The art of homebrew

[perth]

I took a shot at this recently. As far as 'art' goes, I'm still at the "colouring book" stage. Turns out there is a homebrew shop very close to where I live, and I stopped in to check it out. I came out with all the hardware to make a five gallon batch of brew, as well as an "Octoberfest kit".

The hardware was all fun. A bucket with a spigot, enormous glass bottle, capper, etc. I found the bottlecapper and the airlock particularly entertaining.

The kit consisted of a big can of malt extract, hop 'pellets', some actual malt grain, and a little packet of brewers yeast. Upon opening the kit I experienced the same sort of thrill I felt as a child, opening a big box of lego for the first time.

Washing and sterilizing the equipment isn't a lot of fun, but the cooking part made it all worth it. After steeping the malt grains for about 1/2 an hour, the entire house smelled of malt. It was like heaven. The hop pellets looked like rabbit food, and I guess I was surprised a how they smelled. Nothing like beer, but a deep whiff reminded me of beer. It was cool.

Here we are three weeks later and I have 5 gallons of beer portioned into rows of 12-oz soldiers. I cracked the first one last night. I think I did something wrong, because it tastes just slightly watery to me. I like it, it's just not as strong a flavour as I expected. But after you subtract the initial cost of reusable hardware, I spent just under 30 bucks for 50-ish bottles of beer tasting far better than Budweiser, and I got to make it myself.

I'm brewing another batch. This time an American wheat, also from a kit. I'll try my hand at doing it from all-grain eventually, but for now the kits make it easy and fun.

Has anyone else done this?