Brewing Your Own Brew

Brewing your own beer or cider is great for any party, but especially for Halloween when people can be a little more adventurous. I know - it's the middle of July - do you really need to start thinking now about what you might want to serve at the end of October for a Halloween party? The answer is yes. Although brewing your own beer or cider is not particularly labor intensive, it does take awhile for all of the steps to take place. Last year, I waited too late and so I still have quite a bit of Pumpkin Porter left and I'm not really sure if it is safe to drink. Lesson learned: If you want a good beer or cider to be ready for Halloween, you should start brewing no later than mid-August (possibly as late as Labor Day).

Homebrewing can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. We became homebrewers a few years ago and went with the "Cliff Notes" version of homebrewing. We use a Mr. Beer kit and order basic mixes from Mr. Beer. We've tried adding our own ingredients and have had mixed results. (See discussion below.)

If you don't try to get too fancy, making the beer or cider is super simple and involves 6 steps using the Mr. Beer method.

1. Sanitize everything. This is very important and the most labor intensive of the steps.


2. Boil water and make the wort (for beer) or must (for cider). The sanitizing and the boiling generally take less than an hour.


3. Wait the requisite amount of time for fermentation to take place - usually takes about 2 weeks.


4. Carbonate and bottle your brew. Basic white table sugar creates carbonation. Be sure to measure carefully though. For bottling, we bought a capper and save brown glass bottles from other beers for our homebrewing. If you're saving bottles, make sure that they are the kind that you open with a bottle opener and not twist-offs. They will need to be sanitized the same way that all of the utensils were sanitized. This step - including sanitizing the already clean bottles - usually takes about an hour or so.


5. Allow carbonation to take place (i.e., wait some more). Usually between 2 and 3 weeks, but at least 1 week.


6. Condition your brew (i.e., wait some more - Are you noticing a theme here?). Conditioning is really just chilling your brew. It's not sufficient to just ice a homebrew for a few minutes before drinking. Conditioning in a refrigerator for a period of at least a week or two allows the flavors to meld together. It's also essential if you are making a lager.
   

I don't want to sound like a commercial for Mr. Beer. There are a lot of other kits available from places like Homebrew Heaven, Monster Brew, and Midwest Homebrewing Supplies. I originally bought the Mr. Beer kit as a last minute present for my husband for Christmas. I wasn't sure if he would actually like homebrewing, so I went cheap (using my 20% off coupon from Bed, Bath & Beyond). We have friends that make their own beer from scratch - boiling their own hops and everything. We like beer, but not that much and I had concerns it would end up like a lot of our other kitchen gadgets (i.e., collecting dust in the basement).

Throughout our brewing exploits, I have learned a couple of basic but important tips that are not necessarily apparent that I though I would share:

• Label your beer. We forgot to do this for our first several batches. Now, we go to the refrigerator and hold the bottle up to the light and guess what type it is. Our failure to label also became an important mistake when we tried our "recipe." For our next batch, we ordered water-resistant white polyster labels from Labels By The Sheet. They're made to be used for DIY water bottle labels, but I figure they should work for beer as well. You could go low tech and use a sharpie to write on the cap, but it may rub off. Different colors of fingernail polish on the cap would also work provided you keep a legend of what's what.
  
• Too much of good thing is not necessarily a good thing. My husband and I like sweets. Our friends would tell you that you could serve us sugar water and we would be happy. We especially like a raspberry flavored lambic style beer that is hard to find and expensive. So . . . we decided to try to make our own. We took a simple wheat beer recipe and doubled the amount of raspberries you would normally add for a raspberry wheat. We forgot that in our simple brewing process, it's the sugar that provides carbonation. Raspberries have a lot of sugar. When I opened the first bottle, it exploded sending raspberry chunks flying all over the kitchen and me. Second bottle - same thing. We made another beer at the same time and failed to labor either of them. For awhile, all bottles were opened outside or in the shower for fear that they would explode.


• To recycle bottles to be used for homebrewing: (1) Only use bottles with a real cap. Bottles with twist off caps do not work. (2) To remove paper labels and glue from bottles, soak them in hot water for 30 minutes. Peel as much of the label as you can off. Then scrub with a "scrubbie" to remove any remaining label and the glue residue. Additional soaking may be necessary to get everything off. (3) I prefer to use only bottles with paper labels (i.e., Don't use bottles where the label is actually painted onto the glass like Corona or Rolling Rock.). (4) It doesn't hurt to stand the bottles up in the dishwasher to clean them, but you will still need to go through the sanitizing process.


• If you're not going to recycle bottles, look for local homebrewing supply stores. Shipping is every expensive for glass bottles because of the weight. We actually found a local store operated out of a guy's basement. We thought it was a little sketchy at first and felt weird knocking on his door, but he actually had a pretty good supply and decent prices.

This year, I have decided to make a cider and a wheat beer for our Halloween party. On top of my usual libations, I will be serving "Baker's Blackberry Cider" and "Whispering Wheat Weizenbier." I can't wait to try them! (And you can be sure, I will only use the prescribed amount of blackberry to avoid potential explosions.)