First Homebrew Post

Prost! Beer and homebrewing represent the other half of my URL.  For now, I am focusing on my hike.  However, I may sneak a post or two on this side of the site if I have any excellent beer experiences during my hike.  Until then, I’ll just use this as my introductory post and plan to publish a lot more content starting in the fall of 2024.

My simple homebrew set up on the deck of my brew shed

I think the love of beer is somehow in my genetic code.  I liked it the second I tried it as an early teen.  I graduated from college in 1994 and found a book called the Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian.  I read that every day on my subway ride to and from work in Boston.  There was a great homebrew shop in Somerville, MA called “The Modern Brewer” and they helped set me up for my first brew.  I just boiled up some pre-hopped dark malt syrup, added dry yeast to my bucket and wound up with a fairly under attenuated, low carbonated, “stout.”  The shitty stout from a malt extract can (or perhaps an amber/nut brown ale) seems to be a rite of passage for first time brewers. 

My brewing ebbed and flowed in the early days but has been pretty consistent over the past 20 years.  I am very fortunate that my wife of nearly 24 years likes beer and brewing.  We brew together, judge together, go to breweries together and consider ourselves beer tourists.  Our most recent beer tourism took us to Antwerp and Dusseldorf in the fall of 2023.  Perhaps more on that later.

Our brew setup is pretty simple.  Single infusion mash in either a cooler or converted keg, very simple fly sparge setup, and we have a few kettles.  I built a “keggle” and have a Blichmann (a.k.a “Bling-man”) boilermaker.  We cool with a therminator, and our brewery’s most recent acquisition is an SS Brewtech brew bucket.  Otherwise, we just use PET carboys.  We have the coveted Samsung 4.9 cubic inch fridge with a johnson controls temperature controller.  We keg our beer and serve it via our keezer.  That’s about it.  More to come.  I’ll leave you with my favorite recipe:

Belgian Golden Strong (“Sugar Betty”)

7.5 gallons pre-boil, 6 gallons into the fermenter

Malt Bill

12# Belgian Pils Malt

1# White Wheat

0.5# Carapils

Mash – 152 for an hour

4 grams each of CaSO4 to the mash and sparge water 

Pre-boil gravity about 1.050

Hops 

7.5 AAU Magnum at 60

3.5 AAU Styrian Goldings at 15

Boil 1.5 hours

Sugar

1 Pound of light Belgian Candi syrup at knock out

Healthy pitch of Belgian Ardennes yeast.  Start in the mid 60s, let it free rise (not past 75).

OG:  1.068

FG: 1.014

ABV: 7.1%