ELIZABETH PEARCE (orig pub 06/29/2011)
A few months ago, I wrote a column in praise of cheap beer. This month, I give a shout out to another kind of (potentially) inexpensive beer: the homebrew. I discovered that with minimal investment on the front end, you can churn out a high quality beer that would cost considerably more if you bought it at the store or a bar. And if you decide to join the ranks of homebrewers, you’ll be participating in a great American tradition.
Throughout the 18th and 19th century, America was the ultimate land of homebrewed beer. That was because if you wanted beer, you had to make it at your house. In the days before refrigeration, beer didn’t keep or travel well, so in addition to spinning yarn, knitting mittens, making clothes, and making absolutely everything a family would eat, the Colonial housewife made the family’s beer. This beer was called “small beer,” due to its low alcoholic content, and was fit for consumption by the entire family, down to the smallest toddler. It was no unusual thing for a colonial breakfast to consist of bread and a bowl of beer, which to me sounds a helluva lot more satisfying than Fiber One.
Eventually, however, the colonies grew, and brewing was taken over by local taverns. With the ready availability of ice in the 19th century, large companies were able to ship beer across the country, and the beer conglomerate was born. As happened to many industries in this country, smaller companies were edged out of the market by larger ones and by the mid 20th century, American beer meant the following: Budweiser, Miller and Coors followed by Michelob, Millwaukee’s Best and Schlitz.
- image from shiftingpixels.com (labeled for reuse)
Little by little, though, smaller micro-breweries started competing with the big guys. As folks were able to taste a wide variety of beers, some of them responded with the DIY statement of “I can do that.” One of those folks is my friend Dale.
Dale started making beer when he got a job teaching at Troy State in Troy, AL, because, he says, “There was nothing else to do.” (It should be noted that was the same year he trained for and ran a marathon. He had a lot of time on his hands). He bought a starter brewing kit and began experimenting with homebrew. Though he discovered there were several ways to really screw it up, in general his beer came out tasty, and he’s continued to brew it over the last ten years. He notes, “There are moments when you have to pay attention, but it’s not a high demand process. It’s like making soup or beans; you put stuff in the pot, make sure it doesn’t boil over and you get something yummy at the end.” He also added, “Men like their cooking to involve specialty equipment, and making beer fills that need.”
The initial cost for that specialty equipment is not unreasonable. For about $100, you can get a starter kit and, if you’ve been saving beer bottles, that’s all you need to begin. The average cost for a bottle of home-brewed beer is 75 cents, which, yes, is about what you pay in the store, but that’s what you pay for average beer. The beer we made tasted like a beer you pay $4-6 a bottle for, so the first batch almost pays for itself.
I spent a day with Dale last month, eager to make my own beer. We first headed to the beer store to buy supplies. The store is packed with those same bins you find at Whole Foods offering grains by the pound. The owner asked what kind of beer we were interested in making. Dale raised an eyebrow at me, and I said, “I like beer that tastes like bread.” A nod to colonial roots. The beer guy mixed up a recipe of grains, two kinds of sugar and a little bit of unsweetened chocolate. It all smelled delicious. Then we headed home to “cook the beer.”
The process is amazingly simple. You heat a pot of water and add grain and sugar and cook it ‘till the sugar is dissolved. You then add other flavorings, depending on the kind of beer you are making: chocolate, strawberries and coffee, to name a few. The hops are added throughout this process, some at the beginning, some at the end, depending on how “hoppy” you want your beer. The longer they cook, the less potent they are. During this time, you sanitize all of your containers thoroughly while working your way through a fifth of whiskey, that other great American drink. Dale cautioned that beginners should moderate their liquor consumption while brewing, but as he was an old hand at this, he comfortably sipped away.
After the beer had cooked, we transferred it to a 5 gallon container, where it would begin the fermenting process. It sat there for 2 weeks, when I returned back to his house to bottle the beer. At this point we got to taste it. It tasted like warm, flat beer, but it also tasted delicious. Dale was optimistic we would end up with something tasty and very drinkable.
Dale prefers using bottles with sealing caps attached to them, but he also saves beer bottles, fills them with his own beer and caps them himself with a tool that I think is called a “beer capper.” He advised the new beer maker to consider investing in these specialty bottles because occasionally the beer capped with a “beer capper” doesn’t hold the carbonation well. Plus the specialty bottles are prettier and bigger. Bottling was as easy as cooking. Pour the beer in, stick the cap on, seal. Bottling 5 gallons of beer or the equivalent of 60 bottles of beer took about 15 minutes. Then we waited. Two weeks, actually. Dale said you don’t have to wait quite that long, but if you do, you should have a nice level of carbonation.
I got to taste my beer during the Rapture that didn’t happen. Dale and his girlfriend Brooke had folks over to toast the probability we would remain on the Earth with all our sinner friends. In the midst of the party, Dale pulled out my beer. Everyone loved it. Some of the bottles were flat and it was a little heavy for the season, but it was thick and delicious and sweet (though not cloyingly so) and there was praise from all round. I was proud and satisfied. I had made beer and it was good.
I thought about what Dale told me the day we cooked the beer. He said, “I like the idea of making beer. I love that, here’s this thing that I thought had to be manufactured for me, but it doesn’t–I can make it for myself in my kitchen. This thing I thought was beyond my capacity to make, something like a car, is actually something anyone can do. You can actually make it yourself.”
Making beer was easy and fun. I haven’t bought the equipment yet (I plan on using Dale’s a few more times) but I do plan on making beer again. Not because the economy is bad, not because I know exactly what ingredients are in my beer, not in the spirit of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” and not even because I am a “foodie.” I’m going to make beer again soon, for the same reason Dale makes beer. He put it succinctly: I like making beer, because at the end, I get beer.
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