Brew To Live

FILE UNDER: If I write it down, it might become real.

 When I get home from work this Thursday evening I'll enter the house through the side door, which leads to the basement.  In the corner of the musty and moldy, pre-Prohibition cellar I'll find two six gallon white pails tightly sealed with white lids, and equipped with clear, plastic airlocks filled with a clear liquid.  The idea is to get both of these buckets up the stairs to my third floor apartment without making two trips.  The idea is to save energy.  The idea is to disturb the contents of these pails as little as possible.

It will not be an easy task.  For one thing, the stairs are old and creaky, pushed in on both sides by hallways too narrow and from the top by ceilings too low.  For another both pails weigh over 50 pounds each - about 40 pounds of liquid sitting on top of 10 pounds of trub; the fats, grain husks, proteins and inactive yeasts, not to mention a small portion of my lawn, that has been settling out of the liquid above it.  Bulkiness be damned, I'm taking them both at the same time.  Not out of laziness, but more out of conservation.  I have a couple hours of work ahead of me, it's a week night and I work during the day.

But it's OK.  In fact, it's more than OK.  It is absolutely necessary.  For within these buckets is beer, and not just any old beer.  It's my beer.  Mine in that I own it.  Mine in that I made it.  Mine in that the recipe resides on a thumb drive on my key chain.  More accurately the beer belongs to me and to my partner-in-beer-brewing-crime, Douglas Weinberg.  We are the brew masters.



Douglas Weinberg and Michael Burt



Here's a picture of us.  The perceptive eye will notice a couple of dudes standing in front of a lake at sundown holding some cans of mass-marketed, mostly watery, commercial beer smiling like it's Christmas morning.

We like beer, and I bet at the time that picture was taken we would have maintained that our beer palates were as developed as anyone’s.  We drank good beer (read: all grain/micro) all the time, but at those times when mass quantities were required we always reached for the old standby, the one in the easiest to carry package or with the cheapest price tag.

We found out, however, that not only were our palates underdeveloped, but we didn't even know what we should be looking for.  Heck, we didn't even really know what beer was made of.

For the uninitiated, beer is made of water, malted grains, hops and yeast.  The German Reinheitsgebot, adopted in 1516, actually made it illegal to call a malted beverage 'a beer' if it contained anything other than the aforementioned ingredients.  Five-hundred years later, things have relaxed a bit (except, of course, in Germany where the Reinheitsgebot is still in full affect) and brewers are using everything from rice, wheat and corn to old boots and bird's nests to make brews that will further carve up the malted beverage market.

Large, corporate brewers in the States and around the world routinely use rice and corn to raise alcoholic content and lower body while significantly lowering production costs.  Cheaper beer that gets you more drunk; essentially the reason you will never see me scoff at a mass marketed beer in a can.  Small breweries have taken to using exotic ingredients to create brews that range from mildly unique to bonkers, from double digit alcohol levels to hops levels that would take a thousand Miller Lites to equal (even with their bullshit 'Triple Hops Brewed' marketing campaign.)

Over the last 18 months, as I have immersed myself in everything beer and have contemplated fermenting everything from rhubarb to radiator fluid, I often find myself thinking the Germans may not be too far off, for with little more than their four ingredients an infinite number of delicious and intoxicating concoctions can be created.  Stouts, porters, Belgians, Oktoberfests, pale ales, and on and on and on can be created with just these ingredients.  To me it’s amazing.  It’s like a miracle.  Mass market beers are so refreshing.  Extreme beers can be more complex and interesting than fine wines.  It’s amazing what can be done with simple, fresh ingredients, a little know-how and time.

Why brew it if you don't share it?

This brings me back to the two, fifty pound, six gallon buckets in my basement.  Within ferments a Belgian Red Ale, brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot (save for the little bit of my lawn that got in there) in my back yard two weeks ago.  Thursday night we'll move it into a secondary fermentation vessel to let it mellow and clear a bit more before we bottle it two weeks later.  After spending about a month in the bottles it will be ready to drink.  Yeah, it's a long time to wait.  It teaches patience.  It also reinforces organizational skills.  But, in the end it allows us to be creative and to share the fruits of our creativity with our friends and families.  Good fun!

If the last eighteen months have taught us anything it's that anything is possible.  Some of our brews have been slightly left of foul, others have been a revelation - the type of experience that lasts long after the bottle has been drained.  And if anything is possible, then perhaps it is a possibility that someday soon we can drop the 'home' from home brewer.

If we can drop the 'home' from 'home brewer' than maybe we can also drop the 'mass' from mass market and the 'extreme' from extreme brewing.  Then we could just brew - for us, for you, for all.

This page will be dedicated to documenting progress as we grow into our over-sized dreams of someday giving a lot of people hangovers.

mb