A New Year, A New Hobby

For Christmas, I received a homebrew kit from my lovely girlfriend. Today, January 2nd, 2012, I began my first batch. Basically, making beer is pretty simple, or so it seems. You boil some malt in water, add some hops, creating a substance called Wort, mix it with four gallons of water, toss some yeast on there and let it ferment. For the most part, everything went well. There was really only one mishap. When you boil the malt and hops, foam rises very suddenly, you're supposed to turn off the flame, let the foam go down, turn on the flame again. Repeat if necessary. The foam rose slowly a couple times but I followed the instructions and nothing bad happened. I thought I was in the clear. Thinking back, (following a comment made by my girlfriend), I realize perhaps I hadn't needed to keep the heat on the highest setting. Anyways, I stirred the brown mess and it suddenly exploded upwards. The foam surged upwards and splashed everywhere before I could even turn the knob on the stove. The stovetop and surrounding floor area was covered in brown gunk. But other than that, everything went fine. A glass carboy filled with Wort now rests in the study, hopefully fermenting. After a week, I'll bottle it and then let it ferment for about four weeks or so. Then, we drink, and hopefully it tastes okay.

Here's some pictures!

Boiling the malt, making Wort

The Carboy where the fermentation will take place

The Bottling bucket

A Manual that came with the kit

I even took a class in brewing, back when I was a sophomore. It is unfortunate that I remember just about nothing from that class. Ah well, doing something new is always exciting and fun.

I have a smart phone now, so I guess I'm always 'connected', man. Like, the government could totally be watching me, dude...

Anyways, it's nice not having a flip phone anymore. One thing that I am enjoying is having a decent camera on my phone. I like to take pictures of things. Big buildings, abandoned factories, warehouses, etc. Anything interesting. I've always wanted to take pictures of places where I think I could write cool scenes set in. So that is nice. I will also be able to take pictures for this blog, so it won't simply be walls of text all the time. Don't get your hopes up too much though, as I am a writer, not a photographer, so walls of text aren't really going away.

So brewing. Yeah. It is a thing I am doing. I shall keep my loyal readers posted about it. Some of you may even get to taste the end result, for better or worse.