A couple Christmases ago, in a galaxy far, far away called San Francisco; April gave me the best gift ever: a Coopers home brewing kit. For some reason, I never busted it out and whipped up some craft brew in the city. It seemed like we always had something else to do and the brewing beer needed to be kept at a temperature above 60 degrees which is tougher than you might think in the foggy, cool Richmond district. One of my first goals here on the farm was to break out the kit and brew up some tasty man soda. I realized April's scientific knowledge was far superior to my own and enlisted her to be my chemical reaction & enzyme consultant. So, as soon as the winter weather was past, we got down to the business of making beer in our dining room.
adding the malt
According to my calender, the first batch we made has been secondary fermenting for two months today so we must have begun brewing it sometime in the early part of April. The kit she got me allows you to mix and match different sugars and yeasts with the various cans of malt extract to make any kind of beer you can dream of from your light Corona style all the way to down to your Guinness thickness. The first batch we brewed was a simple ale and the hardest part was getting enough water filtered to fill up our 30 liter fermenter ( I only use liters because the kit is from Australia, I think it's about 6 gallons roughly.) We added malt extract, brewing sugar and yeast and left the wort alone for a little over a week before bottling it and adding sugar drops for secondary fermentation. It was pretty idiot proof which is always a good thing when I am involved.
...and some yeast
Back in college when I was courting April, I decided to make her a delicious dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce. I had reduced the recipe down to adding raw hamburger to some canned tomato sauce but I neglected to actually cook the hamburger before adding it to the pan of sauce on the stove. April was hovering around the kitchen, probably to make sure I didn't do something like adding raw meat to the sauce and gently asked if I had bothered to brown the hamburger. "Brown the meat? Isn't it going to cook in the sauce?!?" was my reply and since then I have been relegated to assistant status in April's kitchen.
Back to the beer, I was really anxious to taste the fruits of our labor and the directions said that you could sample the stuff only a week or two after bottling BUT that the brew would not reach full carbonation and maximum flavor for 3 months! I marked down the dates on the calender and decided to give one bottle a try in about two weeks. Boy was that a mistake. It tasted like a plastic cup of Budweiser you got at a baseball game on a hot summer day that has lost all carbonation and been irradiated by sun rays until it was a few degrees short of boiling. I was a little disappointed to say the least but I resolved to give it the full 2 months before I tried it again. So, once I saw that red circled day on the calender was drawing near this week; I took a bottle and left it in the fridge for a few days to achieve optimum coldness. When I finally poured the beer into my beer stein shaped like a boot, the head was thick and creamy and the effervescence was like a JV cheer squad. As I took long sip of the first batch of homebrew, I was amazed to taste something very similar to my favorite brew of all time, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Hoppy, crisp and totally refreshing after a hot day of hard labor. The happy satisfaction of creating something and then enjoying it washed over me like...well like only a good cold beer can. Now, if I could just get these damn bent corn stalks to stand back up straight....
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