Brewing Beer

Last month I went a beer tasting festival. But why stop there?  Something else I wanted to do for a while is brew my own beer.  Coinidentally, ended up with a colleague who had a full on brewery in a shed behind his house; but no one to help him with the process.  So, I jumped at the opportunity.

Apparently, there are two types of beer brewing: extract and all-grain.  Extract brewing is where you start with pre-processed malt extract.  Extract is what is used in the home brewing kits readily available at retail stores.  I think this is really what I had in mind when I thought of brewing my own beer.  But, I guess if you have you have your own beer shed, you've already decided to step your game up.

All-grain brewing is definitely more involved.  You go through the process of making the malt extract.  You start by milling the grain, then cook the cracked grain in water (known as mashing or steeping), then rinse this mix and collect the run off (known as sparging).  Ths run-off is known as wort and is essentially the extract you would begin with in the extract brewing process.  You then boil this mix and let it sit for two weeks.  And voilà you've got your own beer!

It is a pretty cool hobby.  It takes a full day to go through the full process.  There are only a handfull of times when you are really busy moving the mix between one phase and the next.  The majority of the time is spent monitoring temperatures and waiting for a particular cooking process to complete.  We filled the down time by grilling, talking about sports and technology, and sampling the last batch.  Not a bad way to spend a late-summer day in the northwest.