Yay, beer!

Back at Truman, my roommate Andrew and I both majored in Chemistry and had found out that one of our professors made his own beer.  My Dad had dabbled in wine making a few years ago, so I was generally familiar with the process of making an alcoholic beverage, but Andrew had never done anything like that.  Of course, being future chemists (he’s getting his Ph.D. at UNC right now in their Chemistry department), he figured that we could give it a try and see what we got.  Of course, I was perfectly fine with this and we got started, with some pointers from our Chemistry professor.

We looked into a few options, but settled upon William’s Brewing for the kit we wanted.  Pictured above, the kit basically includes two 5 gallon buckets for fermentation and priming of your beer, tubing, a gravimeter (for detecting the alcohol content), bottle caps + bottle capper, and some instructions to get you started.  The company also sells a variety of beers, although once you have the equipment, you can make beer any way you want from whatever company you want, or just get all the ingredients yourself.  William’s Brewing makes it pretty easy giving you the components you need in a single box (e.g. malt, hops, sugar, yeast), and have the yeast/hops matched for the variety that they are getting you (i.e. pale ale, wheat beer, etc.).

When we left Kirksville, Chambers and I sold our kit to another Chemistry student, but I always intended on getting back into it.  Chambers continued on at UNC and has made a few varieties since, and told me the turned out quite well.  In St. Louis, however, I never really had a good location for brewing.  Besides keeping your equipment sterile during the brewing process, the other really big thing you have to consider is the temperature of your brewing, and keeping it consistent.  Yeast tend to like a consistent environment when they ferment your malt and make alcohol, so allowing huge swings in temperature will “shock” them into either a hibernation-like state, or death – neither of which are particularly helpful when making beer.  In Kirksville, we did this by fermenting in a closet that was generally insulated from changes in A/C or heating in the winter time, only varying the temperature by about 5 F.  In St. Louis, at our first apartment, we didn’t really have the space for it, and in Soulard, the temperature swings were still generally difficult to manage.

Now that we’re in Iowa and we’ve got quite a bit more space, I think I’m ready to get back into it.  I think Brooke’s even on-board with helping me out from time to time, so long as she gets some of the beer, of course.  Once I actually get this going, I’ll post about what the full process is, but I’ll go ahead and mention right here that we should get around 5 gal of beer per batch, and each batch takes around 2-3 weeks from start to drink-ability.  5 gal translates to 40 pts, so if you figure that the average cost of a kit from William’s Brewing is around $36.90 (depending on which kit you get, of course), it ends up getting you 40 beers at about $1 each.  Not a bad deal, methinks.

My goal is to get one of these things purchased in early November and, if all goes well, have a batch ready by Thanksgiving.  I can’t guarantee that batch will be good, but I’ll certainly drink it.  It may take a few tries before I figure out the best placement of the fermentation bucket, the styles that work best with our water (we are using well water, but I’ll used the filtered stuff for this…I don’t like the taste of sulfur in my beer, and I don’t think the yeast will like it much, either), and the logistics of actually making the beer in our small kitchen (more on that when I describe the process…).  So yeah, hopefully a good trial run by Thanksgiving, and maybe my first truly spectacular batch by Christmas.  If all goes according to plan…