Winter Hobbies – Brewing

Ah, winter hobbies.

After a crazy fall (a DIY wedding, last-minute garden harvests, and a busy work schedule) the winter has been wonderfully calm.

Too calm.  Renovating our bedroom hasn’t been enough of a distraction, so it was time to drag out a project we’d been putting off for a while.

Years ago, my parents got in to brewing beer.  They made a few tasty brews before a medication allergy forced my Dad to eliminate gluten from his diet.  They passed the kit on to my sister, who bought a wheat beer kit and then stored it and all the equipment in safety for several years.  Once she decided beer brewing was not her priority, she passed the equipment on to us…everything you need to brew a beer kit.  I bought Toby the simplest Stout boil kit in existence for Valentine’s Day of 2016.  This winter we FINALLY dragged everything and stared at it.  What were all these tubes?  Would they ever be sterile again?  Would we ever make ginger ale from this mysterious bottle of extract?  The length of the stirring spoon and the collection of mystery tubes made storage a nightmare.  They just flopped everywhere and didn’t fit inside the fermenting bucket.  Uck.  What a process.

Let’s back up.  The real reason we dragged everything out was we got a box of fresh apples and pears from our friends.  I’ve wanted to make cider for years, but passively…I didn’t have a recipe ready.  We did have equipment though, including a meat grinder and an antique cider press.  We’d made fresh cider before.  And I had a sad, cupboard-temperature packet of Champagne yeast that I had bought from a brew shop in Boise last winter.

(This post is going to be filled with mis-handled yeast.  We should know better…we make bread all the time and keep giant amounts of bread yeast safe in our freezer.  I don’t know what we were thinking!)

We ground up the pears, disinfected a 6.5 gallon plastic fermentation bucket, and added half the cupboard yeast.  It made about 1 gallon of pear sludge.  It actually bubbled happily.  We were hooked…we sat down and ordered a few different sizes of fermenters and a few more lids and airlocks.

Next we tried the 5 gallon stout recipe.  Around this time we discovered neither of us like stout…Toby drinks Porter, and I don’t really like dark beers.  My thoughtful Valentine’s Day gift was an honest mistake, based on a time when Toby couldn’t remember if his favorite beer at one of our local breweries was a porter or a stout.  Oh well, we were going to make it anyway.  We set aside a Saturday.

Our water comes from a well and it is extremely hard.  If we boil water it leaves a white film, and we are constantly cleaning our faucets.  This led to filtering all of our water through a Brita pitcher, which holds MAYBE half a gallon at a time, and filters at the speed of honey.  This slowed us down quite a bit, but eventually we managed to follow all of the instructions on the printout from Midwest Brewing.  We couldn’t help ourselves, and we added 2 cups of maple syrup to the wort, and later on a vanilla bean to the secondary fermentation.

Toby mentioned the new hobby to a few of his friends and coworkers.  It turns out this was many people’s OLD hobby, and they showered him with books and extra equipment.  It shocked me how many people had gotten into brewing at some point in their lives!

After the stout came an IPA with zero recipe changes, and then the three-year-old wheat beer kit from my sister.  We purchased new yeast, but used the same liquid malt extract.  This might result in off flavors later on, but since it is costing us $4 for about 50 bottles of beer, I think we will risk it.  We had friends over to help with this one and it was so much fun!  We added lemon and grapefruit rind to the end of the boil, and we might add a few kaffir lime leaves to the secondary fermentation.

As of mid-February we have another IPA furiously bubbling (a copycat of Fresh Squeezed) and we have two more kits waiting…an IPA with some added rye grains and hops, and another aged wheat beer from our friend’s forgotten garage.  And we’ve tasted the stout.  It’s delicious!

I’m waiting for the interest to wear off, but so far we both love the brewing process from start to finish.  It’s like a science experiment, and you get to try the results in about 6 weeks.

Hops will grow in McCall, and I know about 5 people who have plants for decoration or brewing.  Since they have an invasive growth habit, we’ve had several offers of starts.  I’m excited to start planting!  We also have several plants that can be used in the place of hops in brewing (like yarrow) or to flavor the beer.  I had a beet sour the other day and it did have some dirt overtones, but maybe a rhubarb sour or a gooseberry wheat beer?

I compiled a few brewing tracking sheets into one that has all the information we wanted.  You can download it here.  It includes a calculator for the cost of your beers.  I like to know the value of my endeavors…it also probably colors my beer judgement.  I’ll give a little more leeway to a wheat beer that cost a nickel per bottle, but if that Fresh Squeezed copy isn’t delicious, I could just..buy some actual Fresh Squeezed.

If you are interested in the numbers too, we’ve spent about $120 on supplies for brewing beer, cider, and wine.  We inherited (well, no one died, just their interest in brewing died, or maybe their ability to digest gluten died) about $100 worth of equipment.  The stout, including shipping, came out to $0.87 per 12 ounce bottle.  (Caps cost about $0.03 per bottle.)  The IPA that will be bottled soon will come out to about $0.40 per 12 ounce bottle, and the old wheat beer…well, about $0.13 per bottle.

Do you brew your own beer or cider?  What is your favorite?