On December 4, 2011 by vard
Finally! I’ve finally found a hobby that doesn’t require a camera…not that I was looking for one, but it’s nice to be able to enjoy something without creating more work to get to.
A few months back some friends and I decided we wanted to take a stab at making our own beer. We drink enough of it, and we like good craft beers, so why not. Benny got to work studying what we’d need to make it happen. A couple of small investments later, we were ready to brew.
The first beer up was an IPA…there’s no way it wouldn’t be. Benny and I both drink our fare share of it, so why not start with what we like. The brew went well and we had a great time. The only hard part was not being able to drink it immediately. That first IPA had to sit for 3 weeks before it was ready for bottling! So we kept ourselves busy with other beers…
Next up was a Belgian Wheat. I’m not the biggest wheat fan, but at this point we’re just learning, so we’re brewing pretty much anything and everything. We had another great 5+ hour brew session that night as well. The wheat was brewed a week after the IPA, but both would be ready for bottling at the same time, as the wheat takes a week less.
So, two weeks after brewing the wheat Benny and I sat down to bottle 93 bottles of our own making. A simple process really, but again we were cursed with beer not yet ready to drink. Patience…it’s important to beer making, apparently. With the bottling of the first two batches out of the way we got to work planning our next 2 brews…
For the next round of brewing we ran back to our favorite, the IPA. This time we mixed it up a bit. I tried a Dogfishhead 90 recipe and Benny went after a Ruination. Two nights in a row of great brewing and learning…learning that mixing up your yeasts will probably not result in the beer you were aiming for…Oops! Yep, we accidentally swapped the yeasts between the recipes. Doh! Oh well…lesson learned…the beers should actually be fine…we’ll know in a few weeks.
While these two IPA’s were fermenting, we finally had our first real beer casualty. Benny’s Ruination was fermenting so intensely it blew the airlock off the top of the carboy. Not a huge mess, and the beer wasn’t ruined, but something different for sure.
And that about brings us to this weekend. This time we pushed the capacity of our setup and went for a double batch of the Belgian Wheat. It’s takes nearly the same time and the grain costs are minimally different…and the first round of wheat was so popular with the folks that tried it, we thought we’d give it a go on a larger scale. As has been the case, we had a blast brewing and are very much looking forward to the weekend before Xmas when a whole bunch of this stuff will start to be ready for sampling…
We’re having fun…We’re eventually going to be saving money…We’re learning lots of cool stuff…and it’s pretty neat to be able to create something we dig so much. Oh, and the first 2 brews, the IPA and the Belgian Wheat…both are effing awesome! They didn’t last long, but they were damn good while we had them…
Rock on!
