Mmmm, Beer. My Journey Toward Passion.

Passion is one of the fundamental aspects of life, one of the reasons life is worth living, pain worth enduring, puzzles worth solving. It's interesting to me how we all find passion, and what it is to each of us. I think we all have a variety of passions in life, but what those are to each individual is just fascinating to me. Why is beer a passion of mine? Why is quilting a passion for her, and painting for him?

Did I mention this is a blog about beer?

Well, it only seemed fitting for me to start my first blog post with the essence of what started it: my passion for beer. Honestly, this post is going to be long. Very. Long. Probably boring for the reader passing by. So, you might want to go get a beer, probably one in a large bottle, pour it in your favorite glass, and settle in.

There has just always been something about beer that called to me. Even in high school when I didn't like the taste of beer, I liked beer and wanted to brew beer. My parents knew this, and for Christmas in my senior year of high school, they gave me a beer brewing kit. Basically, it was a bag that you filled with water, and in six weeks, you had beer. That is definitely how the pros do it. So, I did that about two months later.

My very first beer.

About March, 1996, I filled that bag with water and waited to see what happened. The bag expanded and became puffy for a while, and then deflated and didn't appear to be doing anything, so I surmised that it was "done brewing." During that time, I collected Arizona tea bottles. I had about two dozen or so for my first beer. I then filled them and put them on my shelf in my closet. I rinsed them out with water, so sanitation issues were abolished.

In May, my buddy Rudy had his family's annual camping trip to Cache Creek, "the only campground in California with grassy campsites." I was invited and prepared my beer for the trip. I mentioned that this was in high school, and taking a cooler of beer with me, right? Rudy's family was pretty lax about that. 

I named my first beer. On a piece of paper, I drew three large Xs, and inside the Xs, I wrote the letters PMS, which stood for Pinole MoonShine. In looking back, it was horribly tacky. But at the time, I though I was so freakin' cool. And I had a cooler full of beer that I brewed! It was mildly alcoholic, and also, it tasted, well, shitty. So, word to the wise, beer brewed in a bag is terrible. This should not be a shocking revelation. But at the time, I didn't really care, I had alcohol!! And it was beer I made. Hell yeah I made that!! Poured the water in the bag myself! 

It would be many, many years before I would brew my second batch of beer. 

Over the years since high school, my love and exploration of beer slowly grew. I discovered Guinness, and for years, it was my all time favorite. I used to go to the store in college and occasionally buy "micro brews" which for me was various offerings by Sam Adams. Occasionally, it was offerings by other breweries, like Sierra Nevada, or Pyramid - I had a long time love affair with Pyramid Apricot Ale (I still love it). But my exploration of beer remained fairly minimal: I didn't understand beer styles and types, I didn't try very many kinds, and I didn't understand much about what I liked and why I liked it. My interests tended to be more rooted in what was "cool" rather than what was most delicious or nuanced. 

After college, I moved to Georgia and my love for beer grew profoundly. I discovered beer fests, and began volunteering at them. This introduced me to numerous types of beer I had never heard of or tasted. I discovered growlers, bought my first one, and found a local bottle shop with great beers on tap. I discovered Oktoberfest in Hellen, GA, still the best Oktoberfest I've found. And I can dance the hell out of the chicken dance. I discovered amazing breweries like Lazy Magnolia, Sweet Water, New Belgium, Rogue, and Southern Tier. I bought a beer tasting journal and took notes on beers I tasted. And best of all, I discovered beers from Belgium. Belgian beers are still my favorite, by far. But my life was soon going to change drastically, and eventually lead me to beervana: Portland, OR. 

Welcome to Beervana. I arrive in Portland in November, 2012 and first on the agenda was learn to brew beer. Surprisingly, after all the beer tasting, exploring, and enjoying, I still couldn't tell you what are the four principle ingredients in beer nor how it was made, nor differentiate between the two principle types: lager and ale. Lame, I know. 

My new hobby was about to begin. After living in Portland for about a month, I decided to take a drive to F.H. Steinbarts, an iconic brew shop, and buy a home brewing kit. I had the choice of buying a kit that included ingredients for my first brew, and I could choose from about seven different beers. I chose nut brown ale, in honor of one of my favorite beers from Portland: Rogue Hazelnut Brown Ale.

I didn't know the first thing about brewing. So, I asked the guy who was helping me if he could recommend a book on brewing. He selected the iconic How To Brew, but John Palmer. I decided to skip the lengthy reading (tisk tisk) and skip to the chapter on step-by-step brewing. It was actually two years later before I would actually read the entire book. 

Brew day. This kit I purchased included a fairly simple brew setup, a plastic container of malt extract, a fermentation plastic bucket, a plastic secondary bucket, a hydrometer, some sanitizing solution, an S-bubbler, and a racking cane. What the heck was all this stuff? It was all very overwhelming at the time. Luckily, I read the chapter in How To Brew, and the instructions that came with the kit, and pulled off my first brew. Look out Portland, I've moved up to extract brewing from the bag thingy.  

After a few weeks of fermentation, I was ready for the next step: bottling. This seemed easy enough, and why the heck would I learn everything I needed to know. Just mix the beer with sugar in a bucket, and pour into sanitized bottles. Easy peasy. Right? Um. No. You see, there is this thing called bottle bombs. When you don't mix in the sugar with the beer evenly, some bottles end up with more sugar than others. Yeast eat sugar, and make carbon dioxide, this is called bottle conditioning. And the more sugar you give those little moldy bastards, the more C02 they make. Too much sugar, and BOOM, quite literally. Fun. I had two bottle bombs. A loud bang in the middle of the night, followed by 16 ounces of beer raining down on your closet floor, it isn't fun. At. All. So, it would seem my bottling technique needed a little refining. 

I also leaned that variable amounts of sugar in solution also leads to variable levels of carbonation in the bottles of beer. So, when I would open a bottle of my beer, I would get a range of carbonation levels from a very loud pop and extra carbonated beer to almost no pressure at all and nearly flat beer. Hey, it was only my second batch of beer ever, my first (and only) extract batch, and my first time bottling beer. So, I sucked at it. 

Enter, <NAME> Brewery. Okay, I would love to tell you the name of the brewery, but I'm afraid I will come home and find my home surrounded by lawyers yelling at me for using the brewery name without permission. But, they are a hiking / camping themed brewery, and make great beer in East Portland. Their name might rhyme with Base Lamp. I was introduced to the brewers by a friend who invited me there to play board games and drink beer. After chatting with one of the brewers, I offered to shoot photos of their beer pro bono, and they agreed. Bad. Ass. I'm doing photography for a commercial brewery in Portland. Bucket list item: check. So, a week later, I showed up, photo gear in hand, and a wild frenzied joy from combining two passions: photography and beer. I shot photos of their beer, and the pizza shack that served pizza to the brewery patrons, and Lebanese food truck's food too. It is amazing. 

Have you met John? In my first month in Portland, I was introduced to a place that would suck more money from my wallet for beer than any other in my past or present: John's Market, a bottle shop with beers from, well, everywhere. It's beautiful. I literally can't go there unless I have about 45 minutes to spare because I have to go up and down every isle. John's Market has introduced me to beers I had never even heard of: sours, berliner weisse, lambic, mead, dubbel, tripel, saison, dunkle, helles. And it introduced me to breweries that I've fallen in love with: Goose Island, The Commons, De Garde, No Li, Brasserie Dupont, Off Color Brewing, Ecliptic, Russian River, Crux. I walk in looking for a beer, I walk out with a box full of beer. It is in a word, sublime. 

"Hey, you want to come over and help me brew?" Meet Tom. 

At my job, I met a guy named Tom that inspired me to undertake a large project. We partnered on this project, and at some point, he invited me to come over and drink beer and help him brew. I was excited at the prospect of brewing again, and went to his house eager to learn. It was there that I discovered "all grain brewing." Time for an SAT like question: All grain brewing is to extract brewing as Michelangelo is to __________. Answer: paint by numbers.

Tom has a setup that kinda blew my mind when I saw it. He has a full size keg that has been frankensteined into a pot on steroids, complete with built in ball valve and thermometer. And it sits atop a propane powered burner with about two billion btu's for heating power. He has a computer with special brewing software, a fridge with three taps of home brews, and more random brewing devices than I have ever seen or knew existed. And during the brew session, so many brewing terms were used that I'd never heard: vorlaufing, mash tun, hot liquor tank, original and final gravity, strike water, grist, sparging, wort, wort chiller, hot break, trub, carboy, reinheitsgebot, ABV, SRM, IBU. I wondered what the hell I had done to actually pull off my extract batch. I was also, well, hooked. I was introduced to a hobby, a time honored tradition, 

That brew session with Tom set in motion a desire to learn about this craft that is stronger than I could have imagined. Since that fateful brew day, I have read numerous books, blogs, websites, and scholarly journal articles. I have asked brewers at my local brew club, my local brew shop, and at commercial breweries numerous questions about brewing. And I finally feel like I am beginning to understand the depth and complexity of craft of brewing. Meaning, after all my inquiries, I have a vague idea of how it all works. Brewing is a rabbit hole, how deep it goes .... 

YOU TOO can brew like a pro. Tom inspired me to spend unjustifiable amounts of money on an all grain five gallon brewery. I have a 7.1 gallon stailness steel cylindroconical fermenter (aka "a conical") and a stainless steel 10 gallon kettle by SS Brewtech, a home built 10 gallon Igloo cooler mash tun, a custom built brew stand, a chugger pump, stainless steel cam lock fittings, a home build convoluted copper counterflow wort chiller, a home built stir plate (made out of a cigar box) for growing yeast starters, a brew fridge serving as a temperature controlled fermentation chamber, a full corney keg kegging setup, and numerous small devices and gadgets. 

The time spent on home builds has been such an enjoyable part of the journey, and I strongly recommend this for any aspiring brewer out there. Nothing more rewarding than making a stir place, filling an erlenmeyer flask with water, and watching it perform embarrassingly poorly, only to have to go back to the drawing board, build it better, and watch version 2.0 spin the hell out of some water, to give you a sense of pride about the craft. 

My next blog post will cover the journey that has been building my own home brew setup, and all I have learned about building it. Subsequent posts will focus on travel, beer brewing and recipes, and other things beer. I have brewed two beers now: a petit saison with raspberries, and a 10.3% quadrupel. I'll post my notes and recipes soon. 

This is truly a joy of mine, and my fiances as well, and I will love sharing this with you. 

Cheers!