Blood, Sweat, & Beers: A first-timer’s homebrewing story

The title might seem like overkill, unless you’ve seen the gash left in the wake of losing a chunk of my left middle finger in the battle to fit a racking tube over the too-large bottling-bucket spigot.  Such are the sacrifices we make for art.

Wort-Making Day: Sunday, 3/30

This was delayed a week after I discovered that my tiny little electric stove can’t heat gallons of water to a boil and I was forced to buy a monster propane camp stove (see below).  Unfortunately, it has to be run outside, unless potentially lethal carbon monoxide fumes give you a thrill.  Since I needed access to my sink, this meant the fire escape was my only choice.    

This involved constructing quite the shelter for the camp stove given that the wind was approaching gale force strength (not really, but it was quite breezy) and the fire escape is made of narrow metal slats with gaps between them just big enough for the legs of the camp stove to fit through.  Let’s just hope the fire warden doesn’t conduct an inspection of our apartment any time soon. 

My ingredients were just the basics, because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible for my first time through.  It was a little hard to hold myself to this, as I had just read Dave Miller’s Homebrewing Guide, and now had grandiose dreams of propagating my own yeast starters, roasting and milling my own malt, and growing my own hop rhizomes on the back patio.  One day….

      The Ingredients:

• 1 lb. crushed crystal 2 row barley malt
• 2 3.3 lb cans of amber malt extract
• 1 oz. of chinook hop pellets, 13.0% alpha acid
• 1 oz. of cascade hop pellets, 5.9% alpha acid
• 0.5 oz. heavy toasted oak chips
• 6 grams Muntons active brewing yeast (strain not specified)
• 5 oz. priming sugar

I have photos of the empty packages/labels, but didn’t manage to take pictures before because I was feeling a little frantic about getting everything done in the right order.  I don’t know how Sam Adams handled multitasking “Brewer, Patriot” when I can’t even handle “Brewer, Photographer.” 

Wort-making day actually ended up going a lot smoother than I expected.  Though it took me about 4 hours from start to finish, a lot of that was just sitting around waiting for stuff to boil.  I was even introduced by my roommate Kathleen to the wonder that is “Mystery Science Theater 3000: Puma Man”, unofficially sub-titled, at least in our apartment, ”The Hero Who Wears Slacks,” all while getting my brewing done.

Bottling Day: Sunday, 4/6

Bottling Day, on the other hand, was a bit of a fiasco.  I don’t know why I never think to enlist people to help me ahead of time and then expect people to show up when I text them Sunday at 10am. 

This also took me about 4 hours total, but at least 2 of that up front was sanitizing all my equipment and bottles, and at least 1 at the end was cleaning up the mess I made in our kitchen.  My one step sanitizer’s package warned me that it was corrosive and I should only handle it with gloves, etc., etc.  I eventually found out this was not the case, but only after trying to wear gallon size ziploc bags on my hands for the duration of bottle cleaning and finally giving up after realizing that it was getting all over me anyway. 

Once I was actually ready to bottle, I opened my fermenting bucket (upgrade #1 on my list: getting a glass carboy) and all looked good, if somewhat gross and surprisingly dark for an IPA.  Turns out, that was just because there was a lot of it, inside an opaque container.  When I racked it through the tube, it looked dark golden / amber. 

First step: Racking (getting the beer out of that bucket above and into my bottling bucket without sucking up all the yeast slurry, oak chips, and hop residue.  This part went reasonably well, though I spilled a good bit of beer.  Luckily, we have tile floors and the roommates weren’t home.

Second step: Bottling (getting the beer out of the bottling buckets and into bottles while (A) spilling as little as possible, (B) exposing it to the air as little as possible).  This sounds easier than it is to those who don’t home brew, especially when you hear that my bottling bucket has a spigot at the bottom.  What’s the problem you say?  Well, you can’t just fill your bottle from the spigot because then the beer falls through the air from the mouth of the bottle to the bottom.  This aerates it too much, starting the oxidation process that ruins beer, but the bigger problem is you’ll end up with just foam.  It’s like pouring beer none-too-gently out of a bottle into a glass with the bottle held above the rim of the glass, you’ll end up with all head.

The solution is that you get a little hollow glass rod with a spring tip at the end, connect this to tubing, which connects to the spigot.  Now, you put the glass rod in the bottle and when the spring tip presses against the bottom of the bottle it releases the beer.  This way the beer doesn’t fall through the air at all, it fills from the bottom of the bottle upwards.  Sounds great, you say.  Sure, if I had remembered this at first.  I filled all of the first 10 of my bottles without using the spigot at all, I just had the tubing poked into the top of the bottling bucket.  I only realized I was doing this all wrong when the water pressure got too low to force the beer into the tube and over the top of the bucket anymore.  So, I shrugged and figured, no big deal, I’ll attach my tubing to the spigot the way I should have from the beginning.  Nope.  This is when the spigot attacked me and nearly took off my finger.  I had thought I had lost the spigot that came with my bucket and had bought a new one from Brewcraft, which I now had screwed into the bottom of my bucket full of beer.  Apparently it’s just a tad bigger than the one that came with my bucket and trying to fit the tubing over it was IMPOSSIBLE.  I found my original spigot and had to replace it while the beer was still in the bucket while tipping the bucket sideways to expose the hole in the bottom, try not to spill 3 gallons of beer down my front while balancing this still very heavy bucket with a now unfilled hole near the bottom, without using my hands, which were engaged in unscrewing the spigot.  We came so close to an Exxon-Valdez level beer spill in my kitchen that I can’t even tell you.  Reason #5,000 why I’m getting a helper next time.  And following the directions next time. 

Once my original spigot was installed, everything went smoothly.  Here’s the result:

I now have 24 bottles (large, 22 oz. size) of the IPA.  Speaking of that IPA, it needs a name.  See next post…