Everybody’s got a hobby. Some people make crafts; others make craft beer. I happen to know a guy who falls into the latter category. Evan and his roommates recently entered the homebrew scene and started making their own beer from scratch right in their own home. I sat down with him and got him to tell me how he got into the beer making business and what his experience was like.
Why Make Beer?
When I heard Evan was making his own beer, I thought it was just an impulsive idea. Turns out, Evan had been thinking about making his own beer for quite some time. After watching a bunch of YouTube videos about homebrewing and talking it over with his friend, the two hit up Philly Homebrew Outlet in Fishtown and Keg and Barrel in Berlin, NJ to buy the equipment they’d need to get started.
Working Up To The Real Deal
Before he started brewing his own recipes, Evan and his friends started out with pre-made homebrewing kits. While easy to use, and a good way to get familiar with the basics of beer making, the guys found the pre-determined recipes restrictive with little room for creativity. All the ingredients came pre-measured, so there was relatively little risk involved. This led to Evan forgoing the kits and creating his own recipe for a chocolate imperial stout.
Why a chocolate stout? Well, to quote Evan, it’s “easier to hide your mistakes,” but it’s also a common beer, so there would be a lot of resources available as well as other recipes to look to for guidance.
The Process
The first major decision was whether to use extract brewing or all-grain brewing. (The difference lies in how the brewer gets fermentable sugars. Extract brewing using malt extract whereas all-grain uses, you guessed it, all grains). While all-grain is considered "the proper way of doing it", extract brewing proves better for limited brewing space. With that decision out of the way, it was time to start brewing.
The guys set up shop in their kitchen with an assortment of buckets, paddle, five-gallon pot, and other various pieces. In order to make 6 gallons of beer, they needed about 6 lbs of specialty grains, 10 lbs malt extract, cocoa powder, molasses, cacao nibs, vodka, and various other ingredients that ended up totaling a cool $114. (Cost of equipment was estimated to be about $125).
As for the actual brewing process, it ended being a multi-step process that took weeks to complete. Purified water was brought up to steeping temperature (about 150°F), at which point a grain bag full of the specialty grains was added to the pot.
After steeping, they removed the grains and increased the water temperature so they could add malts, malt extracts, and hops. Once the malts went in, the water was left to chill until it was cool enough to add yeast to the mix.
Then basically-liquid bread was transferred to a glass carboy to ferment. After primary fermentation, Evan added a mix of cacao nibs and vodka along with lactose to the brew that was then transferred to a secondary glass carboy for the secondary fermentation to smooth out the taste.
Then, they waited.
After two weeks of fermentation, and checking on the gravity with a hydrometer (this tells you how much sugar was converted to alcohol), it was time for bottle conditioning. Priming sugar was added to activate the yeast again, and Evan’s beer babies were finally born.
Taste Test
A couple weeks after I had interviewed Evan, he gave me a bottle of the finished beer to sample. It was a little flatter than expected, but he explained that having capped the bottles with dry caps and not wet caps made a weak seal so the beer lost some of its carbonation. As for the taste itself, he wasn’t exaggerating when he said it was sweet. I could smell the chocolate, but when drinking it, the chocolate taste wasn’t as strong. It was extremely sweet going down, but had a bitter aftertaste, which made for an interesting experience. Evan attributed the sweetness to adding too much lactose during secondary fermentation, something he'd try to avoid in the future.
Now the beer wasn’t bad; for a first attempt at making a beer from scratch it was pretty good. Like I told Evan, he made a beer. It was his own recipe, and nothing exploded or failed along the way, so I’d say this was a success.
Next Steps
Now that they have some experience under their belts, Evan and his friends are starting to brew their second original beer recipe. Last time I spoke to him, they were preparing to start a ginger pale ale and then work up to making a mango habanero saison.
If you’re interested in getting into making your own brew, according to Evan, “if you feel like playing around with it, it’s pretty easy to get into”. Just be aware it’s a long process that requires investing a decent amount of money into equipment and ingredients. But, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you get the satisfaction of seeing your work pay off when you share your creation with your family and friends.