Strange Brew, Girl What's Inside of You?

(h/t Ta-Nehisi)

This is a Great Atlantic article on so-called "extreme" beers. While not touching on home-brewing per se it contains much that should be useful and of interest to any homebrewer. Read the whole thing. Sample:

The tavern was a success from the day it opened. The beer took a little longer. Calagione had brewed fewer than ten batches before coming to Delaware, and he rarely used the same recipe twice. “I’d just grab herbs and spices and fruits from the kitchen and throw them in,” he says. “I used to think, Oh, it’s cool that every batch tastes different. It’s like snowflakes!” The pub’s brewing equipment consisted of three fifteen-gallon kegs on propane burners, and a rack of modified kegs for fermenting the beer. To keep up with demand, Calagione had to brew two or three times a day, every day; between shifts he slept on a mattress in the cellar. When the beer was ready, he and two employees would don ski goggles and green garbage bags and bottle the beer by hand, with a siphon and mechanical capper. In ten hours they could fill a hundred cases.

“It was a hot ghetto mess,” Bryan Selders, Dogfish’s lead brewer, remembers. By the time Selders arrived, in 2002, Calagione had jury-rigged some larger kettles out of stainless-steel tanks from a yogurt factory. To reach the cooked barley, or mash, Selders had to climb onto a metal grate twelve feet high and straddle the edge of the boiling kettle—one foot on the grate, the other on the kettle’s lid. Once, during a morning production meeting, Selders fell in. “The lid just gave way,” he says. The mash in the kettle was hot—around a hundred and fifty degrees—but came only to the tops of his boots. “I went home, took a shower, watched a little Sally Jessy, and came back.”

Homebrewed Beer And Homemade Pizza

....and a Presidential debate on the tube. Now if a pretty blond shows up, the evening looks perfect.

Fear Of Fermentation

The best homebrewing advice I've ever seen is "don't panic". Unfortunately, I am prone to panic with pretty much every effort.

My latest batch was concocted with a Munton's Brown Scottish Ale kit, a packet of Windsor Ale Yeast and, here's where the panic set in, 2 lbs. of corn sugar. I couldn't find my hydrometer but obviously everything had to be running pretty high, gravity- wise, which was my intent. After 48 hours, I saw no action in the airlock at all so I immediately assumed that fermentation was stuck. So I immediately ran down to Mecca Coffee, which is Brookside's designated destination for the homebrewer and grabbed some more yeast. Rehydrated the yeast for about 45 minutes, with little sugar to bring it to life, and opened the fermenter. The wort had a thin layer of foam on top already and I tossed the new yeast solution in.

The result was the most awesome demonstration of yeasty power I have ever seen. The entire wort appeared to literally boil. I slammed the lid back on and watched the airlock which was now bubbling continuously.

Clearly, the wort was fermenting already, just very, very slowly. I presume that the amount of fermentables was too great for the single packet of yeast that I had originally pitched and that the yeast while still alive had either been put to sleep or was just too attenuated for a really good ferment....I suspect the latter. In other words I could have just left well enough alone and the whole thing would probably have eventually done it's magic, though I feel a lot better for having just re-pitched.

Homebrewers are like any other hobbyist in that they are prone to revel in/intimidate with a lot of weird gnostic lore (often hard won, I admit). For every time a homebrewer freaks, it probably pays to remember that there are prisoners brewing up things with no sanitation, no equipment, and no recognizable ingredients. Man has been brewing stuff for thousands of years before they even understood what yeast and bacteria were. Making a great beer may be difficult, but making a pretty fair, drinkable one ain't rocket science.