Brewmeisters

My brother Mark (and his wife Catherine) gave Tom and me a gift certificate for a beer making setup for Christmas this year. It was an appropriate gift - Mark was into home brewing himself when he was about our age. Unfortunately, after 3 or 4 successful batches, Mark read somewhere that adding pine extract to beer would make a nice Christmas brew. In actuality it made a beverage that bore an uncanny resemblance to pine-sol. Mark hasn't brewed since.

Aaannnyyyways, Tom and I aren't serious beer connoisseurs, but the chemistry and the do-it-yourself aspect definitely appeals to us. So we got a very nice kit from our local homebrew store, and decided to start with a batch of American Brown Ale. The first task was to accumulate 50 brown pop-top beer bottles. We had to throw a poker party a couple days before brewing to make sure we'd have enough. Then, we spent a long Friday night a couple of weeks ago brewing it up. When we were done, we nestled 5 gallons of precious yeasty mixture into our closet where it would stay warm and dark.After three and a half weeks of fermentation in the closet we finally decided that it was done and ready to bottle. Tom was actually out in DC when it was time to bottle, so I had to schlep the 5 gallons around the house and figure out how to add the carbonation sugar on my own. Fortunately, Dustin showed up just in time to help me bottle the mixture - clamping the tops on all those bottles isn't a particularly easy task.

Last week, we popped open the first "test" bottle of brew when we had a few friends over. It got good reviews overall - it was nice and full and surprisingly hoppy. It had started to carbonate but wasn't quite ready to go yet, so we've put the bottles back in the closet to finish up.

With one batch of beer in the works, we decided to try our hand at something a little different - hard cider. It is tough to find a good set of directions for making hard cider; none of the libraries carry any literature and on-line material varies wildly from site to site. We ended up just quizzing the brew-store owner about how to make it, and we are hopeful that his verbal directions will work for us. Cider is a particular challenge because most commercial cider has a fair amount of sweetness to it. This is very tough to achieve for a home brewer, because any sugar that is left in the cider when you bottle has the tendency to over-carbonate and explode. So we'll likely end up with a very dry cider (despite using some very sweet gravenstein apple juice with 2 lbs of added honey), but we're hoping it tastes good anyway.
As we speak, the cider is perking away in its five gallon carboy in our closet! Cider takes a lot longer than beer to finish, so we aren't likely to be drinking any for at least two months, but it's fun and exciting to try something new!