kit.  We did this at this time so it could be ready by the end of November for Thanksgiving.  This was a very straight forward process and went clean from start to finish.  We'll be playing with some of these again, but these are just so we can have ourselves good wine without the associated costs ($2-$3 per bottle vs $5-$6 at the store).  The results were excellent, but as Ohio isn't really wine country we're not pursuing it with as great a zeal as the beer.  I'll talk about this wine again sometime soonish when I talk about my Thanksgiving traditions, and holiday cooking in general.

Once the wine kit was out of the way we proceeded directly into more beer, this time we went for designing our own... well, sorta... we modified the English Brown recipe from our first kit.  Our modifications were very basic, with some adjustment of the grain ratios, including the addition of some Special B, and switching from the Nottingham dry yeast the kit came with to White Labs London Ale Yeast.  We decided to do a ten gallon batch, as we'd run through most of the kit Brown already (we had a couple bottles each, plus a couple we have long term stored for later comparison).  Man did we botch it in some ways.  All went fairly well, except that our chosen boil kettle (my electric turkey fryer, chosen for capacity) has the heating element in the pot (ie directly in our wort) and has too course of controls for the boil and is being relegated to other uses for the future.  Our other issue cam up in that our chilling system (until we have cash for a proper one) is twelve 20 oz water bottles wrapped in plastic and hadn't completely frozen in time.  We realized this late on brew day and had to rush for other solutions (ie LordAsteroth ran to the store, while I finished the boil and did what I could to get chilling started until he came back with ice).  I had a minor spill that lost between one quart and six cups of wart before we added in the rest of the water.  We came in at just six bottles short of our target, but the adjustments to the grain bill and the extra caramelization kinda screwed the flavor a bit.  We're going back to the drawing board on this one in the spring, though it'll be all grain then.  Once we bottled we tried the process for long term storage of our yeast in the freezer...  it failed for reasons we're not very clear on, but we're adjusting and trying again.

After this we were aiming to make cider then dunkelweizen in October... stuff however came up.  We were on the way to see if apples were in when Asteroth's car died, literally about a mile from our destination.  He had to drop a few hundred on repairs which nixed more near term brewing. Then I had to spend extra money for Thanksgiving dinner, which I always go overboard for, which kept us also from brewing for a period.  During this period, though, we got an abandoned keg, it was left at the restaurant he works at for two years or so, on the very cheap... all grain brewing is our next step with this becoming our tun and boil pot (until we can get and mod another keg just for boiling).

Finally, this week we made our Dunkelweizen.  This was our own recipe nearly start to finish, based on several available online, in part, and other ideas.  This is really more Schwarz-Weizen... it's almost solid black and thick.  I expect that texture wise this will come out at almost a Stout consistency, but with low hop to malt ratio in taste.  We again had issues, this time it was a slight boil over from the huge extract to water ratio (seriously, eight pounds of hops to three gallons of water) followed by the stupid mistake of forgetting to do a starter *sigh*.  It was a tense Tuesday and Wednesday (no time with work to get more yeast) then overnight Wednesday to Thursday it started fermenting in a very serious way, so it became moot.  I cannot wait until we get to try this one (early next year).

Our next project is going to be a stout.  We need to play with it some more, though, before we invest the money in the ingredients.

Speaking of investing, we've been talking about the possibility of going full nanobrewery.  The idea is to start a partnership (or LP, LLP, LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp), get loans for equipment, licensing, etc. then try to come out as close as possible to the break even point.  We rather like the idea of being able to sell our beer and to have a self-sufficient hobby because, well... you know.  We also like the idea of making it to the point we could go full out as a business, since our math indicates we could turn a profit now on the homebrew costs... let alone on the lower bulk supply costs.  Expect to hear more on this as we further explore... and actually much more if we go all out to the logical extreme of quitting our day (well night) jobs.