Start at the Beginning

Greetings Alehounds--Alemonger here.

There are no two brewers out there with exactly the same tastes or levels of brewing knowledge and experience.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I resisted for a long time becoming a brewer because I thought it was not only complex, but also expensive.  My simplest response to that is while it can be both, it needn't be either.  With that in mind, I'd like to take you back a few years to when I started homebrewing beer to prove that it can be a very simple and inexpensive yet rewarding hobby even at its most basic levels.  I'll also walk you through a few of my earliest adventures in homebrewing, and share a trick or two I discovered along the way.

It all started in 2002.  I had a new job in a new city, and new points of view on a lot of things.  Once I got set up in my new place, I started exploring the area and found out there was a homebrewing supply store just a few blocks from my apartment.  I stopped by one day, and when I walked through the door the first thing I noticed was the aroma.  No, it didn't smell like beer, but it was intoxicating.  The exotic air tickling my nostrils spoke of grain and spice and sweetness and, as I found out later, pure awesome!

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I was a clean slate the day I stepped through that door, an empty mug.  I found myself confronted with an amazing array of items: sacks of grain and powdery stuff, hops, yeast, and cans of syrup, buckets and beakers and bottles, oh my!  I had no idea where to begin.

Apparently the blank stare on my face labeling me as a first-timer was nothing new to the gentleman behind the counter.  Long story short, I walked out with a Mr. Beer Home Microbrewery System.  Looking back now, I realize that the shop owner could have up-sold me and made three times as much as he did on that sale, but in me he seemed to recognize someone who was on the fence.  He'd probably heard a thousand times the same story I've heard about the brother or cousin or uncle or buddy who'd tried making beer once upon a time, only to have it turn out horrible.  He knew the kit was a high quality, yet inexpensive place for beginners to learn about the craft of brewing.

Unpacking the kit, I found a two and a half gallon fermenter; an ingredient kit with a can of pre-hopped malt extract, a packet of brewers' yeast, and a "Booster Pack" of brewer's sugar; some PET plastic screw-top bottles for the finished product; and a recipe book with a short explanation of the brewing process.  A single ingredient kit for this system is good for about a case of beer--that is, twenty four 12 oz. bottles.  Using this kit is as simple as boiling water and combining all the ingredients together in the brewing container.  It is probably one of the most basic types of kit out there, and I highly recommend it as a way to dabble a little and find out if brewing is something you want to explore more.  You can always get bigger and better equipment, as I eventually did; on the other hand, if you decide that brewing is not your mug of ale, you're out less than fifty bucks.

A great aspect of the Mr. Beer system is how cheaply expandable it is with a little ingenuity.  When I realized that the fermenter was nothing more than a barrel-shaped plastic jug with a spigot, I went to Wal-Mart and tripled my brewing capacity for about the cost of a good twelve pack.  After that, I was able to stagger my batches and have three different ones fermenting at the same time.

When it came to packaging, I found that the bottles included in the Mr. Beer kit were useful, but functionally not much different from other PET plastic bottles.  At the time, I lived in a place where the tap water had way too much chlorine, so I just happened to have a couple of cases of 12 oz. bottles of Dasani spring water.  Batch after batch, I used the water (which was just enough) to brew the beer, and the bottles (also just enough) to store it.  Put a teaspoon of sugar in the bottom of each bottle, fill with beer and screw the cap on tightly--a week or so later, your beer is carbonated and ready to enjoy!  Two warnings, though, if you're re-using water bottles as I did:  first, most beer bottles are colored brown in order to keep out sunlight that can change the flavor of your beer, so store any beer bottled in clear water bottles in a dark place; and second, some bottled water companies have changed their packaging over the last few years in order to use less plastic, so it's possible that the ones on the market now might not stand up to the pressure that develops in beer during the carbonation process.

Well, that's it!  In my next post, I'll talk about stepping up to a five-gallon brewing setup, and to more complex brews.  If you've brewed with Mr. Beer before, leave me a comment and tell me all about it.  And don't forget to check out my Recipes page, where I've got recipes for all the beers I've made, including these first few with Mr. Beer ingredient kits.

Happy Brewing!