Introduction

An introduction:

My friend and fellow beer lover began brewing his own beer while living in Seattle a few years back. At the time, he and his housemate -- another great friend -- were telecommuting, and had a great deal of time on their hands. They invested in all the traditional homebrewing equipment and created five or six pretty good beers. They had the most success, they said, with porters. As Budweiser ads point out, somewhat disingenuously, darker beers hide flaws more easily than very, very pale lagers like, for example, their own eponymous product. Sadly (for them), clarity is not probably the primary quality a true connoisseur seeks out in a beer. Since that time, Budweiser has begun to market its "drinkability," an unquantifiable quality if ever there was one, as its saving grace. But I guess it does appeal to those who like to drink enormous quantities at once. College seniors who spend as much time applying makeup as they do studying are sure to buy in. But I digress.

My friend took a job in another city, thus breaking up with his erstwhile housemate. Lomg-distance brewing relationships never work out. As one would expect, they split up their equipment. My friend walked away with three five-gallon carboys, two ale pails, a siphon and a hose, 24 22oz bottles, and 18 12oz ones. And an airlock.

When we both moved to Minneapolis this past summer, we resurrected the practice of brewing beer. We started slowly -- an amber ale in early August, and a Pale ale on the final weekend of the month. We wanted to taste our first product before we began our second one. We were all a-flutter as we opened the first bottle. We each took a great sip; we looked at the ceiling as we washed the amber ale around in our mouths; we smiled widely as said something to the effect of, "This is awesome," even as we silently acknowledged to ourselves that it was dramatically more sweet than we had planned. And much darker as well. It was like a doppelbach. No problem, though -- it could have been a fluke. We changed nothing about the process or the ingredients, and we brewed the pale ale right up. Same result.

We took the month of september almost entirely off. The Pale ale came of age, kind of, on the second weekend of the month, but one or the other of us was out of town on nearly every weekend besides. My friend had started teaching, and his time was more precious. I was playing sports and away at tournaments frequently. When my season ended, though, we got down to business in earnest. Two weeks shy of thanksgiving, we're drinking a porter we brewed toward the end of October, we have an IPA and a Pale ale conditioning in bottles, we've got an ESB and a bourbon-barrel porter in the secondary fermenter, and we just brewed a stout today.

My friend and his girlf -- oops, wife -- keep track of their lives, their ideas, their recipes, and so on by means of journals and notebooks. One of these books was called "The Everything Book"; its contents were pretty self-explanatory. But then one day, predictably, the book was lost. And the household was plunged into its own miniature dark age. So it would remain until the seventh son of a seventh son managed to return the ring of power to the mountain in which it was... wait, that's some combination of different stories.

Thus far, we've been keeping track of our vital brewing information in such a journal. But as we amass more knowledge; make more changes to processes, equipment, and ingredients; and brew more frequently; the amount we stand to lose continues to grow. We couldn't stand our own beer-making dark age. We argue about what we've done enough as it is even though we actually HAVE a written record; without it, we'd quickly become a one-man operation producing ales like "Dead Man Porter" or "Murderer's Row IPA." Plus, because we've been working with a pencil and paper, and writing in a 6x4-inch notebook is awkward and laborious, we've neglected to include any of the narratives surrounding the brewing process, and that's where the real gold is. Our journal, as it now stands, contains only the "necessary" facts. It does not chronicle the invention of planterball, the next great American sporting craze, nor does it include mention of our late-autumn pratfalls produced by our efforts to protect the boiling wort from falling leaves. And without that stuff, it's just a list of ingredient weights, specific gravity readings, the occasional historical reference (Obama wins--time to make an ESB for racist Republicans), and so on. And what, really, is the long-term cultural value in that?

Thank God for google and the digital space it affords lowly operations like ours. With a blog such as this one, no detail of our process need escape mention. No anecdote, however trivial, shall go unexplored. That, my friends, I promise to you.

By the way: I'm posting as Aaron Swoboda. But I'm Derek Gottlieb. Our writing styles, I'm certain, are fairly different. You'll be able to tell us apart; fear not.

Next time: the process of retroactively recording three months of brewing begins.