Brewing With My Brother

I want to tell the story of how I got into home-brewing and how it is slowly becoming my passion (not in a Mel Gibson way). But seeing that it's quite a long tale, I'm going to split it up into a few posts.

Here is the first, about my introduction to the world of Home-Brewing...

In 2006 I shared a flat with my brother on Bayswater Road in West Jesmond. This neighbourhood in Newcastle is very popular with students as it's fashionable, the rent is/was cheap, and the main road through it, Osbourne Road, has a string of pretty decent bars there making it a good place to pre-game before a night on the lash.

Anyway, it was the beginning of December, maybe the very end of November. James (my brother) and I were talking about the red wine he brewed with his old flat-mates the year before (it was rougher than Byker High Street) and he suggested that we brew our own beer in the space under the stairwell. Yeah, why not, I thought, half expecting it would turn me blind but whatever.

So we went to Wilkinson's, a home-ware store in the centre of town, and got the kit for about £25. He made me carry it all the way back in the rain, the bastard. Don't know why I let him, though, so maybe it's my fault, haha.

Anyway, we got home, dried off and set to work. We sanitised everything as instructed, then heated up the can of malt-extract which would give us the 40 pints of lager we were after. Now, James is a mechanical engineer, so everything about this process absolutely had to be precise.

He made it like a science lesson, which looking back is kind of cool (education-wise) but at the time, when I was an art-school student just wanting to get pissed, I found it all pretty tedious. He even made a chart on Excel showing the various stages of the process. God loves a trier.

Anyway, you can only imagine my face when he showed me all these mathematical equations. The only one I did pay attention to was the chart showing the amount of alcohol we'd get depending on the amount sugar we put in. That chart I fucking memorised. When it came to adding the sugar, I very generously offered to take care of it. I distinctly remember James being very clear about exactly how much to put in. Four tablespoons only. He said it three times.

Obviously I put in 8.

When it came to bottling we made quite a few basic errors. The main one was the containers that we used: we didn't buy enough bottles (the ones we did get, due to the high sugar level, kept getting their  corks blown off) so we put the rest of the beer in 2L milk cartons.

At the time we thought that, because they held milk, they would also hold in carbon dioxide. Not true. We had so much lager though, that by the time we got to the milk cartons it was all completely flat. It was still quite nice, though and got us fairly drunk.

That was the first experience I had of home-brewing.