One of my favorite quotes is from Benjamin Franklin: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” If this is truly the case, than I’m currently one of God’s favorites as I have recently made beer.

I mentioned a while back that I took a one-day class on beermaking. I won that lesson through a contest held by the Delta Brewing Club in Antioch, of which I am now a member. I have always been told it was easy to make beer, but I was intimidated by the whole thing - until I actually watched it being done. And, seriously, if you can make a cup of tea, you can make beer.

My father in law and brother in law have together brewed about 20 batches. This all happened before I came along, though, so I never was able to participate. In all this time, the equipment they used had been sitting in the attic collecting dust. When I mentioned my interest in beermaking, my father in law offered to give it all to me. We’re talking more than $200 worth of equipment - the equivalent of a deluxe beermaking kit from Beer, Beer and More Beer plus a few nice extras, like a stand-up capper instead of one of those hand-held jobbies and an outdoor gas stove (a.k.a. a “Cajun Cooker”).

So, two weekends ago, I went out to More Beer and bought the kit to make Jason Breatt’s Honey Stout. Jason was the guy who taught the class and this is what he chose to brew. Unfortunately, because beer takes time to ferment and such, I never got taste the finished product. This was my chance to do just that.

It’s an extract recipe, which means you use malt syrup as the base rather than cooking and filtering the malted barley yourself (a process called “mashing”). This reduces the amount of time to make beer and, so long as you use good ingrediants (and if you shop at More Beer, that’s all they’ll let you use), it does nothing to affect the final product.

The whole process of making the fermentable beer - called wort - took about three hours or so on a Saturday. The trick, as everyone will tell you, is to keep everything super clean and sanitized. Frankly, this turns out to be way easier than expected. Make sure everything is clean of residue and debris, then soak it in a solution of sanitizer (I use Star San) for a few minutes and - presto - it’s ready to use. Just try to keep it clean after you’ve sanitized it and you should be good to go.

Once the wort was boiled and cooled, we siphoned it into a glass carboy (a glass version of a Sparklett’s water bottle), pithced (tossed in) our yeast and set it in my father in law’s shed, where it stayed about 68 degrees. Most ales need to ferment between 65 and 70 degrees - too hot and the yeast may throw off some off flavors, too cold and the yeast may not work as fast. Lagers, which use a different kind of yeast, need to stay cooler, in the 50 degrees range. In my neck of the world, that requires a fridge.

We let the beer ferment for a week. Once it was done - obvious by the lack of bubbling activity - we siphoned the beer out into a clean bucket (this process is called racking), added some corn sugar solution (sugar boiled into water - called “priming” the beer, a process that allows it to carbonate in the bottles) then filled and capped clean, sterilized beer bottles. We re-used bottles from non-screw cap beers, cleaning them well after use and soaking them in sterilizer just before filling them. This whole process took about another three hours. Most standard carboys hold about five gallons, which comes out to about 53 standard 12oz. bottles of beer or just shy of nine six packs. We lost a lot of water to boiling, testing, etc. that I neglected to replace, so we actually had just shy of 7 six packs.

The beer then needs to sit for a week or two to carbonate in the bottle. There are still some yeast living in the beer after it’s been bottled, even if you’ve kept most of the sledge out of the bottle. These yeast add the corn sugar you added prior to bottling and produce carbon dioxide, which then gets absorbed into the beer and carbonates it.

So we’re at week three right now with one day short of a week of carbonation time. I decided to crack open a bottle and see how it’s doing. It needs about another week of conditioning - i.e. sitting around and carbonating - before it’s ready but, oh my God… it tastes truly amazing. This is not a true stout - it’s inspired by many of Jason’s friends doing a half-and-half od his homemade honey pale ale and stout. He decided to just combine the two recipes and see what emerged. I’m here to tell you, what emerges is something phenomenal. Just sweet enough to perfectly balance the hop and stoute bitterness, not too cloying though. If you dislike heavy stouts, you’ll still like this - it’s sort of a “light” stout, if there is such a thing. It genuinely is one of the best beers I’ve ever had, and I made it.

For those of you who know about beer brewing, I added a bit more honey than the recipe called for (they only sell honey in 3lb batches, so I had to eye 1.5 pounds - it came out as about 2.2 pounds, I think) so the starting gravity was 1.062. At the end of fermentation, it dropped 1.020, making this about a 5% alcoholic brew. It’s retained a lot of the honey’s sweetness, but the honey flavors are still nice and delicate. The honey was added during the final 15 minutes of the boil. I don;t think a lot was sacrificed as a result.

For those of you who have always wanted to try this but were afraid it took too long, was too complicated, etc. you need to just do it. Seriously. You can get away with about $75 worth of equipment plus stuff you may alredy have lying around your house (a two-three gallon pot, some kind of heat source for boiling, funnels, strainers, etc.). We’re talking two Saturdays, each three-five hours depending on how fast you work. When you’re done, you;ve got yourself some amazing fresh brew that’s all yours. There are tons of great resources out there to help you along (I’m totally entranced by Charles Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing) but I might make one recommendation: Many of these books suggest you start with an American Light beer style, the rough equivalent of a Coors or Budweiser. If that’s the only kind of beer you currently drink, then that’s cool, go with it. If you’re like me, however, and are a bit of a snob who prefers only “craft brews”, I’d recommend starting with something slightly more exotic. Jason Breatt’s Honey Stout is super easy to make and the payoff is outstanding.

Provided you keep everything clean and sanitized, use common sense and have fun with the process, you are guaranteed to succeed. Like Charles Papazian says (again and again and again): “Relax. Don’t Worry. Have a Homebrew!”