Brewing Beer

I started brewing beer a few weeks ago and it was finally ready to drink today. Alyssa and I have been fermenting food and drink for a while now (see prior posts on wine, sauerkraut, sourdough, etc.) and beer was the next untouched frontier. I have friends who brew beer and I've been itching to try it out. All I needed was a pictographic step-by-step how-to guide to show me that it wasn't that hard. Luckily, Alyssa came across this article on brewing small batch beer from chow.com.

Alyssa and I needed to pick up some supplies for our latest batch of wine, so we took a long trek across town to the Homebrew Emporium for beer ingredients, too. If you're in the Boston, Troy, or Worcester areas this is the place for all your homebrew needs. The employees at the Davis Square location might come across as a little snarky, but you have to remember that: 1. We're in Boston and 2. They're beer GEEKS. They really know their stuff and are really trying to be helpful. They want to make sure that your first few batches come out drinkable so that you keep coming back. Each employee also has a different method of brewing, and if you have time it can be fun to listen to their bickering discussions.

If you are going to brew beer, keep the time in mind. Don't be like me and start at 10PM, thinking it will only take an hour. It takes an hour just for the grains to soak! At that late hour you might even forget (like me) to add one of the grains!

The brewing process takes about 3 hours, depending on how fast you can cool down the wort. After that is a 2 week wait while it bubbles away in the carboys. Unlike wine, most of the work is finished when the brew is fermenting. The next steps are priming and bottling.

The recipe says that it makes about 1 gallon of beer to fit a 1 gallon carboy. I don't care for drinking a gallon all at once, so I bottled in 11 12oz. bottles. You might have done the math and realized that 11 * 12 = 132 and 1 gallon is 128 oz. One of the beers is a light beer.

With proper planning, the hardest part of brewing is waiting for the beer to be done. I set the bottles in a paper bag in the hallway for 2 weeks where the flavors had time to mix and mellow. I decided to try one tonight.

It was a little cloudier than I'm used to, but it tasted clean, light, and slightly hoppy. Luckily, it's too hoppy for Alyssa to drink right now. Maybe the batch will continue to mellow, or she might develop a taste for hops. Until then, it's all mine.

The next step is to get a larger brewing pot (8 qts is just large enough to make a 1 gallon batch) and a new primary to ramp up the volume. I see a nut brown ale on the horizon.

Wine Making Update

Jeff and I just bottled 28 bottles of Chiswick Winery Cherry Wine. It started out a few months ago with two giant 96-oz cans of cherries (which completely stripped my can opener into uselessness), 12-lbs of sugar and some yeast. It is already a very full-bodied wine and I can't wait to try it out as it matures. Hopefully by Valentine's Day next year, it will be a perfect wine to drink to celebrate the holiday.

Jeff and I also engaged in a taste test of our Sauvignon Blanc as it turned four months old on the 11th. We bought a bottle of 2009 120 Sauvignon Blanc from Chile, which was approximately 12$, thinking it might provide a good comparison. I administered the blind taste test to Jeff to ensure that he remained as unbiased as possible. The 120 wine started with a fruity bouquet, and had a luscious, robust taste that lived up to the description on the back of the bottle. Unknowingly, we purchased what is, so far, the best Sav Blanc that either of us has ever tasted, setting the bar really high for our young, home brewed concoction. The Chiswick Winery Sauvignon Blanc had a bouquet that you could tell will mature into something resembling that of the 120 wine, however it did include a couple of off-putting scents, which will hopefully go away in time. The flavor was much more subtle than it was at 2 weeks old, but still has a lot of maturing to do. Jeff was easily able to tell the two wines apart.

At four months old I'd say our Sauvignon Blanc is probably right about where it should be, but probably isn't quite ready to be cracked open for a good drink. For cooking it is superb, and would be perfectly suitable for a wine drinker who doesn't have a terribly picky palate.

That leaves our Cider Wine, which we haven't tasted since bottling it in late November. I think we'll safely leave this, and the Cherry Wine, to age for at least 6 months before drinking. I'm looking forward to how they all turn out, and also looking forward to drinking them, as it's getting increasingly difficult to store so many bottles of wine in our apartment kitchen!

Next up, I think, will be a pineapple wine. We hope to follow that up in the summer with a raspberry wine, and we're also considering buying a 1 gallon carboy to make a few unique wines to test out that we won't necessarily want 30 bottles of. It's been getting much easier making and bottling the wines, now that Jeff and I have made three batches. Our racking skills have greatly improved, and it only takes us one try to get the siphon hose started. The last two wines have had no sediment introduced into the final product. And our families have been doing a wonderful job saving bottles for us, greatly reducing the cost of our hobby. (Did you know that bottles can be the most expensive component per bottle, more expensive even than the ingredients?)

Related Posts:
Vegan Wine Kits
Sauvignon Blanc

Vegan Wine Kits

As the cherry wine Jeff and I are fermenting nears completion, we are starting to think of what kind of wine to make next. We've done a white (sauvignon blanc) and an apple cider, and this cherry wine will make our non grape wines outnumber our grape wines. I think that we would both like to do a red wine next and see how that goes.

Unfortunately, the wine kits that come with grape juice (such as what we used to make our sav blanc) come with chemicals in the box already. The kits, made by Winexpert (as far as I can tell nobody else makes such a thing) include everything you need to make wine, minus the equipment. I contacted them today to see if their kits are vegetarian, and, alas:

All kits include everything you need to complete the batch - they all have the packages and Isinglass in the box. All the whites contain Isinglass and the reds contain Chitosan.

Isinglass is fish bladder, and chitosan is made of the shells of sea creatures such as shrimp. Why are they necessary in wine making? Quite simply, they aren't. Bentonite and sparkalloids make fine alternatives to isinglass, and for the low-tech vintner, gravity will do the trick. These chemicals are fining agents. They are slightly ionized, which allows sediment in the wine to attach to them. These heavy particles eventually sink to the bottom of the carboy (fermenting tank). When the wine is bottled, you simply stop siphoning it out as soon as you get to the sediment, leading to a very transparent wine, like the kind you get from a "real" winery.

Wineries with high tech equipment can also filter the wine, but that is simply not realistic for Jeff and me.

When the weather is nice again, I may take a trip to the Finger Lakes with my parents to tour the vast wineries in the area. While there I will try to ask if it's possible to buy grapes or grape juice from the wineries. I'm not sure if this is something that's done often but it's what the helpful salesperson at the local homebrew store has suggested. Otherwise, unless Jeff and I start growing our own grapes (not likely), we will be sticking with non-grape fruit wine.

As for other wines, how can you tell if the stuff you drink is vegan? Wineries aren't required to list the chemicals they use on the label (except for sulfites, which are present in every wine as a byproduct of fermentation, and are added as well in most cases as a preservative). But there are a few online guides to help you out.

Sauvignon Blanc

Jeff and I bottled 29 bottles of our Sauvignon Blanc a few weeks ago. It was an interesting process. The kit we bought came with a neat siphon gadget that has a plunger in the bottom. We figured that we'd put these in the bottles, push down to start the flow of wine, and then let up when the bottle was full. Bad idea. They filled up about half way before the siphon lost its suck and the wine stopped flowing. Then we had to restart the siphon, which can be a messy production consisting of water getting all over the floor. Finally we decided to use the siphon hose straight up without the auto-siphon at the end. Until I realized that the flow valve might be a good idea to use we made quite a mess as wine spilled all over the floor at a high flow rate while I was going in between bottles.

The wine has been sitting for almost a month, and we have opened and drank a few bottles already. I'm hoping that the mildly strong bouquet will go away with time, I think it probably comes with the sulfites that are added right before bottling the wine. Honestly, I would like to do without sulfites entirely but I am not sure how else to sterilize the wine. I know that some people do without, but I would be worried about wild yeasts giving our wine a vinegar taste. The wine kit also recommends adding the sulfites if you want to let the wine age for more than six months in bottles. Clearly, I'd like to let my wine age, so I added it just to make sure it won't go bad.

We'll try some before Thanksgiving to make sure it tastes good enough to bring to Jeff's for the holiday. If it's good by then, it'll also be good enough to give as holiday gifts in December. I just need to print out some labels to put on the bottles.

Right now our cider wine is settling. We used sparkalloids, which are a mix of some polysaccharides and diatomaceous earth, as far as I can tell on my Google searches. It takes longer to clear than isinglass, but I'm really happy not to be putting any fish bladder in my wine! For our next batch, Jeff and I will have to find a wine kit that doesn't have any pre-packed inside the box. (The first wine kit we purchased came with the grape juice as well as all the packets of sterilizers and fining agents.)