You probably won’t ruin your beer.
One of the challenges of brewing your own beer is that, if something goes wrong, you might not know until you open a bottle four weeks later. But most home-brewers are overly paranoid while cooking their first batch, says one of the owners of the Brooklyn Brew Shop.
“Most of the questions we get are ‘Did I ruin my beer?’ And the answer, usually, is ‘No, not yet,’ ” said Erica Shea, who founded the Dumbo home-brewing company with her husband Stephen Valand in 2009. The pair started selling kits at the Brooklyn Flea, and now ship beer-making supplies all over the world.
Inspired by the many, many excellent stouts I consumed during New York City Beer Week, this beer-loving editor decided to try concocting his own black brew, using an Oatmeal Stout kit from the Brooklyn Brew Shop. The box comes with almost everything a first-time brewer needs to produce two six-packs: a one-gallon jug, plastic tubes, a thermometer, yeast, and a grain mixture tailored for one of the 20 varieties of beer.
But I got Shea on the phone to discuss the stages where — like most first-time brewers — I worried I might have gone wrong.
The first step was boiling up the mash, trying to keep the temperature between 144 and 152 degrees, but on my gas stove I found the mash rocketing between too low and too high. But that’s not really a problem, said Shea.
“Beer is pretty forgiving,” she said. “A few degrees off or a few minutes too long — it doesn’t matter. It might be 6.4.% [alcohol by volume] instead of 6.6%, but that won’t affect the flavor.”
After straining the boiled malt into another pot — or for me, a pair of vessels usually reserved for tomato sauce — I got the proto-brew through a funnel and into the glass gallon jug, added yeast, and tucked it into a dark closet for two weeks.
After peeking at the vessel impatiently for two weeks, I added sugar and transferred the brew into bottles (not included in the kit). Brooklyn Brew Shop’s instructional video makes this process seem deceptively easy, but my neighbors were treated to a series of curses as I stretched the tube from the counter to the sink, and finally onto the floor, spilling a bottles-worth of beer in the process.
Bottling is often a problem for people, said Shea.
“I find the bottling to be the biggest challenge,” said Shea. “It’s a little tricky — you have to harness the power of gravity, especially if you’re short. I often enlist someone else to help.”
And after another two weeks in the darkened closet, my brew — which I dubbed “The Stouter Darkness” poured out black as interstellar night. It had a nice chocolate aftertaste — but it was flat, with foam that vanished immediately. My colleagues in the office pronounced it “drinkable” but “under-carbonated.”
So I told Shea the verdict on the beer but again, she told me not to worry — it probably just needs a little extra time to get properly bubbly.
“Give it a few more days,” she said. “Because it’s been so cold, it takes a little longer to build up carbonation.”
So I will be sampling it again this weekend — and deciding what my next experiment with home-brew is going to be.
Beer Making Kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop (www.brook
Updated to correct an error describing the brewing process.
