My New Skill

Key epic music.

A month ago I embarked upon a journey. A journey to learn to do something that man has been doing for over 6,000 years. A journey to expand both my mind and my gut. A journey, in short, to brew beer.

Epic music ends abruptly as the needle is yanked off the record.

This all started towards the end of July when Melissa and I celebrated our first anniversary. I got her flowers, she got me a brewing lesson. Yes gentlemen, I do have the world's greatest wife.

I got to control the entire process, from selecting what type of beer I wanted to make, Belgian Wheat, to wringing the sugars out of the insanely hot boiled wheat flakes (my hands were red for the rest of the day, despite the thick rubber gloves) and bottling the beer after it had fermented for a few weeks.


My ingredients: Hops (The green pellets: apparently there is no one in the U.S. who pellets hops; all pelleted hops are imported from Europe. So there's a very good chance that my hops were grown here, shipped to Europe, pelleted and shipped back again.), Belgian Yeast (the inverted tube), crushed coriander and dried orange peel (in the bowl on the right), flaked wheat (not shown), wheat extract (not shown) and of course water (also not shown).

This list may be to a bit surprising to any graduates of the Budweiser beer school (which I am), who know that Bud contains only: barley, hops, rice, yeast and water.

The entire brewing process took about a month:

• 2 hours to actually brew the beer
• 2 weeks fermenting in a sealed drum
• 1 hour bottling time
• 2 weeks doing some final fermenting in the bottles

Thus far the drinking process is taking much, much less time.

Each year beer drinkers consume over 5 billion gallons of beer, which is enough to fill about 300 oil tankers. This year, I'm proud to announce, I am responsible for producing 1/1,000,000,000^th of the beer supply.



Upon looking closely at the above image I discovered something shocking. I really had to zoom in to see it, but I've blown it up a bit for easier viewing. I'm glad that warning is there! I was about to dive into the bucket myself before reading it.

-Brewmaster Dave