So you want to
brew your own beer, hell everybody does it, why not you?! The first thing you should know is that
there are 3,684,194 ways to brew beer, and you will find that everyone has an
opinion and you should do it like they do or you'll make bad beer. I call BS, do whatever works for
you. As long as the beer tastes
good, it doesn't matter how you got there or what they say.
The best way to
get started is to buy a kit. My
girlfriend at the time, now my lovely wife bought me a Mr. Beer kit for
Valentine’s Day one year, little did she know the monster she was creating. It’s not a bad kit, it will help you
learn the basics, but it is limited.
It comes with all the ingredients you need and instructions on making
home brew. The recipe that came
with my kit was a Canadian lager I called “Hoser Daddy”, named for Mr. Joel
Heflin and his love of all things Canada (sarcasm). It wasn’t terrible, but certainly not award winning. It wasn’t until I talked with a brewer
friend of mine that I discovered you shouldn’t use the yeast that is supplied
with the kit, and you need to add hops to it as well. But that’s enough about my first foray into the world of
homebrew. You can start with a Mr.
Beer kit or any homebrew kit at your local homebrew supply shop, getting
experience is all that matters.
Once I had
brewed a couple of beers, I began to search for any and all things about home
brewing, hence the 3,684,194 ways to brew beer. I read countless blogs and asked my brewer friends so many
questions that I think they began to avoid me so as not to answer more of my
stupid brewing questions. I also
found this book “How to Brew” by John J. Palmer (available on Amazon). It was here that I developed a better
understanding of how and why brewing techniques were developed and
implemented. With this newfound
knowledge, I tried some more kit recipes and the beers turned out pretty
good. By this time, I’m feeling
pretty confident and started looking for greater challenges in homebrew,
probably a little too soon, but most of them turned out good. I brewed a couple of pale ales, an IPA,
and Jalapeno blonde called “Silver Tongue Devil” (named for my dad) that
everyone wants me to brew again.
Here in lies the problem or the agony of defeat when it comes to home
brewing.
It’s easy to brew a great beer, but it’s hard to brew a great beer over
and over again.
Since that time,
I’ve had a few hits and a lot of misses.
I’ve had to pour 5 gallons of beer down the drain due to a number of
reasons including bad recipes, wrong techniques, and the cardinal sin of dirty
equipment. If you haven’t brewed
before, you’d be surprised at just how easy it is for one utensil to not be
perfectly clean and screw up and entire batch, but that’s another post for
another day. I hope to cover many
topics from cleaning and sanitizing, selecting the right ingredients, to using
different techniques to help expand your knowledge of home brewing.
