Stepping forward into a new frontier... Homebrewing!

A couple months ago...June or July 2008..., my good friend, Greg, dropped off a Mr. Beer homebrew kit at my house while I was at work. When I got home, I called him up and asked him what was going on.

He told me his father had given him the kit for Christmas and it had been sitting for six months untouched at his house. He next told me that I was the only friend he knew that would probably make sure he used the kit and had some fun with it.

Well, the kit sat at my house for only about a month or so before we started exploring the possibilities of what we could brew. The kit came with a single can of malt extract to make 2 1/2 gallons of American Pale Ale. Neither Greg or I are much of the Pale Ale types. We like a good stout or other dark beer with body. And, we figured if we used the kit, we wanted to make something special the first time in case we didn't have fun with the kit an never used it again...famous last words. LOL.

There are many recipes and ideas on the Mr. Beer website and we found a beer called the Gila Monster Dopplebock which sounded really interesting to us.

The description of this beer on the site is as follows, "This brew has a large head, stout body and a thick finish, balanced towards the malt. Its bite can make your movements slow and clumsy, so watch out for that 9.2% ABV (alcohol by volume)."

We ordered this kit which came with four cans of extract, liquid yeast, and two packets of dried hops, a far cry from the single can of extract that came with the original kit. At the time we ordered the dopplebock recipe kit, we also decided we wanted to enjoy this beer in a more classy fashion. The Mr. Beer kit came with eight one-liter plastic bottles and they weren't too cool. So, we also ordered a case of flip-top glass bottles.

Our only concern with this beer recipe was that it was going to take three weeks to make and had a suggested six months lagering time. Six months is a long time to wait for some beer but, we wanted to do it right, so that's where we started our homebrewing adventures.

When our recipe arrived, we looked it all over and planned a day to make beer. So, one Sunday afternoon in early August 2008, Greg came over to our house and we started to prepare to brew some beer.

We opened a couple of beers and started to read our recipe and prepare our equipment.

Our first task we found was to let get our liquid yeast ready. The pouch it came in had a small inner pouch that we had to break to allow the yeast to mix with that liquid and be activated. About 10 minutes of comical trial and lots of errors, we finally popped that little inner pouch. The next step said we had to let the packed rise. Unfortunately, it also said it would take 3 hours to 3 days to do so. So, Greg and I grabbed some beers and sat and watched this pack hoping it would rise enough for us to make some beer that day.

After about 4-5 hours, our packet of yeast hadn't risen much more than about an 1/8 of an inch and it needed to rise to about an inch for us to use it. We scrapped our homebrew activities for that evening and Greg went home.

I left that packet on a table at room temperature for three days before it did anything. On the third day, I looked at our sorry 1/2-inch tall packet in the morning before work and said "we're just going to have to brew beer tonight regardless of how big the yeast packet is" and I went to work. When I got home, I was surprised to find that packet had swollen so gig and hard that it looked like it was going to burst at any time.

To make a long story really short, Greg and I brewed our kit that night. We stood in the kitchen cooking water and malt extract and stirring and making our wort for our beer. We sterilized everything as directed and put our 2 1/2 gallons of beer into the fermenting keg. Now, we had to let it sit in a dark place for about two to three weeks to ferment and become beer.

By the time we got back together to bottle our beer, it had sat fermenting for a good five weeks. We sampled our uncarbonated beer, as directed, and were surprised to find how good it tasted. So, we primed all of our bottles and bottled that beautiful doppebock beer to let it naturally carbonate. The carbonation step would take about a week or so at room temperature before we could move it to the refrigerator for its six months of conditioning.

In the meantime, we wanted to drink some of our creation so we each poured a small glass of the sediment from the keg to sample it. Mind you, the sediment is yeast, small bits of unfiltered hops, and all kinds of other interesting stuff. Greg and I toasted our beer and drank some of that nasty milky liquid. I'll tell you what... I managed about three to four gulps of it and said "no more". But, Greg chose not to waste anything and drank all of his and the rest of mine.

That night and all the rest of the next day I was a ripe, gaseous mess. I can't even begin to imagine what Greg was like. LOL. He called me that night and made me promise to never, never, EVER allow him to drink that swill again.

Going back to the night before, Greg and I decided we wanted to get some beer quicker so, after bottling the dopplebock, we cleaned all of our equipment and went to work making that pale ale that came with the kit. It was a lot simpler than the dopplebock so, we decided to play with the recipe.

The Pale Ale extract would make a 3 or 4% ABV beer. The Mr. Beer instructions suggested we could add sugars to our wort and push the ABV up a bit so, we added some white sugar and honey to the mix to make our pale ale about 6.3% ABV at the end.

Now, it was back to the waiting game. Our dopplebock carbonated and then I put it in the refrigerator to lager/condition.

Greg and I were having so much fun with these brewing projects that we purchased a stout recipe from the Mr. Beer site called "Pot of Gold Irish Stout" before we got together to bottle the pale ale.

The came to bottle the pale ale and it tasted a bit sweet and very alcoholic coming out of the fermenter but we bottled it anyway. In the meantime, we decided we couldn't wait any longer on the dopplebock and cracked open a bottle to share.

The result was a very nice, balanced brew with a kick. That one bottle made our cheeks feel a little numb. LOL. SUCCESS! Greg and I produced a great beer on our first try and were well into our third batch and still going strong.

Today, January 2009, we are still brewing. Our fifth batch of beer is fermenting...a Robust Porter. A couple of weeks ago, we invested in some better equipment and more control devices and upped our capacity to 5 gallon batches. Our Robust Porter was even brewed with real malt grains as well and we are loving the experience. We're thinking we need to brew some more Gila Monster Dopplebock though because we've sampled our first batch down to one bottle and we haven't even quite hit that six-month conditioning point. :)

If you get the chance to try homebrewing, I strongly suggest you try it. It's a lot of fun.