Adventures With Home Brew
(Page 2 of 4)
July/August 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
I stole the baby's bottle brush, scrubbed 48 twelve ounce bottles, moved the jug into the kitchen and put it on the counter. As I began bottling, I also began sampling.
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By the time I was ready to clean the jug and start a new batch, I was not as clear headed as I should have been. The residue from the old batch did not want to come out of the jug so I added a new batch to the old yeast and malt in the bottom of the jug. I later met a dentist who had been doing this for years and had created his own strain of yeast bacteria which he felt accounted for the excellent taste of his beer.
The freshly-capped bottles should age for seven days but, like all rules, you can break this one, too. You'll have a beer with hardly any head by drinking it early.
I tried out my brew on some friends. I didn't get any bad remarks but, then again, I didn't get any good ones either. The beer was dark, heavy and bitter. It had a whallop that was astounding. A couple of quarts and you were set for the evening.
I began to experiment and found that the amount of malt extract regulated the color and taste while the sugar controlled the whallop. After a while, I began to brew beer that was light, in color, pleasant to taste and held a head well after pouring. Then one night . . . disaster!
I had had a few too many and I had forgotten to mark the calendar when I mixed the batch. My bubble system had been loaned to a friend who was making his first try at brewing and, to keep out the bugs, I had put a ball on the neck of the jug. To make a long story short, I bottled too soon, put the beer in the utility room and went to bed. During the night, the explosions began.
After the third muffled blast, I decided to investigate. A stream of beer trickled from under the door of the utility room and, as I stood there, another bottle blew. I went back to bed and tried to forget the whole thing.
After a day of thinking, I donned a long pair of gloves and a welders mask and armed myself with a can opener. I took each bottle, opened it and put the beer in a jug to continue working. I was lucky and got away with disarming the whole batch. Now that I know better, I wouldn't advise anyone else to try such a stunt.
The strength of the explosions amazed me. Some bottles had exploded in the case and the top half of the bottle was driven up through the bottom of a styrofoam cooler that had been placed on top of them. Later I viewed a kitchen where one hardy individual had capped a five gallon water jug, allowing no escape for the fermenting gas. There was glass and homebrew everywhere, including the ceiling.
As my friends began making beer, the age of experiments began. One added ginger; a second, cracked corn; one man threw in raisins and still another included a bag of corn meal. The results were potent. Of course they no longer had beer but a high octaine mixture similar to mead. Some of these formulas laid out respectable beer drinkers like they were schoolboys and had to be treated with respect. If you ignored the rule, you slept where you fell.
