Brewologist: Home brewing requires equal parts science and luck

Sep. 15, 2010

I didn't drink much in the way of commercial beer in the past week or so, because I was focused on making my own.

My high school friends and I played in a country rock band a million years ago, and nowadays gather annually to see if we can remember how to play anything. We usually can't. Anyway,I'd wanted to brew my own beer for a long time and the reunion was just the impetus I needed, but there was much misadventure and learning along the way.

Lesson one was patience, something I possess in very small measure. I had the ingredients on hand to make a dark wheat beer for my first batch. I had most of the necessary gear, too, except for one little thing called a hydrometer. It measures the density of your beer, and the idea is that you can track the number as it gets lower. This gives you an indication of how much alcohol your wort has produced, and it tells you when your beer is done fermenting. It's all very scientific.

Of course, I was not feeling scientific. I was feeling artistic! I was brewing a masterpiece, not following some formula! Brown sugar? OK! A bit of cinnamon? Throw it in!

Hydrometer? Measurements? Let technicians do that stuff, I thought. I didn't want to wait until I could get to a store and buy a hydrometer. I wanted to brew at that very moment.

So, I forged ahead. I figured out my ingredients, boiled my wort, added my hops, strained it into my little two-gallon fermenter and pitched my yeast in with it. Within a few hours, I had a big froth on top of my beer, indicating a furious start to fermentation. So far so good, I thought.

After a couple of days, the froth mostly disappeared. My home brewing book said this meant the beer was done fermenting. That seemed rather sudden to me. Could it be done already?

So ... I rushed out to buy a hydrometer. I knew that if it gave me the same reading a few days in a row, it meant fermentation was done. I took a reading, and got a higher number than expected. The yeast apparently had more work to do, but as far as I could tell the action in the fermenter had stopped. I crossed my fingers, and decided to wait until the next day.

Another day, another reading, same result. Next day, same thing.

My brew was not fermenting, but the specific gravity (that's what the hydrometer measures) was too high for a finished ale. My beer was stuck!

I reached out to homebrewing friends on Twitter for advice. Some told me to pitch more yeast. Some told me to shake the fermenter a bit. Some told me to add sugar. Some told me to move the beer to a warmer spot, and some told me to move it to a cooler spot. Some told me to give up and start over.

I listened to a local homebrewer who had proven more than once that he knows his stuff by sharing his own good brews with me. I pitched more yeast into the fermenter, opening and closing the lid as quickly as possible to prevent contamination from whatever microorganisms might be living in my basement. I waited another week, but never noticed any real amount of foaming action in the fermenter.

While I waited, I fretted. I had no idea how much work my yeast had done. There certainly had to be some alcohol in there, but I really didn't know how much. Because I skipped the initial hydrometer reading, I had no baseline for comparison. So I reverse-engineered my beer, trying to arrive at a ballpark figure for my beer's original gravity. I realized my full-bodied beer probably started at an unbelievable high gravity, thanks to the unholy amount of malts I used in my burst of enthusiasm. I also learned I should have been choosier with my yeast and gone with something that could handle a big malty wort and a high alcohol content.

I decided then and there to be a bit more scientific the next time I brewed.

After a week, I used the hydrometer again and got the same blasted reading as before. Too high. Argh.

I wanted to brew beer, and the reunion was coming up fast, and I had no experience in tasting beer in progress by which to judge whether the final result would be drinkable at all. Beer in progress is at room temperature and uncarbonated, a far cry from proper serving conditions. I can't drink the flat stuff and really know what it'll be like when it's done.

In a fit of disgust, I started draining the fermenter down the sink with a goal of starting a new batch. I figured I had time to muscle a new brew through, once this initial tank full of crap was out of my way.

Somewhere in the process, I looked at the small type on my hydrometer and saw that it was built to read accurately when the wort is at 70 degrees. What? I'd read somewhere that hydrometers read accurately at 60 degrees, and you have to adjust the reading if the beer was warmer than that. So I had been mentally adding to my hydrometer readings, thinking I was being all belatedly scientific. But my brew was at 70 degrees, my hydrometer was reading accurately and there had been no need to adjust.

I redid the math and realized the reading was within reason for a weizenbock, a full-bodied German wheat beer.

In other words, the beer probably was not really dead after all. I started sanitizing bottles and began bottling what was left of my brew after all the testing and the bit of dumping. It wasn't a lot.

There was a brief scare when I feared one of my bottles would not handle the pressure of carbonization. Important safety tip: Don't use juice bottles for this. Experienced homebrewers were horrified when I mentioned the juice bottle, and they told tales of glass shrapnel and flooded floors. I transferred that beer into safer bottles, knowing that I was risking contamination in doing so. Argh, again.

A week later, after carbonation and chilling, I tried a bottle. It gushed on opening, because I'd probably used too much priming sugar. The beer tasted OK, very malty and sweeter than I expected. Not a home run, but drinkable. I called it Frankenstein Ale, because I'd sort of brought it back from the dead.

I decided to let the rest of Batch No. 1 condition in the refrigerator until it was time to take it to the reunion. A week or so later, I shared a bottle with my friend TW when he visited from Chicago. The beer didn't gush, and was noticeably improved after settling as while. My hopes were raised a bit, and I crossed my fingers for the precisely measured pale ale fermenting in my basement -- the pale ale I'd done everything right on, without skipping important measurements.

I took both varieties of beer to the reunion. The crazy dark wheat beer I'd worried so much about? It rounded out very nicely over time, didn't gush a bit -- and my stout-loving friend Deven and his son liked it just fine. I liked it, too. It proved to be pretty solid.

The perfect-process pale ale? Deven thought it smelled like Pabst, and I couldn't really disagree. It was a bit flat for my taste, but drinkable enough. My friend Larry liked it a lot, though. He kept reaching for more and asked me to brew another batch. He may even come up to help me do it.

So ... lesson number two? Relax. Even if it's not exactly what I expected, someone may well like it -- and it all tastes better with friends, just like any other beer.

Batch No. 3 went into the fermenter within hours of our arrival home.


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