Skip to main content

Is it worth it?

Today, home brewing felt a lot more like work than a hobby.  All told, my wife and I sanitized, filled, and capped 12 bombers and 73 standard 11-12 ounce bottles.  I labeled 129 bottles, and did the basic layout for six different labels. I cleaned six fermenters, a bottling bucket, a couple of lengths of tubing, several airlocks, and miscellaneous other items.  It took most of the day.  I have to ask myself "Is it worth it?"

What will come out of all this labor?

  • Good Beer: The large batch we bottled today promises to be a really good beer, which clones one of my favorites from BJ's Brewhouse. Assuming that beer turns out well, and taste tests to date have all been positive, I'll have this high gravity Belgian beer to enjoy for months to come. I'll also be able to share it with friends and family who enjoy less-hoppy beers like it.
  • Brewing Experience:  Any batch you brew gives you practice and often teaches you something. Depending on how you slice it, today I bottled either two batches - or six batches.  One batch was the clone beer above. The other was a low-gravity beer aimed at raising yeast from potentially-dead packages.  It was split across five small fermenters, in theory yielding five different beers.  Doing these required me to practice adjusting recipes to fit my equipment, brew house efficiency, and overall needs.
  • Knowledge: When the bottles from the five small batches finish conditioning, I will learn how these five yeasts affect the flavor of the beers they ferment. That will help me with future brewing endeavors.  I've also learned between the big batch and one of the small ones that Wyeast 3787 is an aggressive fermenter that should always have a blow-off tube available.  It made a mess with both airlocks.
  • Yeast:  In addition to knowledge and experience, the small batch beers were designed first and foremost to grow the yeast from four expired or nearly-expired packages.  Now there should be enough cells available to use in future brewing.  I'll be able to use this "home grown" yeast rather than having to buy new packages.
  • Teaching:  It's very likely that I'll share bottles from the "yeast revival" batch with friends who brew their own beer.  This will give them the chance to learn how the different yeasts affect beer flavor, meaning that my work will help other brewers, too.
  • Goodwill:  It's pretty common for me to share my home brews with co-workers, friends, and family members.  This all builds goodwill.  

Looking over all of this, I guess I would have to say it's been worth it to put in the effort. I'm learning, helping others to learn, enjoying and sharing good beer, and perhaps saving a bit of money on future brewing activities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Note that comments to this blog are moderated in order to minimize spam comments and things that might be offensive to readers.

Popular posts from this blog

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it.  If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone.  It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package.  This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it).  As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step.  This can radically shorten your brewing time.  For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,...
Post a Comment
Read more

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube.  About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice.  He shows three batches in the video.  One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water.  The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water.  All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment.  I'm changin...
Post a Comment
Read more

What I Learned About Brewing in 2021

Last year, I brewed 20 batches of adult beverages (primarily beer and test mashes). In no particular order, here are things I learned during the year: The COVID-19 pandemic left me with more time at home to brew, but at the same time made doing so a bit less enjoyable.  Why?  Because I could not share my homebrew with family and friends as easily as I could pre-pandemic.  Without feedback from my friends about what they did (and didn't) like in my beer, I was less motivated to brew and less able to improve my beer than in prior years. The pump on The Grainfather has a life span (in my experience) of around 200 brews before it dies, and the "official" replacement is way too expensive to suit me (like $190).  I was able to replace it with a pump from Amazon for about $70 that seems to flow much better and stronger than the official pump.  It took some redneck-looking jerry-rigging to fix it, but the system flows better now and I can continue brewing. On a personal...
Post a Comment
Read more