Brian's Blog

I recently read Beowulf in which it is mentioned fairly often about the warriors drinking in the Mead Hall. Since it's mentioned so often it got me thinking, what the heck is Mead and how does one make it? Especially since I've never seen Mead offered anywhere on a menu. This got me searching the net and browsing a slew of home brew websites covering Mead, Wine, and Beer. To made your own Mead isn't hard. In its most basic from it consists of water, honey, and yeast. The problem is the process takes a year or more. I don't want to invest a year of time into making something like that until I know I can actually brew something successfully.

This got me thinking of beer. I checked the yellow pages looking for any kind of home brew shops in the area and found none. Google gave plenty of hits though and I found three types of kits. One was so simple a retarded monkey could probably make beer. If you can add water and mix in a pouch of beer mix powder then that's about all the skill you needed for this one. That's not making beer to me, I want to feel like I made a difference in the final product so I looked farther. This time I came up with what looked like a mad scientists setup from some horror movie. I don't have a chemistry degree so that was out for now. Then I came across Mr. Beer which seems to be a happy medium. This is what I wanted so I ordered it up.

While I was waiting for it to arrive Ricardo S pointed out that a new home brew shop opened close to us called Keystone Homebrew Supply. I stopped in and they have all the stuff of the mad scientist setup but, after talking to the person at the store it didn't seem that bad. Well, to late now, Mr. Beer was on the way but at least I have a place to go to get ingredients and advice. If this turns out to be something I like to do then maybe I'll upgrade.

Anyway, through all this I'd been talking to one of my fishing buddies, Bob. And we decided to go into this together as a treat for the rest of the guys on the next annual fishing trip.

So, Mr. Beer arrived yesterday. We got the Premium Edition which comes with the keg, the ingredients to make West Coast Pale Ale, and eight 1 liter bottles with caps. We also bought the recipes and ingredients for Dutch Apple Ale and Ginger's Castaway Ale. Bob stopped by this evening and we decided to go with the basic West Coast Pale recipe that it came with to get a little experience before we tried anything else out.

We had a hell of a good time setting up and starting our first batch of beer which is currently sitting on top of my dresser getting ready to ferment. It'll take at least a week before it's ready to bottle and then another week after that to carbonate. Until then we took a few pictures of our fun and I put them up in the Photo Gallery for the world to see. I'll take more photos of the bottling process and add them to the gallery when it's ready.

A minimum of 2 weeks to wait! I hate waiting. I guess I'll just have to buy some beer to drink in the meantime.