Last week, in an effort to simplify my alcohol supply chain, a friend and I decided to try our hands at homebrewing beer. Given that there are very few (read: one) microbreweries out here in the California desert, most of my beer has to travel quite a long ways to reach me. Cutting down on carbon output from transportation is one of my motivating factors in homebrewing. In addition, it allows me a way to further control my food supply, and know what I'm putting into my body.

We started by selecting our ingredients. While in the name of expediency, we went to a standard brewery supply place, I’d highly recommend checking out the Seven Bridges Co-op. They are the largest (and possibly the only) organic brewing supplier on the net, and they have a tremendous amount of resources on their website, including detailed instructions. Anyway, the ingredients you need are relatively simple: barley malt, hops, yeast, and water.

We decided to try doing a Stout, and so we got the proper types of malt and hops (brewing supply houses will be able to tell you what combinations of ingredients will produce your desired results). The actual preparation is relatively easy: you put your barley malt in a mesh bag and boil it for 30 minutes- kind of like a gigantic tea bag- and then add hops and the malt extract and keep it boiling for an hour or so.

After this process is over comes the yeast. The yeast is perhaps the most crucial ingredient in turning your wort (the hops/malt/water mixture) into beer. First, you have to allow the wort to cool, so as not to harm the little yeasties, and then you “pitch” the yeast, which merely means putting it in the container with the wort. The yeast then initiates a surge of reactions: it converts sugar into alcohol, and with such an abundance of sugar (provided by the malt), it undergoes a population explosion.

Of course, as I learned the hard way, if temperature in your slowly brewing beer is too high (78 degrees or higher) the yeast will quite literally explode, spewing out the top of your container and all over the ceiling, floor, and countertop. I arrived home one day after work to find a virtual geyser of foam bursting several feet into the air. We’ll see how this affects the beer.

I’ll post an update in a couple of weeks, after bottling and further fermentation. If all goes well, we'll have 2 cases of tasty stout. If not, we'll have 2 cases of sweet bitter water. Either way, a learning experience, and another step forward in simplifying my food supply.