Brewing with the Man
Chris home brews, which I’ve probably mentioned before. He does so on a pretty regular basis. Maybe every two weeks or so. As I type this, there are approximately 31 gallons of beer in carboys hiding away in the guest room closet. He is the sort of person who has a sponge brain, just soaks up all kinds of information no matter how boring or technical it is. Obviously, I am not like that. I have a wall brain, where information bounces off of it and sometimes things stick. Wow these are terrible analogies. Anyway I was trying to compliment Chris because he got into brewing and read tons of books full of math and no pictures, chock full of academic writing. He’s got smarts.
Chris wanted to brew a beer for my upcoming 30th birthday. It’s meant to sit for a long time, seeing as my birthday is not for another 9 months. I offered to participate, something I haven’t done before. Usually I stay warm inside and knit with a friend while he putters around outside in the freezing cold, wind and rain. Thankfully the day he chose for brewing turned out to be sunny and not too cold!
I lightly assisted, used a hole-filled gigantic spoon called a mash paddle to stir the mash in the pot, ground up all kinds of grains, and cleaned a bunch of equipment. There are several periods of time when you just stand around waiting for the enormous kettle to reach a certain temperature or do other unknown things. I used this time to rake the front yard, taunt the cats from the window and putter around in the cold. Chris used it to come up with more beer recipes!
The beer we made is an imperial stout and it’s really dark (the pictures above are just a carboy full of water & cleaner). I was told to name it and so after some deep thinking and really terrible names, I came up with Queen Bess. It’s imperial. It’s stout. And a little bit goes a long way.
