Just Brew It
I have a sort of need to brew. I love a challenge. I love to solve problems. I love that brewing forces you into positions that you don’t plan for, and forces you to think and act in the moment to solve problems, or face losing the prized result: happily fermenting beer peacefully but busily percolating away in the basement.
There are risks involved, to be sure. You could be scalded by boiling water or wort; you could have a boilover; you could come face to face with a stuck sparge. Matt and I have seen all of this and more. And lest you think you’re out of the woods when the brew day is done, let me remind you that the fermentation process kicks off a non-trivial amount of pressure as the yeast produce CO2 gases. A clogged blowoff tube could potentially result in a rather colorful display of hop and yeast residues on your ceiling. This risk becomes all the more tragic if you bottle your beer and apply too much priming sugar, or bottle too early, which could result in nothing short of an explosion of beer and glass shrapnel (which is why we put beer that is conditioning in bottles in closed boxes).
We’ve lost one batch. We’ve run into situations that have forced us to move from a well-oiled, pump-driven system to all-gravity in minutes, and at a moments notice. We’ve had to get creative with on-the-fly fabrication. Matt and I have also had to team up and think fast to avoid disaster. This sometimes means you have to take the best idea that comes up first if you can’t see it leading to utter catastrophe. You can’t always study a problem. It has to get solved. If you’re slower that day, too damn bad. Hang your ego at the door.
I can’t say I’d never want to do a full-blown all-grain batch by myself. At some point, every budding pilot yearns for his first solo flight. Matt got me into brewing, and taught me a lot. He also pointed me to some good reading material. I’ve learned tons of stuff on the internet, from websites, and, now, podcasts. Though I’d like to do a “solo flight” of my own some day, I’m in no rush. I like having a teammate to bounce ideas off of, and to learn from. For all I know, Matt could pack up and move to Philly or Vermont one day, so when that day comes, I’ll have my solo flight.
I only discovered beer on the internet within the last 6 months or so. It’s only from people on forums that I learned that a lot of people brew because it’s cheaper than buying beer. This shocked the hell out of me, because the investment in the home brewery has the potential to become fairly hefty. We’ve had a bit of luck in acquiring some of our equipment, and we’ve fabricated a lot of stuff ourselves. The money we saved we eventually used to buy a pump, a kick ass wort chiller, and a sizeable amount of 3/8″ ID food-safe, high-temperature plastic tubing.
We still don’t get deep into the science of brewing. We know enough to get by, and we have references for the rest. We’re not guys that you’re going to have long conversations with about the intricacies of how a step mash can help enzyme x break down long protein chain y, even with highly modified malts. We’re not chemists. We’ve been exposed to the stuff, but just enough so that if something pops up that seems off, we can recall having read something about it once. We don’t plan our beer around chemistry. We plan our beers around what we like, or what we find interesting.
In the end, I say, “Just Brew It”. Don’t let anyone say that you absolutely must do anything in any particular way. Take anything you read or hear with a grain of salt, because your tongue and/or your experience could very well prove all of it wrong. “Musts” in home brewing are exceedingly rare. Here are the ones I can think of:
- You absolutely must maintain a sanitary brewery, and know about sanitation (which sanitizers are safe to use on what metals, and how to use them, etc). Bad sanitation makes for bad beer.
That’s pretty much it. The all-grain process can be performed in any number of ways. You can go off in various different directions: HERMS, RIMS, batch sparge, fly sparge, plate chiller, immersion chiller, PIDs, pumps, gravity, control panels, open fermentation… there’s an endless number of choices. No matter which way you choose to perform any specific task, the process is pretty forgiving, and you’re really not very likely to make undrinkable beer as long as you keep it sanitary.
We’ve made less-than-wonderful beer. We’ve fermented at temperatures that were too warm, we’ve mismeasured our runoff and unknowingly diluted our wort, we’ve missed every missable mash temperature, pH reading, gravity reading… any reading, we’ve had sparge water that was too hot, we’ve had hot-side aeration… we’ve had issues. The beer is always drinkable.
It’s when you start getting fussy about your target that things get trickier. “I want drinkable beer” is a fine goal. The minute you achieve that, though, you’re gonna move right into “I want a red ale with an OG of 1.047 and an SRM of 40, and I want it to taste something like this great red ale I had 2 years ago in New Hampshire, which had nuttiness, but a backdrop of fruity esters.” At that point, you will probably find yourself researching how to get fruity esters and nuttiness into your beer, you’ll learn about yeast and its effect on flavor, how fermentation temperature affects the yeast and the flavors it produces, and how to emphasize nuttiness over sweet or roasty malt flavors. Next thing you know, you know a little bit about how to craft a beer.
But for now, just brew it. Keep things as simple as you possibly can. Go as cheap as you can on everything when you start out, because your process and your brewery should evolve together. Don’t go buying a pump until you have a specific problem area that the pump can be applied to in your current setup without interrupting your entire brewery. You can brew award-winning beer without a pump, without a plate chiller, without conical fermenters.
Get a Coleman cooler, some pvc or copper tubing to make a false bottom with, and your mash/lauter tun is just about finished. Sparge arm? Forget it. Just take a large bowl, turn it upside-down on the grain bed (wash it first), and dump the sparge water onto the bowl. It’ll spray out just like a sparge arm. You can make a counterflow chiller out of a garden hose and copper tubing from Home Depot, or you can invest in some ice, put it in your bathtub, and put your kettle in there to cool to yeast pitching temperature. Fermenter? If you can’t find a glass carboy, go to a deli and ask them to save you a couple of those 5-gallon food-safe buckets that pickles come in. They can save the lids, too. At that point, everything else you’d need that I can think of will fit in a grocery bag. Things like airlocks, stoppers, and little cheap things that just make your life easier (I’d hate to have to fabricate a stopper or an airlock).
If you’re thinking about brewing, I hope you do it. I hope you do it all-grain, too. I’ve never done a batch using extract, because I just never learned that way. Matt was more experienced and taught me all-grain from the beginning. It’s only as hard as you make it. Admittedly, we’re getting to where things get a little harder, but only after mucking with the coleman cooler and counterflow chiller for enough batches to know that this was a hobby that we loved enough to warrant additional investment and commitment.
Best of luck. See you on the forums 
brian.
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