Hopinions: Homebrewing, where it all began

I apologize for the delay of the Hopinions post. This was supposed to go last week but I was at the National Homebrewers Conference in Oakland. There was very limited interweb access at the Convention Center and I didn’t feel like paying the Hilton $13/day for internet accesss so I’m having to make it up now.

Gearing up for the NHC got me thinking about homebrewing, specifically, the origins of my own homebrewing. I’m sure I may have talked about it before but I can’t remember which post (if at all). So for this issue of Hopinions, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and remember my initial stabs at homebrewing while bringing Mario (from Brewed for Thought) with me.

Feel free to share your own experiences with homebrewing. I’m always interested in other people’s stories.

From: Peter at BetterBeerBlog

The National Homebrewers Conference (NHC) is in full swing this week and it just so happens NHC is being held right in our “backyard” with the city of Oakland playing host. I will be attending the NHC as a participant this year looking to learn a couple of things to make me a better homebrewer as well as catch up with some friends and perhaps make new ones. That being said, I thought it would be a perfect time here on Hopinions to talk about homebrewing. Specifically, our own homebrewing experiences.

I first got the idea to homebrew looking through the Spartan Daily (the SJSU newspaper) and there was article about homebrewing. I kept the paper and visited the homebrew shop they quoted for the article, Beer and Winemakers of America. Like many other homebrew shops they sold kits with all the necessary equipment to get your started homebrewing. While I use glass for all my beers today, I still have the plastic bucket I started off with. In fact, most of my equipment is still the original. I only just recently replaced my hydrometer about two months ago when it finally broke. The ironic part was that I wasn’t even brewing at the time, just moving stuff around.

Do you remember your first beer? My first beer was an amber ale. I honestly don’t even remember the recipe, I never bothered to write stuff down in the early years. I remember being very nervous about brewing. I was scared to death about infecting my beer so I sanitized the hell out of all my equipment multiple times that day. At the time, I brewed on the stove top and I must say that it took forever for the water to heat up and it took just as long for me to cool it down. In hindsight, I’m surprised my early beers never got infected, especially when you take into account how long it took for me to cool the wort down. Unfortunately, cooling the wort down ended up being my undoing. I misread the thermometer and pitched the yeast when the wort was still too hot. Of course the yeast were killed and the beer never took off so I ended up dumping the thing.

What got you into homebrewing? Do you remember what your first beer was? What was the worst thing that ever happened while homebrewing?

From: Mario at Brewed For Thought

Ah, my first time.  It was special, and I’ll always remember it.  Actually it wasn’t, and I vaguely remember it.

At the time I had just moved to ORegon and was living with my buddy in Corvallis.  He had homebrewed back when we were in college and since we were both such big fans of malt based adult beverages I thought it would be a good idea if I learned the art of brewing.

Since he knew what to do and gave me a hand with the process, I never had that experience of going into it blind, but I did ease my way into it.  I started with the Righteous Ale from Papazian’s Joy of Homebrewing book.  It’s a simple amber, 10 day primary fermentation then straight to the bottle.  For such a simple recipe and short fermentation, it’s a rather tasty brew, so it actually became my fridge filler when the stocks were running low.

Funny thing, this recipe also lead to one of my worst experiences.  Not sure what happened, but a few months later, using the same recipe, fermenting in the same bucket, keeping the beer in the same closet, same fermentation times, we got our first taste of autolysis.  Upon opening the bucket, we knew something was wrong.  I tasted it, and it tasted bad, but not horrible.  Being a new brewer I thought this  was one of the off flavors that might go away with time. So I bottled and waited ten days.

After those ten days later we had the worst smelling and tasting beverage known to man.  One mouthful of this scourge on mankind and you would be stuck with the flavor of burning tires.  No amount of water or beer could remove the flavor.  We should have known because even opening the beer stunk up the entire kitchen, yet everyone had a taste.

The funny thing is, I still have a bottle of the Asshole Beer (that’s it’s name) in my closet.  Would you like to try it?  It has now been kept in fluctuating temperatures for about 5 years and should be reaching it’s prime.

From: Peter at BetterBeerBlog

The Asshole beer sounds pretty hilarious. I should bring in a bottle or two of my almost 2-year old Russian Imperial Stout and Alt bier. Both have been kept in cardboard boxes in my office that also has variable temperature swings. Last I had the RIS, it still never carbonated it should’ve been and it’s already starting to show oxidative qualities. Next time I’m up, we should have a palette-challenging beer night.

It’s funny that you mention brewing from a homebrew book. I have about half a dozen or so homebrew books myself but I have never made any of the recipies contained within them. I actually learned the techniques and process of homebrewing from the Xerox copy of the process that came with my brewing kit. I’ve stayed true ever since. Whenever I needed a recipe, I’ve always thought about the commercial version of a style I really enjoyed and asked my homebrew shop owner to develop a recipe based upon that. I’ve never done side-by-side taste tests as I’m pretty happy with the way my homebrews turn out.

For the last beer I made, I dry-hopped for the first time. I don’t know, I’ve played it very conservatively with my homebrewing all these years and I’ve had some good beers to show for it. I feel left behind though as I read about all these other homebrewers who are brewing with very advanced techniques, such as barrel-aging, methode champagne, first wort hopping, hop backs and even triple decoction.

Do you think your own homebrewing experiences are heavily influenced by the books you read or by the beers you drink? Both? Neither? Also, what was the most challenging technique you’ve tried while homebrewing?

From: Mario at Brewed For Thought

You’re free to drink the Asshole beer, but not around me.  I won’t touch it and I’m actually scared to open it.

As far as recipe sources, I’ve tried it all, books, homebrew shop supplied, internet or even creating my own from scratch.  In the end, that’s all it is though, a recipe.

My brewing experience has been rather conservative as well.  I’ve focused more on perfecting a couple recipes in the past than trying new experimental things.  It’s funny you refer to those other techniques as more challenging.  Other than decoctions, I don’t know how challenging they are, beyond fiscally.  The most challenging “technique” I’ve tried has been to reproduce my previous results.

To answer your question, I think I’m most influenced by the people I brew with.  This would be my old roommate that taught me how to brew, the homebrew shops where I shop and the discussions that took place there.  Beers and books can offer inspiration, but wherever the idea may start, it gets mutated through various stages of conversation.

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