Beer Workout

Jamie, Joe, and I try to brew beer regularly.  Since we (I mostly mean they) drink beer even more regularly than we brew it, we can't seem to catch up with our consumption.  Getting together and making something is the real point, anyway, so I think we are successful if we have enough home brew from the last batch to drink while we are brewing the current batch.  We make dinner and stand around watching a boiling pot.  It's always a good time. 

We started our brewing adventures using a beer kit that Jamie's buddy received as a gift, and never used, so he gave it to Jamie.  We were already making wine by then, so we had some of the basic equipment - a bucket and a tube for racking.  We have slowly expanded our operation.  We now have two buckets, two tubes, and a gas turkey fryer on loan from my brother in law.  We made some sketches for a beer label, so I can tell we're getting serious about beer now that we have the infrastructure in place.   

The new piece of equipment that we used this week for the first time is the Barley Crusher, which Joe is assembling in the photo above.  Previously, we would buy malted barley extract in a can and just use a few specialty grains for flavor.  But with the barley crusher, we can use dried malted barley grains.  These are less expensive, so if we can figure out how to make beer we like, our cost per batch will be much less.  Turning the handle to crush the nearly ten pounds of grain was a good arm and back exercise.  We debated using a power drill to do the turning, but we decided that we like the idea of using our own kinetic energy to make our beer.  Well, that, and by the time I found the drill they were already finished.

All those grains are heavy, and Jamie had to hold them up while I poured hot water over them after they soaked in hot water for a few hours. He got a good upper body workout during this step.  According to the recipe, they were only supposed to soak for 90 minutes, but we got caught up watching a Disney movie (The Incredibles, which was excellent!).  Recipes are for amateurs, right? 

We even grew some of our own hops this year in my back yard.  The hops are attractive plants and I like having them grow up the side of the deck.  We only got enough hops for one batch this year, but the plants should keep coming back and getting bigger each year.  The growing and the picking of the hop flowers was good exercise and excellent stretching, and we got plenty of sunlight while doing it.  Someday I would like to grow the barley too.  I'm sure scything the grain by hand, and flailing the seeds off, and winnowing off the chaff would be good exercise too.  No one would have beer bellies if they had to make their own beer before they could drink it.  Probably no one would drink beer if they had to do all that work for it!