Categorized under: beer, Home brewing

For The Love of Beer, Brew!

Hello Beer Lover’s,

Sean and Ian have been asking me for some time to start writing home brewing articles for the blog. It has probably taken me way too long to get around to it but here goes.

I have been home brewing for two and a half years and have brewed a fair share of batches with more planned for the very near future. I have found that brewing your own beer can be abundantly  rewarding in a many different ways. For one you can produce beer that is just as good or miles better than anything you can get commercially. You can also make five gallons, ~53 bottles, for significantly less then what you would pay for a commercial brew. Note that the last ones only true for some beers, I have spent lots more on some high abv. beers with lots and lots of ingredients and still it was well worth it. Lastly nothing beats having friends over and serving them some delicious home brew straight form the tap or bringing a growler of your latest batch to a party (only down side to that is it usually disappears quickly).

20gal brew-pot

The story begins two and a half years ago I’m 22 at the time and thanks to Sean and Ian I’ve just had my my first experiences with craft beer. I was amazed at the depth and flavor that I now realized was missing from the light fizzy macro brewed lager I had been use-to. That’s where it all began, just a few months and countless delicious craft brewed beers later I happened onto a video of Jim Koch (Boston Beer Company) showing how to brew an extract beer at home. Up until then I had believed that home brewing was a long process including lots of chemistry and lots of equipment. I could not have been more wrong, here was the founder of a commercial brewery adding a can of extract and tap water to a large kitchen pot boiling it with a few oz of hops and adding it to a plastic bucket full of ice.

That was it? Really? Could it be that simple? Fast forward to today and yes, it is that simple, however for me it didn’t start out that way.  With the overwhelming information I found on the web I had a hard time trying to figure out what equipment to use. I thought I would be brewing mainly outdoors and I did, at least for the first few batches. Since then I have move on to brewing in the kitchen with a 3gal stock pot. I have found it to be much more efficient and it makes cleanup much more simple.

The first few batches were were surprisingly good, I was especially surprised since I decided to make my own recipe, a brew that would become known far and wide as “Nick the Prick”. A DIPA (Double IPA) made with lots of amber malts, copious amounts of Cascade, Centennial, and Warrior hops. You might be thinking, wow starting off with a double… that’s ambitious I know that’s what I would think today. NTP had an O.G. of 1.090 and I had little experience with yeast, needless to say I ran into a hiccup or two, after pitching one tube of White Labs WPL0001 (with out getting into pitching rates lets just say this was not nearly enough yeast cells to ferment this batch) I waited patently for 24hrs checking every hour or so, I was like christmas and I was waiting for Santa (really lame analogy, I know) I was anxious to see it start bubbling away. Alas 72hr later and still nothing. What did I do? Where did I go wrong?

Until Next Time,

Drink Craft Beer, You’ve Earned it! and For The Love of Beer, Brew!

Nick

Krausen anyone?


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