Something bad's a-home-brewing...

The other night, a few friends and I set out to make some beer. Three out of the four of us had done this before, to varying degrees, so we should have known what we were doing.

We had the grain - check - and the brew pot, a couple of large pails, the hops, 10 gallons of clean water, and our crazy seasonings, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, and rose hips - check, check, check, check, check. Good to go! The first step was to heat up 5 gallons of water in a 10 gallon aluminum stock pot on one burner of my very mediocre gas stove. It took a while. Hours maybe. I'm not sure, as we were always cooking up some curry and dreaming about the pie that was to come.

Eventually, with this warm water, we moved on to steep the grains. This is also known as the mash phase, or, as I think of it, making oatmeal. For those of you who have never made their own beer, imagine infusing your kitchen with the aroma of 12 or more pounds of Grape-Nuts (i.e. barley) mixed with your favorite oatmeal. It's possible that not everyone loves grains like I do, but, friend, it is a sweet thing.

I'll try to not to bore you with all the hot, sticky details of the brew process, but suffice it to say that it was hot and sticky in the least sexiest of ways. I think everyone got mildly scalded at some point, and my floor and our shoes were coated in gooey, malty water. When we were finally done with all the grain and ready to boil the wort (pronounced "wert," but it is a lovely word for pre-fermented beer, isn't it?), we prepared to wait the hours it would take the water to get up to boiling again, after which there would be at least an hour more of it maintaining that boil.

As we waited, we made pie. We used gooseberries, blueberries, and some leftover honey barley from the mash, all in a homemade pie crust, with caramelized peach slices atop each piece. It was another chaotic hour and a half, but it came out nearly perfect, as you can see. So perfect, in fact, that we had to wrestle Jeremy away from making love to it. A triumph all around - which is more than I can say about the beer...

We had been adding our hops at appropriate times throughout the boil and were finally ready to be done with it. Now, this whole time we've been taking measurements of the wort with our hydrometer and seeing very mixed and very weird results. These readings are supposed to give us an idea of how alcoholic the finished product will be, and most of the readings were pointing toward a 1-2% alcohol content. That's low even for Budweiser standards. So before the end of the boil we decide to toss in a can of malt extract just to bolster up the alcohol potential (more malt means more food for alcohol-producing yeast). This is a connoisseurial faux pas, akin to throwing a pound of sugar into a carafe to make bad coffee palatable.

The only steps remaining are to pour the wort into a pail, cool it to an inhabitable temperature for the yeast, and then to add the yeast. This is important to do quickly so the beer doesn't end up infected with some other bacteria that decides to homestead in these 5 gallons of malty elixir.

It's 3 am.

The yeast...the yeast...oh, good God, we don't have any yeast. We all would have kicked ourselves had we not been way too tired to make the effort. The only option was really to just try to keep it sterile until morning when we could rush out and buy some yeast for the brew. Hopefully we succeeded in doing so, but we won't know for a while yet. Now, as it continually bubbles and foams over the edges of its fermenter, I wonder just how much abuse can wort take and still become beer? I mean, this beer was going to be weird to begin with, but now it may turn out to be a true freak.

As we wait the many weeks for the beer to become beer, I think I might make another pie. Succeeding in anything is great, so I hear, but the best kind of success is when you can literally taste it.