Bondioli Brewing is open for business! Or, at least, it has started operations.
I’ve been wanting to try homebrewing for a while. And when I was in Illinois in the fall, Nate gave me some start-up supplies and very helpful instructions for a light oat ale to try as my first batch. So … months later, I’m finally on it. Today was my first brew day. It took about four hours total, and now I have a nice jug of soon-to-be beer fermenting in my closet. I’m still about a month away from the finished product.
My very unscientific explanation of how it works:
The Mash: Grains mix with water. At this point, my kitchen smelled like a brewery — or Soulard. (Soulard was my neighborhood when I lived in St. Louis. It’s also home to Anheuser-Busch, and some days you could smell the grains, which are sometimes referred to by those in Soulard as “beerios,” by my apartment.)
The Sparge: Extracting wort from the grains. Yum, yum! I need to find a useful thing to do with these spent grains. (No, I did not try eating them. That just doesn’t sound appealing. But many breweries sell the grains to farmers, and those grains become dinner for livestock.)
The Boil: Heating the wort and adding hops. Frothy, and yet it isn’t beer.
The Fermentation: Yeast eats away at sugars, creating alcohol and carbonation. It’ll sit like this in my closet (darkest and not-too-hot place in my tiny apartment) for two weeks while it becomes beer.
Disclaimer: I actually know very little about the specifics. While I consider myself knowledgeable about beer and have been on enough brewery tours that I can basically recite how it all works, I haven’t read that much on homebrewing. This batch was done mostly through the guidance of Nate and the instructions he sent me. However, I don’t plan to continue on blindly. I did buy a homebrew book (“The Joy of Homebrewing” by Charlie Papazian, which was recommended to me by a microbrewer) and hope to really know what I’m doing as far as mixing different grains and making variations for future batches.
The sad part? I have a fairly small apartment and no storage area, so I’m pretty limited. Thus, I’m brewing one gallon at a time — that’s just six bottles each time. And I fear my apartment might get too warm in the summer months for proper fermentation and bottle conditioning.
