Barley and Me
Learn how 417 Magazine's Assistant Editor, Melody Adams, traded girly for burly by brewing her own beer. And learn how you can brew, too.
I take a do-it-yourself approach to life. Knitting scarves, jarring homemade pasta sauce, crafting greeting cards: If it can be hand-made, I’ll try it. So when my DIY partner-in-crime, Lara, and I tackled our next project, we traded our hot glue guns for hops and brewed our own batch of beer. That’s right. Beer. And after all was said and tasted, we’re pretty happy with ourselves. In fact, we just might forgo our usual cosmos for a pint of homemade ale.
Step One: Befriend a Brewer
Lucky for us, home brewers have a compendium of resources right here in 417-land. The Ozark Home Brewery (205 W. Bain St., Ozark, 417-581-0963, homebrewery.com) got me started with a basic equipment kit. Thankfully, owner Todd Frye made sure I went home with a step-by-step brewing guide, plus his own abridged explanation.
Armed with two six-gallon buckets, a hydrometer, plenty of sanitizer and 144 bottle caps, I was ready to begin brewing my own Belgian Wit.
What I DIDN'T Name My BeerIf it were up to the Whitaker Publishing staff, all beers would have names like these. Drunken Melodies |
Step Two: Brew Your Brew
Lara and I sanitized the equipment, then we heated five gallons of water in a massive stockpot. Next, we lowered a cheesecloth full of grains into the boiling water for 15 minutes, doing our best to keep the temperature around 170°F, then stirred the hops and malt into the mixture.
And now for the messy part. We brought the pot back up to a boil and kept our eyes on the continually rising foam, which threatened to boil over and leave a sticky mess atop my stove. Forty-five minutes later, we added a bag of Irish Moss along with spices and bitter orange peel.
Cooling the stockpot to 75 degrees was the biggest challenge. Senior beer-brewers use a wort chiller, but Lara and I used a simpler approach: We set it in a sink full of ice. Once cooled, we transferred the wort into one of the plastic buckets, sprinkled a packet of yeast on top,
attached an airlock stopper and set it aside.
Step Three: Babysit Your Brew
The next week and a half was easy. I simply let the beer do its thing (a.k.a. ferment, the process where yeast consumes the sugars inside the wort, producing CO2 and alcohol). I disturbed it only to take hydrometer readings, and once they measured consistently over a couple of days, it was ready to bottle.
Step Four: Bottle Your Brew
Once I had the bottles and recruited the help of another partner-in-crime, Joey, I was ready to siphon the beer into the second plastic bucket, which had a faucet to easily fill the bottles. I filled while Joey used a device to seal on the caps. And voilà! Operation Beer: bottled.
Step Five: Behold the Brew
After a taste test with a motley group of Whitaker Publishing staffers, the consensus is: Very wheaty. The beer is bold and tasty, perfect for an evening spent conversing on the front porch with friends. The aftertaste was a bit surprising, but it mellowed out once I got used to it. And the best part? It didn’t come from the beer cooler at the closest liquor store.
