But maybe the brewery decides not to make it any more, or they don't sell it where you live. "Sure, you can go out and buy beer, and you like it. Beyond the creativity involved in playing with ingredients to get different flavors, she likes that she can produce the kind of beer that she wants to drink. LaSchum brews on her porch, in five- to six-gallon batches. When that failed, the veteran do-it-yourselfer decided to try making beer. Wendy LaSchum started homebrewing "by accident." The Oregon resident grows Concord grapes in her yard, and tried branching out from jelly to making wine. Who wouldn't want to take control of their beer, too? When you can make something that tastes like that in your garage, it's no wonder that interest in homebrewing is joining the resurgence in home cooking, canning and fermentation. It's heady, downright boozy in the finish, and impressive. These small spirals of wood, charred like oak barrels to simulate oak-barrel aging, are soaked in Jack Daniels for about three weeks. He made it with malted wheat and malted barley, Nelson Sauvin hops - a New Zealand variety with a "white wine must aroma," Browne explains - aged four months on French oak medium toast spirals. Take, for example, Browne's homemade wheat wine, a style similar to a barleywine (despite the names, these are both beers), but much more difficult to find. If there's nothing extraordinary about the homebrew process, its results can be. But Browne also knows some dedicated homebrewers who never leave the stovetop.īrowne says whatever the means of production, homebrewing "doesn't need to be fancy." But homebrewer Zak Holmes likens homebrewing to fishing - "You can buy a rod and reel and go fishing tomorrow, but eventually you want to get a boat and tackle and more stuff." His garage setup includes a gravity system (three kettles, stair-stepped on three levels, so that gravity pulls the liquid from kettle to kettle), and a laptop computer running BeerSmith homebrew software. If a pot boils over, the brewmeister can be chipping caramelized sugar off the stove for days. Bottling to complete the process takes about another hour.īrowne extols the virtues of brewing in the garage, or at least not in the kitchen. The fact is, making a batch of beer can be done with less than $100 of equipment, a couple of hours of labor and another week to a month or so to age the brew. Yet fermentation, the base of brewing, is a process as natural as living and dying.Ĭalling it zymurgy - also the name that the American Homebrewers Association has taken for its bimonthly magazine - makes this process sound more complicated than it is, even as it invests it with a special allure. "Zymurgy" - the study or practice of fermentation in brewing, winemaking or distilling - sounds to modern ears even more magical than alchemy, the fabled process of transforming dross into gold. "It's tedious if you're just watching a flame for four hours." There is grain steeping in the first pot, and a warm, malty aroma starts to fill the air.īrew sessions are "best with other people," Voskuil observes, even though most parts of homebrewing are easily done alone. At just above freezing, it takes dedication to your craft to spend all day brewing beer in a cold garage. There are about four of these setups on the floor.īrowne, who lives on Madison's west side, has help this chilly December morning from Annie Leitzke and Aaron Voskuil, friends and co-workers from the Wine & Hop Shop. "This is a five-gallon batch," Browne explains, noting this is a typical volume produced by homebrewers that makes about two cases of beer. A large stainless steel pot sits on a portable propane burner on the floor of Ryan Browne's double garage.
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