My first foray into homebrewing, albeit backwards

Now, onto what you really want to read about: beer.

I have been passively observing a homebrewer friend of mine. I’ve been to the Modern Homebrew Emporium a few times, helped sniff out the best, most HOPPIEST of hops (I’m a Cascade fan) and have ground whole malt kernels into a coarse flour. I have passively watched the procedure of boiling water, the suspension of a giant teabag of said crushed malt (the mixture is called the wort – pronounced “wert”), the adding of liquid malts, and lastly, the addition of bittering and finishing hops. HOPS, it took me so long to recognize it was you that I loved all along..

But I’m not going to talk about how to brew – not yet. Because I haven’t done enough to be able to tell you, definitively, how to do it. But I can tell you about what a spaz I was last night when I tried to siphon the beer from the carboy (the fermentation vessel) into a bucket, and then from the bucket into individual bottles. I can also tell you about the ridiculous amount of pride I felt when I finally capped those 29 bottles.

The instructions left for me were straightforward enough – dissolve priming sugar (for carbonation) in one to two cups of boiling water, throw into the bucket. Hoist the carboy onto the counter and assemble the siphon – a racking cane (a long piece of plastic with an inverted tip at one end), a hollow plastic tube, and some flexible plastic tubing. Again, pretty straightforward. Stick the racking cane into the hollow plastic tube and attach the flexible plastic tubing to the inverted end. Pump. Simple, right? Evidently not. The entire process demanded an amount of dexterity that I didn’t seem to possess last night. Somehow I had to suspend the racking cane above the hollow plastic tube in order for the beer to flow into the tubing. Then I brought the racking cane down, pushing the beer up through the siphon. Beer trickled through the tubing onto my floor, because, in holding the apparatus so high, I had pulled the bottom part of the tubing out of the bucket. WTG. I tried a few more times, each time managing to trickle a little more beer into the bucket. I got about three pints into the bucket and about one pint onto the floor before getting extremely frustrated.

THEN, it occured to me. I should stand on the counter! Balancing precariously on the counter, I tried the pumping motion again. And again. And again. And then I just started furiously pumping, cursing myself for evidently not knowing how to siphon and the homebrew that needed to be siphoned in the first place. Then, something magical happened. The beer started flowing, steadily, on its own. I could’ve cried. Quickly readjusting the tubing that had (once again) fallen out of the bucket, spilling beer all over the floor, I watched as the homebrew flowed – on its own – from the carboy to the bucket. Why siphon, you ask? Why not just pour? Oh, friends, this occurred to me, and oh, how badly I wanted to half ass it. But if I poured, all of the sediment from the bottom of the carboy (all that hops and malt that makes for murky beer) would have made it into my bottles. Plus the siphoning makes it simpler to bottle, because, theoretically, you can block the tubing with your thumb, controlling the amount you dispense into each bottle. Ha. Easy.

So I managed to transfer the homebrew into the bucket with the priming sugar, then I hoisted the bucket onto the counter for the same siphoning process – this time, into individual bottles. With the same trial-and-error strategy of pumping like hell til something came out, I managed to get beer into the tubing. I put my thumb over it. The top part of the tubing attached to the inverted tip explodes off, drenching me, the dishwasher, and the wall behind me in beer. I swear profusely, the most vile Russian words that I ever heard a bum utter while in Belarus. I regain control of the tubing, salvaging the beer.

It comes out too fast, overfilling the bottles and splashing onto the floor. I remember the homebrewer’s advice – if it’s coming out too fast, hold the bottle higher so that the flow of beer stops. I heed the advice. I fill 30 bottles, 29 full and 1 half full. I cap. I uncap the half-full one, because, evidently, when there’s too much open space in a bottle, the bottle will explode because of overcarbonation (same goes for bottles that are too full – they won’t carbonate enough). I heave a sigh of relief. I mop the floor, clean out the bucket, tubing, and carboy, and go over to a neighbor’s house, exhausted, but somewhat amused at how this process all went down. Glad my friend the homebrewer wasn’t there – he’d have laughed his ass off.

Anyone else homebrewing out there? Was your first time bottling anything like this? What are you brewing?