A wise man once said: “This is grain, which any fool can eat, but for which the Lord intended a more divine means of consumption … beer!”
For all of recorded history, it’s been with us. Beer, in fact, may have been responsible for recorded history. According to Bryon Burch in his book, Brewing Quality Beers, there are those who maintain that the necessity of growing grains for beermaking led directly to the beginning of agriculture, and is thus responsible for the rise of civilization itself..
Who am I to argue with history?
Thinking there could be no better way to get in touch with my ancestors than take part in a tradition dating back to the dawn of civilization, I decided to try my hand at homebrewing.
It was also cheaper than building a still. Oh, and legal.
Seeing as civilization’s already been founded, I needed a better excuse—a finely crafted reason, if you will—in order to convince my wife, Heather, that we needed to homebrew: “It pays for itself after a couple uses! You can make wine, cider, and root beer with it! It’ll be great barter after the fall of civilization!”
She later told me she was 90 percent there at “brew our own beer,” and that “make root beer” put it over the top.
Need … stuff
The first stop in this odyssey was Doc’s Cellar in San Luis Obispo. There, George McClintock will set you up with everything you need.
His store is not unlike a candy store for grownups. There are bulk containers of malt extract, grain mills, CO2 regulators, yeasts—he really does have it all.
McClintock started homebrewing in 1997 and brewed batches pretty regularly until 2003 when life got in the way. In 2005, he decided to buy Doc’s Cellar and has been providing equipment and advice ever since.
He figures that some of his customers have brewed thousands of gallons of beer over the years, all in 5-gallon batches.
“It’s dangerously good,” he noted with a chuckle.
As his assistant got my equipment together, I cheerfully picked McClintock’s brain. Sanitation and temperature control are king, he said.
“It’s not as much about the recipe as it is about your technique, your handling of the yeast,” he explained. “Yeast doesn’t like temperature spikes or swings. If your yeast is happy, it’ll make you happy.”
He set me set up with all of my equipment and the raw materials to make a Mexican Negra. That takes a jug of malt extract, hops, and a bag of specialty grains.
Gear in hand, I headed out the door and home to a date with destiny.
The day that was the day
After checking my list, spreading out my equipment, and sanitizing the sanitizables, it was time to start. I filled the grain sock with my grains, and steeped it in 150-degree water for half an hour. A note on grains: It turns out after you steep your grains, the leftovers can make a tasty cereal, as my wife discovered.
“I was sick, and they looked good,” was her reasoning.
The grains came out, the malt extract went in, and the whole mix was brought to a boil. I dropped in the first batch of hops, and suddenly it smelled like beer in there. Just shy of an hour into the boil, I dropped in the second batch of hops. Then, with an hour of boiling done, it was into the ice bath.
I’ve managed to convince myself that there are murderous bacteria and wild yeasts just waiting to ruin my beer, so I’m as nervous as a mother hen during the cooling and yeast pitching stages.
I closed the lid, affixed the lock, and then … waited. I had a week to kill, so I decided I might as well go drink some beer and talk brewing with one of Santa Maria’s original brewers.
The pro
There are few places that brew their own beer in Santa Maria. The Loading Dock in Orcutt will be unveiling its first batch soon, and Rooney’s will be opening in the coming days, but the first guy in town is, well, not quite in town.
At the end of Highway 166, if you drive under—yes, under—Highway 101, you’ll come to Santa Maria Brewing Company. Owner and brewmaster Dan Hilger set up shop right across the river because trying to run an alcohol-related business in Santa Barbara County wasn’t worth the hassle. But all that falls aside when he gets down to brass tacks.
“It’s my Zen time,” he replied when asked about his brewing routine.
For Hilger, it’s a one-man show.
“If someone is here when I’m brewing, I almost always f*ck it up,” he said. Making a note to not ask when I could watch him brew, I asked him to tell me the most important thing for a budding brewmaster to remember.
“Sanitation,” he said, with hardly a pause. “Bacteria, wild yeasts, anything like that getting into your cooled wort can screw it up.”
Aha. So I’m not crazy.
Hilger is set up to brew seven barrels at a time. At 32 gallons to the barrel, his operation makes my budding 5-gallon batch seem like chump change. But you have to start somewhere, right?
Bottle time
Brewing my first batch had been a mostly solitary affair. Bottling, however, was going to be a group effort. I convinced Jeremy, one of the other writers here at the Sun, that helping me bottle the beer would be in his best interest.
Jeremy—who, like any good print journalist, is fond of libations—honestly didn’t need much convincing. He’s also the one who came up with “Horny Salamander” as the name of our brewery/name brand/beer line when we get that far.
The lid came off the fermentor, and the smell of hops hit us like a lovers’ ham-fisted caress. Jeremy and I looked at each other, eyes agleam.
It smells like beer!
I took one last hydrometer reading to check the final alcohol content: 6.6 percent. Then I passed the flask around: Jeremy, Heather, and I all grinned as we each savored the aroma. Jeremy’s young daughter took one sniff and made a face: “Yeeeech!”
We were doing something right.
To ensure proper carbonation, we dissolved three-quarters of a cup of corn sugar into two cups of boiling water, then added it to the wort. The remaining yeast eats the sugar and puts off CO2 in the bottle.
In the old days, homebrewers would add a teaspoon of sugar to each bottle, or even bottle while it was still fermenting. There’s a reason why, if you mention homebrewing to the older crowd, the first thing they think of is “exploding bottles.”
In went the racking tube with the length of siphoning hose attached.
I was momentarily taken aback by how to start the suction with the bottle filler attached. I had a brief vision of me trying to depress the spring valve with my tongue while simultaneously sucking. Then I realized I could take the bottle filler off, start my suction, pinch off the hose, reattach the filler, and get in business.
We anxiously watched the bottle fill, and then, just like that, it was capped. Our first bottle.
We got a system going: I filled, Jeremy passed the full bottles to Heather for capping, and in less than 20 minutes, we were done.
Now for the hard part
Forget the sanitizing measures, siphoning, and grain boiling—the single hardest part of brewing your own beer? Waiting. Beers generally need at least two weeks in the bottle to ensure proper flavor and carbonation.
Do you know what it’s like having beer you can’t drink in the house?
At a week to the day after brewing, I couldn’t take it anymore. I convinced myself it was for posterity’s sake that I was opening it—that it was for the benefit of you, the reader.
There was a slight hiss as I cracked the liter bottle (I had to have enough to pour the wife one, too). It was shorter than the typical hiss you get when cracking a carbonated beverage, but I’m hoping another week of conditioning will take care of that.
A rich, dark-colored liquid flowed into the glass—not quite as dark and thick as a Guinness, but not a light, pale ale, either.
And the flavor? A heavier, hoppier version of Negra. There seemed to be some extra bitterness, but this was eminently drinkable. My wife and I were about halfway though our respective glasses when it hit me: By god, it worked!
But even as I reveled in the thought of Ancient Man reaching across time to give me a congratulatory fist-bump, I was all too aware of Ancient Man also ready to smack me down, too.
“One brew, a brewmaster makes not! Lagering, kegging, all-grain brewing—await you these things do.” (He sounds a bit like Yoda, my Ancient Man.)
He’s right, though. Now to convince the wife we need a grain mill.
Hey, Staff Writer Nicholas Walter, toss me a cold one. Contact him at nwalter@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 1-8, 2009.