As the weather in Northern Michigan turns gloomy, what could be better than learning how to make beer on a farm? This year, my housemates, who are experts in homebrewing, showed me how to concoct two styles of brew. With some experimental extra ingredients and a lot of love, we succeeded in our mission and had a ton of fun while doing it.
My Lesson in Sanitization
Beer is more like making tea, or so it seemed to a newbie like me. My housemates Brent and Erin have a decade of home brewing experience under their belts and they were excited to show me the ropes. “The most important thing in brewing beer is sanitization,” explained Brent as he soaked the buckets, tubes, stainless wort chiller, and the other essentials in a safe sterilization solution. Taking extra care in sanitizing your equipment will ensure a clean tasting beer, something we really wanted to drink.
Making Barley Soup
After cleaning everything in sight we filled our five gallon kettle with delicious Michigan spring water and measured the PH. “I add a little calcium carbonate, a PH of 5.5 is what we’re looking for!” said Brent as we began heating the five gallon kettle over a gas stove. This part of the process is called making the mash. First, the water is heated to around 170° F and the malted grains are added.
We made two styles of beers: an oatmeal stout and a pale ale, both requiring separate grain combinations. Once the grains steeped for about an hour, we used a thin cloth to remove them from the liquid. To do this, we attached a simple pulley system to the beams in the pole barn, hoisted the bag, and let gravity do its magic by gently draining every bit of the sugary barley nectar from the bag.
A Lesson in Bittering: Hops, Cedar, and what?
After the liquid has been drained, we used a refractometer to measure the amount of sugar in the liquid. The more sugars, the more the final alcohol content will be. Ours initially measured out to 5 or 6 bricks for each style of mash. Next, we added the liquid back into the kettle and brought it to a boil, reducing the volume to further condense the sugars until our refractometer gave us a reading of 12 bricks, which will cause a brew of around 5% ABV after fermentation.
After reaching the desired sugar concentration, we added our hops, killed the heat, and let the flavors seep for a few minutes. For our stout, we used a combination of hops pellets that came with our pre-ordered malted grains. But for our pale ale we tried using something different: a bag of our own homegrown cascade hops, a couple sprigs of cedar from the property, and an extra homegrown herb to give it a final “citrusy” character.
This dark and sweet soup is what brewers call wort. After the wort has been made, it’s time to chill it before fermentation by using a long metal coil known as a wort chiller. After the wort is cooled, the yeast is added, a process known in the brewer’s universe as pitching, and the liquid is poured into rigorously sanitized fermentation buckets. We attached a small fermentation airlock to the top of the buckets and moved them downstairs into the darkest part of the house. For a few days, the bubbling brew and its hungry resident yeast churned out CO2 and alcohol and it was only a matter of two weeks until we got to sample our creations.
The Results
When it was time, we transferred the brew into our kegs, pumped CO2 into them, and hooked them up to our bar fridge. The nozzles connected to the kegs began pouring the beautiful beers in succession. Our stout was dark as night, smokey, and rich, the flavors of its charred grains accentuated by our excellent well water. The pale ale, however, an experiment in bittering, turned out to be our favorite. Its bouquet of cedar, freshly harvested hops, and garden herbs reminded us of cool fall nights on the farm. Refreshing, low in alcohol yet rich in flavor, and above all brewed with ingredients sourced from our home, made us immensely proud of our final brews.
This introductory foray into brewing and the time spent learning the process with my close friends was infinitely gratifying. Our thirst for good beer was satiated for weeks, until the last comforting drops fell into our cups as we prepared our next batch.