It's been just about one year since the beer brewing bug hit me. And hit me it did. It came while watching Alton Brown on Good Eats, in particular the Amber Waves episode. I had seen this episode once before. The difference this time was that I had a $100 gift certificate for Amazon.com that I had received from my father for my 40th at the beginning of the year.
A gift certificate for Amazon.com sounds like a great gift. However one needs to have a general subject in mind when going to this website. The site has so many "departments" that I would go into an Amazon daze. So much so that I would leave. Thus the gift certificate stayed in the wallet for almost five months.
This episode of Good Eats showed me that the general process of brew day was essentially three steps: Clean the kitchen; Make a soup and put it away; Clean the kitchen. How hard could that be? I then went to Amazon.com with my father's gift certificate with a purpose. After all I remember the time when I would visit his house and we would share his own homebrew. While at Amazon.com, I found the same kit that Alton was using (awesome). The kit came with the first batch of beer (doubly awesome). A few clicks and a couple of extra bucks for s+h and I was ready to embark on a new chapter.
Given the timing of that fateful episode and when the equipment arrived (it couldn't arrive fast enough), I was planning on opening the first bottles during a Memorial Day BBQ at the homestead. As usual, I followed AB to a tee, complete with throwing a couple of bags of ice from the local "packy" in the wort to cool it. (WTF you say? Yep, I followed AB to a tee and dropped ice with the potential of all kinds of wild yeasties into the hot wort.) I then set off on the waiting game fermenting that first batch, when I realized I had a serious problem! Where am I going to put the finished product? One needs roughly 50 12oz bottles on hand to put the finished beer into. I had no empties to work with. Thus I embarked solving the problem by buying a couple of 12 packs to empty. By the time the beer was ready to bottle, I was 24 empty bottles short and found myself looking for local home brewing shops to obtain bottles ready for bottling.
The big Memorial Day BBQ came and I had two cases of beer bottled and aging for one week. One year later, I would say that I rushed the whole process. The first batch had to be rushed. After all one wants to be able to see results on a new venture. Fortunately those first beers looked and tasted like good beer.
Over the past year, I have come to realize that several items AB spoke of were erroneous. However, I also know that his show has accomplished exactly what it set out to do. And that is show people that a given culinary topic can be easy and can be... Good Eats!
