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Beer

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Hop Vines
1 gallon glass fermenter Cascade and Nugget hopes vines growing in containers

Beer, liquid bread. The ingredients are similar, the result is pretty different. Beer is made from malted barley, yeast, hops, and water. I don't really have any improvements flavor-wise over what is already out there. If you are thinking of brewing your own I'll just say this: If you just follow some directions you will be making beer that tastes as good or better than 90% of the stuff out there and it will cost you about $0.60 a bottle (6-pack for $3.60!). The equipment costs around $100 so I guess if you are going to make less than about 5 5-gallon batches you might as well not do it.

One of my goals has been to get the price per batch down with minimal investment. The ingredients for a basic 5-gallon batch of beer are as follows (see Williams Brewing):

Let's attack these one at a time. MALT The malt extract is a tough one. This is malted barley that has been crushed and cooked in water and then condensed down to syrup consistency. You could in theory cut this cost in half by buying 55-lb bags of malted barley, crushing it with a mill, and then cooking it in a giant vat of water, but you'd have to buy a lot of equipment for that, which is fine unless you live in an apartment without any closets like me. I just buy the malt extract for now.

HOPS Hops are perennial vines that have flower cones which are the part used in beer making. Every year around the beginning of March, there are a few places that sell hop rhizomes which look essentially like a 3-4 inch stick and are clones of the original vine. Drop these under some dirt and they grow into new vines. I just planted some and sure enough, they have sprouted a few shoots each. The first year they expend a lot of energy establishing their roots, so they won't fully produce the cones. By the second year they can produce as much as 2 lbs of dry cones per plant, which would be enough for about 16 batches of beer! The rhizomes cost about $5 each and by the second year are producing more than $200 retail value of hops. So, let's just say you pay $5 and you have free hops for life.

YEAST You can buy an "activator pack" for about $4.25 and use that to propagate your own yeast strain. This will require some basic biology skills, which mostly just means keeping things clean with alcohol and fire (note: NOT together). The yeast needs something to snack on, that is sugar. But that is a minimal input, so again I'd say this is basically free after you buy the initial strain, though maybe it get's funky after say 10 generations. I don't really know biology, but since you probably don't have a microbiology lab, then you'll have to invest in a new culture every so often.

So, where are we, I guess we can get the cost down to about $20, which makes 5 gallons or ~50 12 oz bottles. That is $0.40 per bottle, nice! I'm thinking that if you went the grain route instead of the concentrate, you could get it down around $0.25 per bottle. Of course, I have left out all the equipment "capital" but I'm too lazy to spread that out over a series of batches. As Bush said, "I'm not an economist...I am an optimist".

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Beersplosion (June 15th, 2009)

I learned a few valuable lessons on a single botched batch of beer recently. First, beer does in fact require hops to taste good. Second, DO NOT exceed 3/4 cup of sugar per 5 gallons of beer to prime it before bottling.

Sugar + Yeast + Heat + Time + Glass = Bomb

I lost two bottles to microorganisms. I was wondering why it sounded like there was a bar fight in my kitchen that one night. I threw the rest in the fridge immediately and even after cooling them down, the pressure is immense. Here is a video of one such beer after sitting in the freezer.