Choosing a Recipe

In the early 90's, I decided that I wanted to try to make my own beer. I was living in Louisville at the time and saw an ad for a local homebrew shop. I went in and bought a basic brewing kit and a copy of Charlie Papazian's book, " The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing". Unlike today where you can learn to brew on YouTube, back then, Papazian's book was the bible for homebrewers. Papazian took you through the mysteries of brewing beer step by step. He made it sound so easy, and it really was. I went back to the homebrew store, bought a beer kit and made my first India Pale Ale, or IPA. The beer kit was basically a big can of malt syrup with a yeast package glued to the top. You opened the can, poured the malt syrup into a pot of water, boiled it for a few minutes, waited for it to cool and poured it into a 5 gallon glass carboy. You then carefully poured the yeast package into the carboy, put a fermentation lock on top and waited. In two weeks you siphoned your beer into primed bottles, capped them, waited another two weeks and then it was done. In the span of four weeks you went from a can of glop to beer. And it wasn't bad either. And it was pretty cheap too. A five gallon carboy of beer made about 50 bottles, two cases of good beer for the cost of two cases of PBR.

After that first batch, I was ready to try something a bit more difficult than the beer in a can. In Papazian's Intermediate Brewing Section, he said that you could make better tasting beer if you skip the can and control a few more variables. You could still use liquid malt extract like the can, but you could control the hops that you used. In addition, you could vary the flavor of the beer by first making a tea of specialty grains into which you poured your liquid malt extract. You could also get better yeast. It was a little more involved than the can method, but it was still easy. And he had recipes in the book. I liked the IPAs I made, so I chose his recipe for Palilalia India Pale Ale. With help from the homebrew store I made it, it was easy, and it was real good. Well I made this beer a couple of more times, tweaking the recipe, and then I stopped brewing. I'm not sure why I stopped, but I did. I had my tweaked recipe written on the back of a business card, but in the fifteen or so years since, it got lost. So I guess I'm starting over again.

I pulled out my old copy of "The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing" which now was neither new nor complete, but it was a starting point to get back into the hobby. The old recipe for Palilalia Pale Ale was in there and I thought that it would be a good place to pick back up from. So thats what I decided to do. The recipe called for dry malt extract, a couple of pounds of specialty grains to make the brewer's tea, two kinds of hops and a package of ale yeast. So I headed to the Homebrew shop and picked up the stuff to try again...