Mug Warrior

Well, I decided to take the leap and jump into microbrewing. I chose a DunkelWeizen as my first brew. Though I haven’t had many DunkelWeizens, but the ones that I have had I loved. I went down to my local homebrew store and picked up the ingredients. I brewed them all up on sunday night and now they are fermenting in my basement. Today I am moving the brew from the primary fermentor to the secondary fermentor. Then from there, I will have about a week before I bottle. I posted the recipe on my basement brewing blog. I will be posting back here with my progress. Here are some photos of what I have done so far.

Ok, so, this one is a week (and a few days) late, but the bottling of our brew was so smooth and easy that it was almost entirely unnoteworthy, with one exception. No one told me the trub was going to be so absolutely gross, and rediculously fun to play with. What do I mean? Trub has the consistency of very watery… uhm… excrement, and for all it’s worth stinks in a equal, but dissimilar, way. With that in mind Jarrod and I did the only thing we could think of with it: Throw it in the toilet with some paper, take a few pictures, and call his wife over and trick her into having a look. Priceless. We have some pictures but they are on Jarrod’s phone so I will have to get them for you all later. Nothing useful just pictures of the bottle and the toilet. We are so grown up.

Yes, I did say Jarrods wife, Jarrod (The Least Active MugWarrior Contributer) was married on saturday in a nice small ceremony followed by an intimate brunch with friends and family, where the friends promptly got drunk and danced with the family in a haze of booze and silly hats. Most importantly though Jarrod had the foresight to put a bottle of our brew in his refridgerator before the wedding, just to give it a taste after a week of bottle fermentation. Much to his pleasure the strongest of the hop characteristics had disappeared, and it was “delicious.” So we are in the homestretch, next saturday we drink our brew and start the next, which means sometime next week you will get yourself a review of our own beer. Between now and then I will try to put up something about a brew I have wanted to try for quite some time. Want a hint? Moo.

Yesterday Jarrod and I went to Brew Your Own Beer, absolutely not ironically, a store dedicated to homebrewing. We bought a kit and ingredients, and will either tomorrow, or next friday be taking the first steps to brew an American Brown Ale. We aren’t doing anything fancy, we are using prepackaged grains and extracts, and fermenting in a big ass plastic bucket. All told, we split a bill that came to $112 and it should net us two, or just slightly more, cases of beer. It’s a pricey case, but the initial investment of $63 for the starter kit (we spent $49 on ingredients, but we are actually attempting something that is a smidge more complicated), opens us up to try to brew a whole bunch of shitty beers. That is not to say homebrews are shitty (quite the opposite in fact), it is to say that the beer we brew will be shitty, maybe. The fellow who runs the shop (John Reynolds, a very friendly and helpful sort of chap) says it’s not rocket science, and Jarrod is displaying confidence in our ability to boil water and dump the ingredients in.

So in a few weeks we will know if we have become brewers, or we have become purveyors dirty water keeping in the tradition of dysentary. We’ll keep you posted.

11/11 Update: Brewed. We may have kind of burned some… We’ll let you all know next saturday if that buggered the flavour.