Northern Brews – Naïvely Northward

I still remember being about 18 or 19 or so, when my first ever girlfriend’s dad decided to give me the best birthday (or was it Christmas, it didn’t matter) gift that a young man could ever receive: a home brew kit. I’d proudly bring my delicious brews to parties and friends’ places. They were always greatly appreciated and I felt like the most popular boy in town. My secret: making beer is easy and, unless you mess up real bad, home brew almost always tastes way better than store-bought beer.

When we moved north, Faye and I thought about bringing beer brewing equipment, but decided that since it was a mostly-dry town, we didn’t want to develop a reputation as brewers. After a few months here we realised that it wasn’t such a big deal, so started making our own ginger beer using just local store-bought sugar and ginger.

IMG_20170114_201918836_HDR — Home made ginger beer

Well, we’ve evolved.

Last time we went south Faye brought back a DIY kit beer. It’s got everything you need to brew a basic beer in one handy transportable box.

The kind of DIY beer kit Faye brought home.

These kits are basically liquid malt extract (i.e., the sugars out of barley, minus most of the water) pumped full of hop-extract. We used our tiny carboy to transform the kit into beer and shared it with our friends.

People seemed to like it, but I was not impressed. It tasted chemical-y, like cheap mass-produced beer or the kind of beer you serve at $1/glass near universities to draw in crowds of poor penny-pinching students. I’d made home brew before, and this was not the good stuff.

So, we ditched the kit and ordered a bunch of raw(-ish) ingredients.

The contents of our first load of beer making supplies. Includes Dry Malt Extract, Liquid Malt Extract, a bunch of specialty grains and a whole lot of different kinds of hops in pellet form (not shown).

We’ve used them to make a couple of brews so far. The first was a very hoppy ale (almost an IPA). It was super super delicious and we just drank the last bottle today.

The ingredients for our second brew were chosen by Faye’s mum Joyce when she was visiting. She munched on all the grains, quickly spat out the hops (tee hee) and made her pronouncements.

Brew 2 “Joyce’s Ale” has just been bottled now and should be ready for drinking next weekend. It’s an almost-hopless wheat ale, very very light in flavour, with a creamy head. I’m thinking of maybe adding some apricot extract flavoring to it to make it a fruity summer beer.

Because our carboy is small we brew in just 10-litre batches, which also keeps us within the town’s alcohol possession limits. The basic procedure goes like this:

Step 1:

beer_crush_medium — First we crush the specialty grains—usually different kinds of barley that have been roasted for different amounts of time.

Step 2:

beer_mash_medium — Then we “mash” the grains—keeping them in water at around 70°C for about an hour, so the barley enzymes can break the starches into sugars which dissolve into the water.

Step 3:

beer_boil_medium — Then we “sparge” the grains into our “kettle” (the big kitchen pot). We run hot water through those “spent grains” to wash all their sugars out and into our “wort” (i.e., the resulting sugary water). We boil the wort for another hour with our hops thrown in too, so that the bitter hop oils infuse it.

Step 4:

beer_cookies_medium — Faye uses those spent grains, along with an egg or two, to make dog biscuits.

Step 5:

beer_decant_medium — Then we transfer the wort into our “carboy”, being careful to strain out the hops and any lingering spent grains.

Step 6:

beer_ferment_medium — We put some yeast into the wort and leave it for about 2 weeks to ferment.

Step 7:

beer_bottle_medium — Next the beer goes into bottles to “condition”—we add a little more sugar and seal them up, so that the C02 the yeast produces gets trapped and makes the beer bubbly. Those resealable Howe Sound bottles are the best!

Step 8:

beer_done_medium — Finally, after another week or two, a delicious home brew!