Strange brew

This past Sunday I got a taste of what I think Eric must be like at work. We turned our kitchen into a lab of sorts and did an experiment: we brewed up some beer.

We had ordered some equipment from the Beverage People whose booth exhibit we had perused (and sampled) at the Maker Faire. Included in our home brewing kit were a large kettle (30 quarts) which looks really really big on the stove, an enormous bucket, two large fermenting containers, a thermometer, siphon assembly, 24 bottles and a bottle capper, two brushes that look like enormous pipe cleaners, a scientific looking thing which measures specific gravity, a copper wort chiller, and a big wooden spoon which I was promptly forbidden to cook with.

We also got the ingredients to make an American India Pale Ale, and this was what we brewed up on Sunday.

The first, most boring, and most important step is sanitizing everything. For all of those reasons, this was Eric's job. He gets extra points for repeatedly using his mouth to start the siphon which moved the iodine-water sanitizer from one container to the next. Gold star.

The brewing process is not hard if you have specific step-by-step instructions, which we did. Boil this, steep that, add that stuff, stir, add the hops, turn yourself around, that's what it's all about! Eric's laboratory expertise was particularly helpful in this process and it all went pretty well except that our puny little stove really struggled to keep the six gallons of beer-in-training boiling, so that is a potential excuse for this to not turn out very well.

Now, this big bucket of potent, yeasty liquid will sit in a corner of our apartment covered in a beach towel (it prefers to be in the dark) for a week or two. It has been four days and I have found myself talking to it when no one else is home. I don't think that's weird.