ben.parmeter

Just as I had mentioned in previous post, I have stepped up and made good on my plans to brew beer. Today, I peeled myself off of the couch and went down to the local home-brew shop. There I was confronted with a vast array of confusing choices of equipment and brewing materials. I quickly made friends with the guy running the place, who himself had just started brewing beer a couple of months ago. I told him what I had wanted to do – and we started off trying to keep it simple and cheap and then escalated from there.

First, I chose a beer kit which consists of all the delicious ingredients to make the actual beer. I chose the “Strong Nut Brown Ale” which comes with all the grains (Pale Liquid Malt Extract LME, Victory Malt, Chocalate Malt), Hops (Northern Hops from the UK, and Willamette Hops from Oregon), Irish Moss for flavor, Turbonado sugar for brewing, yeast for brewing also and bottling sugar.

Next, I chose to purchase the actual fermenter (5-Gallon Bucket) and gear from the same shop. This is how things started to escalate in price. As we chatted over the course of 45 minutes, we slowly began piling on item after item. It started with just the fermenter, the airlock, then the rack and bottling bucket, the siphon, the tubing, the bottling tube, and the list goes on. Not really all that terrible when you consider after purchasing all of this it was still around $80 with about $35 going to the actual beer kit contents.

The brewing process is relatively simple, but very precise. In a way, I feel a bit like a cop-out by not actually doing the process from scratch – actually selecting the ingredients one by one and preparing the malts, etc. However for a first timer, I think that going with a kit is a wise choice. Maybe if I really enjoy this, I’ll start to experiment with more complicated brews.

Thankfully, HopTech has some great instructional videos online which helped me immensely. I learned some new stuff that wasn’t in the instructions from these videos. They really helped me visualize what I needed to do during the entire process.

In two-three weeks, I’m hoping to have 5-gallons of delicious, delicious beer. Wish me luck.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under food, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.