We Begin! Pale Ale #1 (Bonus: Metapizza)

The delicate and lovely process of brewing beer has begun! My good friend Abel and I are brewing beer together, and we've decided to start out with somewhat standard pale ale. He and I are both what I would consider "beer geeks." We like beer, and we love trying and exploring variants of the basic recipe, but in general we just love beer in all its forms. We recently split the price of some brewing equipment, and tonight we began the actual process of creating our own beer.

Abel and I (right and left respectively) are beered up and ready to get brewing. My new beard looks more red than I expected.

Of course, it's near impossible to begin the creation of a new beer without a trusty brew by your side. Abel and I started out with a lovely German Paulaner. My birthday was this past Wednesday, and Abel was enough of a stand-up guy to get me an outstanding gigantic beer mug to contain a full liter of the beer.

For our fist bath, we brewed something that was pretty simple. All standard beers (i.e. not witbiers) utilize malted barley (generally called malt) as their most important ingredient. This provides the beer both with its characteristic taste and its eventual alcohol content, which I'll get into later.

Turning dry malt into liquid wort, or pre-beer, is a somewhat difficult task for those new to the hobby. Abel and I chose to start out by using "malt extract" - a super concentrated liquid created by dissolving all the necessary sugars and whatnot from malt and condensing them into a thick syrup about the consistency of honey. We added our liquid malt extract to a pot with about two gallons of boiling water, stirring constantly in order to minimize burned sugars along the bottom of the wort along the electric stove's heating coil. 

Abel stirring our absolutely beautiful pot of wort.

Once the wort returned to a boil, we added about 2/3 of the hops we had bought for our brew. Those who are considering brewing should note that hops added early in the boiling process tend to add bitterness. These are the hops that give India Pale Ales (and to an extent normal pale ales) their characteristic bite. They don't generally add much to the aroma of a beer, and are thus useful for developing the taste portion of a beer's flavor profile. 

After a half hour, we added the remaining 1/3 of our hops and took the beer off the heat. Late boil hops serve the exact opposite purpose of early boil hops - they add aroma, but very little bitterness. Once they were in the hot wort, we cooled it off in a lovely ice bath. Since Abel and I are both trained engineers, we set up a lovely siphon system to add water to and drain water from the bath at approximately equivalent rates until it was about 110 degrees Farenheit. Note that a plain old ice bath will probably serve just fine; we're just committed to the ideal that if something's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

After cooling, we added our lukewarm wort to a primary fermenting vessel containing about two gallons of room temperature water. Once we measured to make sure that this diluted wort was at the correct temperature, we added our yeast and however much water we needed to ensure a final volume of five gallons. At that point, we slapped a lid on it with a fermentation lock and tossed it under Abel's sink to hang out for a few days. I would show a picture here, but blogger is being difficult and it's a rather unexciting image of a bucket under a sink.

Soon, we'll be siphoning our soon-to-be-beer into a secondary fermentation vessel. From there, it's into bottles to develop carbonation! We should be drinking fresh home-made beer within three to four weeks. Words cannot describe how excited I am for our efforts to come to fruition.


As a little bonus, we decided to make meta-pizza as a brewing snack. I picked up the idea of meta-pizza through Boing Boing, a fantastic blog that generally reports on technology, news, and culture. Boing Boing itself was repeating word from MPLS. The idea behind meta-pizza is to conglomerate as many pizza-flavored snacks as possible into a single pizza-flavored entity (thus transcending pizza itself). Due to a lack of options, we created a barbecue-ranch pizza formed from pizza Pringles, pizza Goldfish, Pizzerolas chips, cool ranch Doritos, barbecue humus, and a lovely tortilla base. It was delicious, but outrageously salty. I would never dream of making it again. Having said that, I wouldn't pass on a piece if I saw it at a party.

Simple words cannot describe this beauty/monstrosity.

Questions about home brewing or meta-snacks? In spite of my limited experience, I've read a disproportionate amount and consulted some pretty reliable sources. Hit me up in the comments and I'll be sure to get back to you.