One of my favorite things to do in life is study. I spent 5 years getting my undergraduate degree (Human Biology), and 3 years getting my master’s (Secondary Ed). [Note I was on the slow track both times.] I spent a good deal of time in my daughters’ classrooms and with their friends as they were growing up. I’m telling you this because I want to emphasize that I’ve spent a decent amount of time around educational research and practice. And I’ve heard this (in 3 languages, though I only understood it in two and had to trust a translator in the third) a dozen times:
“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”
Let me tell you what everyone should do to bring home how true this is. Everyone should brew a batch of beer in his or her kitchen.
“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”
Let me tell you what everyone should do to bring home how true this is. Everyone should brew a batch of beer in his or her kitchen.
[Ironic -- but hey, it was a free wardrobe for 16 years!]
I’ve seen TimCo and various friends brew dozens of times. I have enjoyed the fruits of their labor every time – except once when he dropped a glass carboy full of wort on the way to the shower (otherwise known as our fermenting room in Whitefish Bay, WI) and what I now recognize to be precious liquid that he and ChrisMo had just created ran away through the floorboards to the basement. I have savored beer from breweries gigantic and tiny in many corners of the world. But I had never brewed a batch myself, until yesterday.
Throughout the past few months, since we really committed to making this brewery a reality, I’ve been paying a bit closer attention when TimCo brews. And over the past 3 months, he’s stopped brewing altogether. Starting a biz tends to grind some other activities to a halt, even when the biz is related to one of your favorite things. Then Linsey came on board and in her casual conversation she lets drop about 3,000 things an hour that I’ve never heard of in brewing. She talks serious chemistry here and knows minutiae about yeasts, for crying out loud. So to try to get a handle on this foreign language I began to read about the process a bit. All that got me was more confused -- I see why there’s a need for an official fermentation sciences course of study (and bravo, CSU, for developing it). It’s a broad and complex field that encompasses a whole lotta’ science, agriculture, mechanics, and artistry. Overwhelmed, I harkened back to the key learning in that phrase above and figured I’d do and understand – I needed to brew my own batch of beer.
When I announced my experimental brewing intention to Tatum, she wanted to participate. AGAIN – one more way in which beer brings people together and adds balance to our life. She took time out of a zany college and work schedule, I stopped looking at spreadsheets and paying innumerable bills for Horse & Dragon, and I got to spend some time with our daughter. We scheduled a date, I poked around for inspiration and ingredients (thank you Zach at High Hops Brewery and the nice guys at Hops And Berries), and we set to it.
Throughout the past few months, since we really committed to making this brewery a reality, I’ve been paying a bit closer attention when TimCo brews. And over the past 3 months, he’s stopped brewing altogether. Starting a biz tends to grind some other activities to a halt, even when the biz is related to one of your favorite things. Then Linsey came on board and in her casual conversation she lets drop about 3,000 things an hour that I’ve never heard of in brewing. She talks serious chemistry here and knows minutiae about yeasts, for crying out loud. So to try to get a handle on this foreign language I began to read about the process a bit. All that got me was more confused -- I see why there’s a need for an official fermentation sciences course of study (and bravo, CSU, for developing it). It’s a broad and complex field that encompasses a whole lotta’ science, agriculture, mechanics, and artistry. Overwhelmed, I harkened back to the key learning in that phrase above and figured I’d do and understand – I needed to brew my own batch of beer.
When I announced my experimental brewing intention to Tatum, she wanted to participate. AGAIN – one more way in which beer brings people together and adds balance to our life. She took time out of a zany college and work schedule, I stopped looking at spreadsheets and paying innumerable bills for Horse & Dragon, and I got to spend some time with our daughter. We scheduled a date, I poked around for inspiration and ingredients (thank you Zach at High Hops Brewery and the nice guys at Hops And Berries), and we set to it.
| We banished TimCo from the house so that we wouldn’t be too reliant on him. And we are about halfway through making a (delicious, nutritious, fresh & tasty, smooth) better-than-pie pumpkin ale which should be ready just in time for Thanksgiving dinner. (Beware, you folks who are dining with us.) |  |
I’m not too sure there’s an audience for this, but here are some things we learned. [If you’ve brewed before, you will say a big, “DUH!” If you haven’t, you just need to stop reading right this second and go brew, because as we know from the adage above, if you just hear, you forget. Nevertheless, I’ll keep typing.]
1. If you’re making a 5 gallon recipe of beer, you really need a gigantic pot.
1. If you’re making a 5 gallon recipe of beer, you really need a gigantic pot.
[Workin' out with the big pot.]
Me: “We clearly need a bigger pot.”
TatumCo: “I thought of giving you one for Christmas, but then I realized you’re getting one that’s approximately 100 times the size of this one.”
2. Chinook hops smell amazing. Even in pellet form.
3. Brewing is a good thing to do on a cold day in arid Colorado. You'll get a little mini-sauna going.
TatumCo: “I thought of giving you one for Christmas, but then I realized you’re getting one that’s approximately 100 times the size of this one.”
2. Chinook hops smell amazing. Even in pellet form.
3. Brewing is a good thing to do on a cold day in arid Colorado. You'll get a little mini-sauna going.
[Cold & rainy outside, tropical rainforest inside.]
4. Brewing is enough like cooking that if you love to cook, you’ll probably enjoy brewing. Especially if you like beer, but even if you don’t. For example, I took the yeast out before Tatum got here because y’all know that if you put cold yeast in the pizza dough it takes fordangever to rise. And then lo and behold, when Tatum read the tiny (I mean TINY) print on the yeast capsule, it said to take the yeast out of the fridge 3-6 hours before you pitch it. Kitchen chemistry: it’s cool, even if I don’t know the underlying true chemistry. Which brings us to:
5. There’s terminology. You might, if you’re like Tatum and me, have to Google. For e.g.:
Sparge.
Pitch.
Crash.
Flame out.
Boil. [Do you mean steeping for flavor? Or a gentle boil, to stir a tad and get it all toasty hot? Or rolling-all-over-the-place (RAOTP) boil, hot as bejeezus to kill stuff. And if the latter, does that take 90 minutes? What kinda’ organisms are LIVING in our water?!]
All this was just for this one recipe. I’m sure there’s some crossover in the next recipe, but I’m equally sure we’ll encounter some other new vocab.
6. No one wants to have his or her surgery done on our kitchen counters.
This learning lesson will not surprise anyone who knows me and didn’t shock me, so I’m not sure we can call it a lesson gleaned from homebrewing. But just in case you were thinking of scheduling that over here…
On a related note, (7) there’s a lot of sterilizing going on in brewing. There are beer enemies. Bacteria and suchlike. Even oxygen is a hostile attacker – except when it’s beer’s friend. (Apparently wort should aerate. Who knew?) There’s a magic chemical, which I sincerely hope does not cause growth of a second nose, that’s marketed as Star San. By the end of our brew day we were pretty much spraying that stuff on everything involved in the process. After reading the label and Googling the ingredients, I realize I should stop reading labels. The bottle recommends we wear gloves and protective clothing and be careful not to inhale the mist (which is all over our kitchen at this point). Hazardous to humans and domestic animals. And then this: “Do not rinse.” [After applying it to everything THE DELICIOUS PRODUCT YOU ARE GOING TO DRINK TOUCHES OR RUNS THROUGH, you’re supposed to leave this “dangerous to humans” stuff right there on it and let your treasured wort run over it.] I’m going to have to assume that there’s some magical chemical reaction during the fermenting process that neutralizes the Star San chemicals and makes it less hazardous to humans who drink good fresh beer or I won’t be able to sleep nights.
8. The giant pot produces incredible aromas.
Tatum: “Mmmmmm. I wish that you could take a picture of smell.”
5. There’s terminology. You might, if you’re like Tatum and me, have to Google. For e.g.:
Sparge.
Pitch.
Crash.
Flame out.
Boil. [Do you mean steeping for flavor? Or a gentle boil, to stir a tad and get it all toasty hot? Or rolling-all-over-the-place (RAOTP) boil, hot as bejeezus to kill stuff. And if the latter, does that take 90 minutes? What kinda’ organisms are LIVING in our water?!]
All this was just for this one recipe. I’m sure there’s some crossover in the next recipe, but I’m equally sure we’ll encounter some other new vocab.
6. No one wants to have his or her surgery done on our kitchen counters.
This learning lesson will not surprise anyone who knows me and didn’t shock me, so I’m not sure we can call it a lesson gleaned from homebrewing. But just in case you were thinking of scheduling that over here…
On a related note, (7) there’s a lot of sterilizing going on in brewing. There are beer enemies. Bacteria and suchlike. Even oxygen is a hostile attacker – except when it’s beer’s friend. (Apparently wort should aerate. Who knew?) There’s a magic chemical, which I sincerely hope does not cause growth of a second nose, that’s marketed as Star San. By the end of our brew day we were pretty much spraying that stuff on everything involved in the process. After reading the label and Googling the ingredients, I realize I should stop reading labels. The bottle recommends we wear gloves and protective clothing and be careful not to inhale the mist (which is all over our kitchen at this point). Hazardous to humans and domestic animals. And then this: “Do not rinse.” [After applying it to everything THE DELICIOUS PRODUCT YOU ARE GOING TO DRINK TOUCHES OR RUNS THROUGH, you’re supposed to leave this “dangerous to humans” stuff right there on it and let your treasured wort run over it.] I’m going to have to assume that there’s some magical chemical reaction during the fermenting process that neutralizes the Star San chemicals and makes it less hazardous to humans who drink good fresh beer or I won’t be able to sleep nights.
8. The giant pot produces incredible aromas.
Tatum: “Mmmmmm. I wish that you could take a picture of smell.”
[Looks: yuck. Smells: 10.]
9. There is no saving a thermometer whose alcohol (or mercury, god forbid) has separated. I know this because I have tried to resuscitate such a thermometer twice. Just bail.
10. Wort is a fabulous insulator. We were all done boiling (vigorously, BTW) and needed to drop the temp to around 70 so as not to kill the yeast we were about to pitch in there. We rigged up a little homemade heat exchanger in our fridge:
10. Wort is a fabulous insulator. We were all done boiling (vigorously, BTW) and needed to drop the temp to around 70 so as not to kill the yeast we were about to pitch in there. We rigged up a little homemade heat exchanger in our fridge:
[Homemade heat exchanger.]
and then we began to wait. We waited. We stirred and checked the temp. We waited. After two hours, the temperature was still at least 40 degrees above where it was supposed to be. We went out to have a beer and a pretzel:
["Don't mind us, we're just cooling our wort."]
We came home and stirred and measured. We went over to some friends’ house for a bite of their Friday-night challah. [She makes challah from scratch every Friday. I’m telling you, she’s just a hair’s convincing away from becoming a home brewer.] We came home and measured again. We finally poured everything in the carboy thinking that process would help everything along.
[Yes, that is a lily-shaped funnel. Hey, it's a women's collab beer. We get to choose the utensils.]
We came home and stirred and measured. We went over to some friends’ house for a bite of their Friday-night challah. [She makes challah from scratch every Friday. I’m telling you, she’s just a hair’s convincing away from becoming a home brewer.] We came home and measured again. We finally poured everything in the carboy thinking that process would help everything along.
When I got up this a.m. everything looked happy and tidy in the carboy, so it must have gone okay.
Having listened to Tim and Linsey talk Horse & Dragon tanks and having chatted with at least one supplier, the time it takes to drop the temp to a yeast-friendly level on a more commercial system seems to be a big selling point. I am sincerely hoping this is because, as a business needing to sell your product, you just don’t want to wait eons for those 15 barrels to cool down. If it’s because there’s a pivotal effect on the flavor of the beer that you achieve through quick cooling of the wort to fermentation temp, our better-than-pie pumpkin ale might not live up to the descriptor.
The upshot of all this is, I think we should brainstorm on some other applications for hot wort. It definitely should be in those mini-barrels around St. Bernards’ necks. I think it has potential in ski boot liners, SCUBA wetsuits, and waterbeds. Where else?
11. Wort is possibly the stickiest substance known to humankind. Heat this stuff up and Super Glue has got nothing on it. I know this because, as mentioned previously, we concluded our pot was too small. And we know THIS because:
When I got up this a.m. everything looked happy and tidy in the carboy, so it must have gone okay.
Having listened to Tim and Linsey talk Horse & Dragon tanks and having chatted with at least one supplier, the time it takes to drop the temp to a yeast-friendly level on a more commercial system seems to be a big selling point. I am sincerely hoping this is because, as a business needing to sell your product, you just don’t want to wait eons for those 15 barrels to cool down. If it’s because there’s a pivotal effect on the flavor of the beer that you achieve through quick cooling of the wort to fermentation temp, our better-than-pie pumpkin ale might not live up to the descriptor.
The upshot of all this is, I think we should brainstorm on some other applications for hot wort. It definitely should be in those mini-barrels around St. Bernards’ necks. I think it has potential in ski boot liners, SCUBA wetsuits, and waterbeds. Where else?
11. Wort is possibly the stickiest substance known to humankind. Heat this stuff up and Super Glue has got nothing on it. I know this because, as mentioned previously, we concluded our pot was too small. And we know THIS because:
[Permanent alteration of stovetop via homebrewing.]
When we do this again, of course we will not let our boil boil OVER. But on the off chance that we aren’t as diligent as we should be and it DOES boil over, I’m going to take the risk that interrupting the home brewing process to remove the (too small) pot from the burner to clean that stuff up immediately might jeopardize the beer. Because if you leave it on the boil, you have changed the structure of your stovetop by the time the wort is happily bathing in its home-made heat exchanger.
12. Adding even just a small baggie of fresh hops grown on a close-as-family friend’s front door vine as part of your aroma hops is the best secret ingredient ever. Don’t tell me there’s not love in that Thanksgiving beer.
12. Adding even just a small baggie of fresh hops grown on a close-as-family friend’s front door vine as part of your aroma hops is the best secret ingredient ever. Don’t tell me there’s not love in that Thanksgiving beer.
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