Man Crafts: The Art of Beer Making

As promised, Kim gets his own post. Of course, he refuses to write it, but we'll go ahead and pretend it is his post anyway. At the Planet Bowling microbrewery, we are working on our third alcoholic beer at the moment. This weekend, we completed our second batch of root beer, bottling over two cases. The same day I made a double batch of jam (again) to replace those lost in the great vacation power failure of 2010. It's little house on the prairie over here, I tell you.

Let's walk through the beer making process, shall we?

Boiling the Wort

The first step in beer making is to do a ridiculous amount of sterilization of all sorts of beer making implements. Kim uses this dreadful smelling iodine stuff to get the job done right. He follows directions just like an engineer in the kitchen. Of course, he really isn't not following directions if he doesn't read them everywhere else, right?

So after locating the biggest pot we own and dragging out the crawfish boil propane stand thing for the back yard, he gets to work boiling the wort. This is a mix of water, malt extract, the tea made from steeped grains, and hops. It takes over an hour of careful consideration and sampling of previous beers for reflection and inspiration to complete this step. At various predefined times, he then adds different kinds of hops for bittering, flavor, and fragrance. This massive pot is then flash cooled in the sink by surrounding the pot with water and ice until it is below 98 degrees. Then yeast is added to encourage fermenation.

Since Kim started brewing in the summer, it never ceases to amaze me how many people come out of the woodwork to hang out while he boils the wort. A few weekends ago, we ended up with three families and an impromtu party going on in 100 degree heat while we all hung out around the propane fire and boiling wort. I suspect it may have something to do with the sampling going on among the men of all the previous batches...

Once it cools and the yeast is added, the whole mixture is poured into a massive glass carboy and put in a dark, coolish place for a week to ferment. Currently, that is in our bathtub with a cardboard box over it.

After a week, we rack the beer to seperate the yeast bed from the beer. This starts the clarifying process.

Kim uses a cool siphon to move the infant beer from one carboy to another while leaving the yeast bed/yucky gunk in the first carboy to be dumped out. Again, this requires a ton of sterilization because even clean items have ambient yeast which will muck up the fermentation process and make the outcome unpredictable. Which it kind of already is, but in a better way.

St. Kimbo's Girl?



99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall...

Once the beer has clarified, about two weeks from the start of the process, we bottle. Once again, the beer is separated from the sediment by transferring between carboys. Then a priming sugar is added to promote carbonation. Without that, it would just be a lot of effort to create tasty but flat beer.

The Assembly Line

At this point, we have roughly five gallons of beer to get into bottles. Thankfully, beer bottles can be sterilized in the dishwasher and the whole family gets involved. Kim fills the bottles with his siphon beer filling contraption, I crimp on the caps, and Alastair fills the boxes. Emery crawls around the kitchen and cheers us on to victory. It is enjoyable to have a project all of us enjoy completing, even if only one of us drinks the product. Alastair enjoys the root beer and I'm waiting on the hard cider I'm promised this fall. Cheers!