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Beer brewing 101

Brian Huntley - Omega Contributor

What is the nature of civilization? Theories abound: Civilization means a responsible government; civilization means people working in harmony; civilization means health, happiness and the—insert your favourite country’s name here—way.

One theory I’ve always respected has more to do with what started civilization as we know it in the first place: Civilization equals beer.

One popular (and important) idea is that beer was one of the first products produced by humanity. When we were all still hunter gatherers, we moved from place to place and watering-hole to watering-hole. And somewhere along the way beer was discovered.

Maybe someone left their barley and hops in a damp bag and liked the smell or maybe they were trying to make soup and left it out in the sun all day. However it may have happened, it did indeed happen.

For another story I was working on (i.e.: a thinly veiled excuse to my wife to start brewing beer at home) I bought all the necessary equipment to make beer in my very own home—under my kitchen table as a matter of fact.

The process of making beer is both deceptively simple and insanely easy. For $80 I was able to buy everything I needed from my local grocery emporium, Save-on-Foods. This bought me all the brewing vessels, bottles to put the beer in, the beer mix itself, a floating thermometer, and a hydrometer (a floating glass tube that tells you how much alcohol is in your brew.)

Beer making was likely discovered by a caveman named Ughh-duh, so you know it couldn’t have been that hard to figure out. Basically, you get a bucket and another almost sealed bucket—called the carboy, think of a higher quality water cooler water bottle—in the brew kit. The beer kit consists of brewing instructions, a can of molasses-esque liquid which is the malted barley mixture and a packet of brewer’s yeast. The yeast is the secret ingredient, but more on that later.

Take the can’s contents and mix them with hot water and sugar in the bucket or the carboy. I mixed everything in the bucket and transferred it to the carboy later. This allowed for easier mixing and better fermenting. Take the water malt mixture, add sugar, and then add enough water to bring the volume up to 23 litres.

That’s right, for an initial price of $80 you get 23 litres of beer! After the start up costs, every additional 23 litres will cost you $13 tops. Hell, even if it tastes like mud and has alcohol content it’s still a pretty damn good deal.

After adding the water and getting the big mix close to 23 C (floating thermometer) you add the secret ingredient. Yeast is what makes this entire thing work. What yeast does is eat, poop, and grow. What it eats is the sugar you added. What it poops is alcohol. Seriously.

-Side note: If you add more sugar than the instructions call for you will raise the alcohol content. My first brew was six per cent approximately.

After all the careful work of preparing the beer, I transferred it to my carboy and slid it under my kitchen table.

The next morning there was a tower of beer head cascading out of the carboy. The sides of the fermenter were sticky with beer residue and I was perplexed. I’d later find out that I had maybe added a little too much sugar and kept the brew too warm. Oh well, it all ended up okay.

A week or so later it was bottling time. Using the time-old-proven method of siphoning, I transferred the beer from the carboy into individual bottles prepped with more sugar. The addition of sugar to the bottles was not to add more alcohol to the mix, although I’m sure it did contribute a little. The main reason is to carbonate the beer.

You see, the other thing yeast poops is carbon dioxide. While the beer is brewing, the carbon dioxide is released into the air, but when you put the beer in sealed bottles and give the yeast fresh sugar to eat, the co2 has nowhere to go but into the beer itself! This gives you that fizzy wonderfulness that we all know and love.

A week after bottling you have drinkable, fizzy, boozy beer. Twenty-three glorious litres of goodness.

As for taste...well I’ll be honest, no it isn’t the greatest beer I’ve ever tasted. But it is good. And after two or more pints, it’s damn good. I have bought worse beer from the liquor store, let’s put it that way.

So, if you’re a starving student, who is also thirsty, oh so very thirsty, create a little civilization in your living room, make yourself some beer and enjoy that blissful feeling of having made something yourself. Of course all that blissful feeling comes from the fact that you made it yourself. There is no other explanation. Well, at least you can tell your mom that.

The theory of civilization goes that once beer was discovered, people settled down, and grew crops so that they could produce the stuff to make beer. Not so outrageous of a proposition if you ask me.

Beer led to civilization and with civilization came rules and regulations and licensing and Sarah Palin. It wasn’t long before only certain people were allowed to brew beer. Many monarchs had their own private brew masters and it is said that Queen Victoria commissioned a beer so potent that only she could stomach it.

But we seem to have come full circle now. And once again, we can make beer in our own lowly commoner homes.

The important thing is that beer was created and the person who invented it—well, that person should, in point-of-fact, have an international holiday named after them. Weren’t we just looking for a new national holiday? Well, I suggest “Ughh-duh Day,” named after that initial, patron saint of beer.