An Introduction to Brewing Beer

What lover of fine brew doesn’t eventually play around with brewing their own beer ? Once you hang around breweries and develop a taste for real beer that’s not frilly and foofey crap foisted off on tourists you start craving your own brand. Maine especially has a lot of craft breweries around. Unfortunately they all eventually become cookie cutter brands of IPA with some kind of flavoring meant to entrap tourists visiting the area. The brews are full of fruit extracts, some are brewed with clams (awful taste), and some with Froot Loops cereal ! There’s coffee, hazelnut, and blueberries in this swill.

Proper beer in my opinion (for what it’s worth), should not have daylight visible through the glass. It should be almost too thick to drink, but too thin to plow with a mule. Stouts and porters are the beer of preference, unless it’s a truly hot summer day. In those events, a light blonde Hefeweizen or an Irish red is acceptable. Anything else is just tourist swill. And don’t get me started on the horse piss canned and bottled by Anheuser — Bush or other commercial breweries. Rice belongs in a Chinese buffet, not in your beer. Yep — call me a beer snob if you want — but at least I ain’t one of those metrosexual flannel wearing hipster fops in the city who wouldn’t know which leaves to wipe their asses with in the woods. Hint — it ain’t the cluster of three shiny ones, unless you’re into severe ass rash.

At any rate, this is just an introduction to the ingredients that I use to brew my own stouts. It’s not yet an instruction for brewing beer. If you want that, do as I did and pick up a copy of beer brewing for dummies book. The information there is a great place to start with brewing your own.

Bags of hops

I love leaf style hops instead of hops pellets. Eventually I’ll end up growing my own hops vines, but I’m not that hard core serious about my beer just yet.

cascades and fuggles leaves.

A lot of my mash is done with Muntons grains in a bag. Steel cut Irish oatmeal makes a wonderful stout with a lot of flavor.

Malted grains and oatmeal

Even though I griped about adding flavors to the brew earlier, I’ll confess that I do add a touch of cacao powder to the brew sock to the initial wort. The chocolate does contain some fat which does tend to kill the head on the beer.

Cacao powder for the chocolate flavoring

I brew with barley and malted grains in addition to dry malt extract, which is a type of sugar. Irish moss is added to the wort in the last bit of cooking to get the particulates to settle out and sink to the bottom of the vat. This helps clarify the beer somewhat.

Cracked barley

Roasted grains

Black patent malt

This is the introduction to the ingredients list I use to make my homemade brew. Later, I will post how I put everything together and begin the process.