Getting Equipment, Part 1

Since I had decided to keg my beer, I had to find a kegging kit. My first inclination was to buy one on Ebay. So I searched Ebay and found several systems. I also decided to search through several on-line homebrew supply stores. The least expensive single tap draft system I could find was not on Ebay, but at Midwest Homebrewing Supply. Their Single Draft Tap System with Reconditioned CO2 tank was $149.95 plus shipping. The link to this item is here. So I ordered it and started to collect the other equipment I needed. BTW, don't let the reconditioned CO2 tank throw you. There is no need to buy a nice new shiny CO2 tank. When you go to get it filled, they are filled on an exchange system. You don't get your tank back, you get another. Kinda like the propane tank exchange at Home Depot.

Bottles or Kegs?

One of the things I least liked about homebrewing was bottling beer. It was time consuming. It was messy. But the part that bugged me the most was the sediment that collected at the bottom of the bottle. The sediment is yeast. Before beer is bottled, it is flat. Bottled homebrew is carbonated in the bottle. This is called bottle conditioning. Unless it is filtered (which is rare in homebrewing), beer contains yeast in suspension. During the beer making process, most of the yeast settles out of the beer as it ages and clears. But some of the yeast stays in solution. It is inactive because during the brewing process it has eaten up the available sugars. When beer is bottled a sugar solution is added to the beer. This gives the yeast something to eat and they reproduce, produce alcohol and CO2. This CO2 is what gives the beer its fizz. After the yeast has eaten this available sugar, it goes dormant again. Some of the yeast falls out of solution and produces the nasty looking sediment at the bottom of the bottle.

Beer sediment is harmless. In fact it is really good for you. It contains vitamins and nutrients. I had a friend that made a big production of swirling the sediment at the bottom of his homebrews, swigging it and telling anyone who was within earshot how good it was for them. After all, many expensive craft beers are bottle conditioned and have a layer of sediment at the bottom.

All the above information is useless however when you proudly give a friend a bottle of your precious homebrew which you think is the nectar of the gods, only to have them tell you that you must have done something wrong because there is stuff floating at the bottom, it must be spoiled, and they've thrown it out. When you tell them that the sediment should be there, they look at you funny and say something to the effect that their Bud Light bottles never have stuff floating in them.

When I first gave homebrewing a try in the 90's, everyone that I knew that homebrewed bottled their beer. At least in my circles, and local homebrew shop, kegging was not done and the parts were not available. Boy have things changed. When I decided to take homebrewing back up, I started looking on YouTube to see what others were doing. Boy was I surprised at the wealth of information and instruction available! As I delved more into what was being done, it soon became clear that kegging homebrew was not only now a viable option, but really popular. I guess the cost had come down considerably and it was now well within the economic reach of the homebrewer.

A homebrew kegging setup uses Cornelius (or Corny) kegs which are 5 gallon kegs designed to hold soft drink syrup. Most homebrew shops carry reconditioned corny kegs that are retired soda kegs. They are pretty cheap and at 5 gallons are a manageable size for a homebrewer. Add a canister of CO2 and some hoses and you are in business. The whole system can be put in a fridge and you can have draft beer any time you like. If you want to get fancy, you can put the keg in a commercial kegerator, or you can build your own kegerator out of an old fridge, or you can even build one out of a small bar fridge.

Instead of using yeast to produce the beer fizz, kegged beer is carbonated using a CO2 tank. Therefore kegged beer has no sediment. I even found out that there are ways to bottle kegged beer so that you can share your beer with your friends and it'll look just like their Bud Light. No sediment, no tossed beers. I decided that kegging was the way to go.

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...

Welcome to The Zen of Homebrewing

Its St. Patty's Day. As good a day as any to start a blog about beer. But more than just about beer. This blog will be a chronicle about my adventures in homebrewing.

During the day I am a neurophysiologist. That means that I spend my day in the operating room watching squiggles on a screen while a surgeon is poking around on some poor patient's brain or spinal cord. Its rewarding, but very stressful.

I needed a hobby ---- bad.

Well, I had toyed around with homebrewing beer a couple of times in past years, but never really got into it as a full fledged hobby. But now I've taken the plunge. Got some equipment and have a couple of batches under my belt. I find the whole brewing process challenging but relaxing at the same time. On brew day, you forget everything else and for a couple of hours you get lost in the process. It is, for a lack of a better term, -- very Zen.

My plan is to chronicle the process of learning how to brew a good batch of beer. I want to share my successes and mistakes in the hopes that anyone taking up the hobby can learn from them. Since I have already brewed a couple of batches, the first few entries will be a history of what I have learned so far.

I hope that you will enjoy this adventure.