SOME THOUGHTS FROM A NOVICE HOMEBREWER

Beer is the greatest thing in the universe, so it stands to reason that you'd want to make your own. Congratulations. You’re basically entering a long, delicious period of forced alcoholism, only you have to work harder at it. If you're curious about the beer-brewing process, and wanted to hear the perspective of someone who just barely knows what they're talking about, then you've come to the right place.

Now, I'm a sucker for the DIY thing, but such activities are rarely entirely practical — we started mass production of consumer goods for a reason, after all, and there are very few things you’ll be able to create more cheaply and more easily than their manufactured counterparts. Sometimes you can make them better. Mostly, you can enjoy just knowing how they’re made, and do something more productive with your time than working on sculpting your ass imprint into your couch as you watch endless reality TV show marathons. It feels good to do something, to make something yourself. And in the case of homebrewing, the result is 5 gallons of beer. That’s 50 bottles. Of beer. After a hard day of work, there's really nothing more comforting than knowing that there is yeast living in a bucket in your closet, farting out alcohol for you to drink.

Still, there are some important questions. Why brew beer, you may ask? A reasonable question, I suppose, if you hate having fun, are a terrorist, or drink wine. In this blogopost, I will attempt to answer this question, and other questions. Why brew beer? In all seriousness, the answer as the same with any DIY venture. It is fun, it makes you cooler and more attractive, and you can make a convincing (if still bullshit) argument that it's educational. And eventually, if you are good enough, you will get beer out of it. (So basically the exact same reasons people learn to play guitar.)  However, homebrewing is not necessarily cost-effective, and it's definitely not a time saver — pretty much for the same reasons you wouldn't start a band with the goal of obtaining free music. If you’re going into it for financial reasons, maybe reconsider. You should brew beer because you love beer and want to understand what makes beer so much better than all other available beverages, and also, to impress other dudes with beards.

Probably the first issue anyone is concerned about is cost. The cost of brewing your own beer is a difficult thing to address, but consider that the most important factor is your own mindset. A basic brewkit can be obtained from anywhere between $85 to $150 dollars, but it's very easy to spend twice that after your first few batches on little conveniences here and there. After doing it for ten years, you might have spent a thousand dollars on equipment. It's certainly possible — you can get elaborate keg set-ups and fancy custom-built stainless steel equipment and all sorts of gear for the sake of convenience. But technically, you can get everything you need to brew beer for under $150, maybe even less than $100 dollars. I started by purchasing an $85 dollar equipment kit which had everything I needed to get started. In retrospect, I regret not buying a more inclusive kit, but as a beginner you unfortunately don’t really know what the hell anything is, or how it’s used. I bought a large, 8-gallon aluminum kettle at the convenience store for cheap (no equipment kit that I've seen comes with a brewing kettle, but chances are you don't have anything large enough already sitting around in your kitchen.) Soon after brewing my first batch, I decided a few more things were going to be worth the extra investment. I upgraded my hose with an auto-siphon, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Trust me, you don’t want to have to dick around with physics and gravity and magnets and bullshit like that. After deciding to do a peach wheat beer, I needed a secondary fermenter, so I was back at the homebrew store picking up a hefty glass carboy, which don’t go cheap. And other things — a decent stirring spoon to avoid gross contamination from cook-ware, a funnel, PBW to remove bottle labels, extra sanitizer, extra bottle caps, etc. Plus, once you know you need to start saving up empty bottles, it’s even easier to justify picking up another sixpack at the store. It’s for Science.

Sooner or later, but probably sooner, I’ll very likely pick up more odds and ends. For example: my apartment doesn’t have central AC, and yeast start to get pissy when it gets too hot — like above 75 degrees. (Temperature control, surprisingly, is one of the most important factors to consistent homebrewing. Sanitation is the other. And your recipes, obviously.) While there are ways to keep the temp down on a fermentation vessel, it’s a lot harder to keep 50 or 100 bottles at a reasonable temperature for an extended period of time, especially during a muggy New York summer. I’m currently looking to buy a mini-fridge from some college kid moving out, which wouldn’t be a big investment. The thought of having to give up brewing for the next three months is devastating, since I'm just getting into it.

Still, equipment is more or less a one time investment, and not that much of one.  Ingredients generally cost around $30 - $40 for a 5 gallon batch. So, that's not bad. Sixpacks of decent beer rarely cost under $10. Looking at just the cost of ingredients, brewing your own beer costs less than half of what you'd pay for beer of the same style in the store. Of course, there are cheaper options out there — but you'll still probably beat the cost/taste ratio of medium-grade stuff like Yeungling or Lion's Head. PBR and Budweiser will start to edge you out in the price arena, and beers cheaper and worse than that, well, they'll always probably be cheaper and worse than what you can manage. Here is one of the great ironies of homebrewing: lagers are much harder to make than ales for the homebrewer, despite being drastically cheaper (usually) at the store. This is because lagers ferment at colder temperatures and require an extended fermentation process, meaning they require additional equipment and attention. Plus, lagers (especially pilsners) generally go for a much cleaner, lighter flavor that leaves no real room for error. If the concept of 'no flavor' being difficult to achieve perplexes you, consider that a slightly off flavor in a rich, complex beer like a stout will be masked by everything else going on, whereas your Bud Lites and so forth are calculated to have as little taste as possible, thus leaving nothing to mask any fuck-ups or inconsistencies. Weird, but it does make sense. Even crappy beer is still complex, and there's a lot that can go wrong. The Big Guys have multi-billion dollar budgets. They have equipment you will never in your life have access to. They have an automated process that allows them to brew watered-down lite beers very very cheaply. To me, the amount of work necessary to create a "decent" pilsner, a beer that will never approach my favorite IPAs, wheat beers and pale ales, just isn't worth it. If you are a fan of pilsners, you can certainly try them yourself down the line, but the general consensus is that newbies should start out with ales.

For me, the most difficult thing was just understanding what I was doing the first time I brewed. There are a lot of things to manage, and the process can seem long and strange.  I still don't fully understand what effect every little detail can have, much less the variations and outcomes of every potential ingredient that goes into a beer. For the first few times, it's going to be easiest to buy a pre-assembled recipe kit. Make sure everything is fresh, and the recipe includes "speciality grains" and hops. (If there are no hops in your recipe kit, you've been sold shit.) Once you're brewing and get past the stress of that first batch, the most difficult thing is waiting to brew again, to perfect what you've learned from last time and try out new ingredients (especially if your last batch was drinkable but not great.) I'm a little tiny bit obsessive, and a perfectionist, so I've been spending hours online reading homebrew forums since I started, trying to pin down basic recipes for ideas I had. Possibly the most difficult but also exciting thing about beer brewing is the sheer, absurd variety of ingredients. You really begin to appreciate how absurdly complex beer is when you're staring at a list of dozens of hops, grains and yeast, all of which have their own specific attributes. There is literally no beverage in the world that can match beer's complexities and subtleties and variations — not coffee or tea or soda or wine or milkshakes. The combinations just within the three main ingredients are nearly limitless — to say nothing of adjuncts — and if you have the right personality, you'll undoubtedly get caught up in searching out new combinations and tweaks. At that point, it can be excruciating waiting to brew your next batch.

Will your beer be good?  That depends. I'm not even going to get into all the techniques involved in the actual process, since this post isn't meant to help anyone who's already started brewing. But to summarize, there is extract brewing (slightly simplified) and all-grain brewing (which requires an extra step, and therefore additional equipment and opportunity for errors, but also greater control and freshness). Either way, homebrewed beer has the potential to be as good as anything you can get in the store. I will comment (in another post) on my first few brews, which I can confidently say are not poisonous. One of the most appealing things about homebrewing, to me, is the imagination involved. You can pretty much make anything, from clone recipes of hard-to-find favorites, to wacky experimental beers that no one will want to drink. You learn a lot about beer in the process. If you need a hobby, some way to feel like you've actually accomplished something with your evenings and weekends and blooming alcoholism, it's hard to beat homebrewing for its resulting satisfaction.