DIY GOURMET: Hop To It, Making Brew At Home Cures What Ales You

The beer-making process isn’t quite like making sausage.

Sure, there are some less-than-appetizing moments in between the fragrant hops and — in the case of the Grapefruit Session IPA the folks at The Brew Hut helped me brew — aromatic citrus peel. Once those hops hit the boiling water, for example, the brew looked more like some nasty corner of the local pond than a crisp, clear pint.

And pouring the green and brown sludge from the pot into a fermenter also left behind a pile of muck that you wouldn’t want to scrape off your boot, let alone taste.

If you’re a beer lover, you’ll likely appreciate the smell of steaming grains wafting from the initial boil. Not a beer lover? Well, don’t make beer then, I guess.

The process is surprisingly relaxing, too. There are busy moments — like the end of the boil, when you are plopping clumps of hops in every few minutes, and when you’re trying to cool the once-boiling brew to below 80 degrees — but there’s also lots of waiting.

Really, if you’re looking for a hobby that lets you relax and drink a beer, making beer is an ideal fit.

Mark Hurley, the manager at Brew Hut and a longtime home brewer, summed it up the best as we waited though an hour-long boil: “We’re literally watching water boil at this point,” he says with a laugh.

In our case, that grapefruit IPA took only a few hours to brew. The process is a relatively simple one, too. First you heat a few gallons of water to about 160 degrees. You don’t want to heat it too much for this particular brew, Hurley says, because that would draw tanins from the grains that you don’t want. Then you drop what looks like a cheese-cloth sock stuffed with grains into the boil and let it steep. Those grains give the beer some of its body as well as the amber color.

Next, we slowly pour in the 6-pound tub of liquid malt extract. This brown syrup gives the beer that malty flavor. If we wanted to, we could have extracted the malts from a few pounds of grain ourselves through a lengthier boiling process, but Brew Hut sells the concentrate and for a first timer, the easier route is tough to beat.

As we pour it in slowly, it’s important to stir the steaming mixture throughout so the extract doesn’t burn to the bottom of the pan. For this, Hurley breaks out a metal spoon the length of my arm that would make any area lunch lady proud.

Then we crank up the stove top and let the mix — now called wort — boil.

And we wait. And wait some more.

After an hour, during which the brew is allowed to boil without a lid so any gas that could mess with the flavor escape, it’s time for the hops. This brew gets four different hops at this point — warrior, cascade, citra and equinox. It also gets an ounce of grapefruit peel. As the hops dissolve, the brew looks like a giant pot of miso soup.

For those first few steps sanitation is important, but Hurley says it gets especially important now that we no longer have the benefit of boiling the liquid. That means when we drop the coiled-copper device designed to bring the temperature down below 80 degrees, we dip it into a bucket of sanitizer first.

Once that’s done, we pour the mix from the pot into a bucket for fermenting — making sure to sanitize the strainer and bucket before we let the beer hit it. After a few measurements that we will need for determining how much sugar to add later, we dump a couple more gallons of water in, sprinkle in the yeast packet and snap the lid shut.

If you thought the few hours of waiting around earlier was rough, you’re probably gonna hate this. Now, before you can bottle your brew and indulge in a few cold ones, you need to wait a few weeks.

Making your own beer is a pretty easy hobby to jump into. Hurley says a newbie who already owns a decent pot — it needs to be at least five gallons, and if it’s a bit bigger that extra space will definitely come in handy as you to try avoid letting it all boil over — can buy the equipment they need for about $100. The ingredients for that first batch will run around $50.

Like any hobby, you can easily double or quadruple that initial expense based on the fancy add-ons you opt for, but Hurley said that for about $150, most people can be brewing their own beer. Compared to getting into golf or biking or fishing, that’s a relatively cheap hobby. That batch should net you five gallons of beer, which is equivalent to about 50 standard, 12-ounce bottles of beer.

If you’re worried about the complexity of the recipes, don’t be. Brew Hut offers a bunch of easy recipes that come not only with detailed ingredients lists, but also minute-by-minute breakdowns of what you need to be doing, from that first boil right through sifting the cooled-down brew through a strainer and into a sealed bucket to ferment.