Home Brew!

Finally, after years of wanting to try it, your Ham Sandwich, along with two of her partners-in-crime--P and L--jumped on the homebrew-making bandwagon. Above, we proudly present our ESB Pale Ale: Extra Sassy Bitches Edition. It has a rich amber-red color and is made with crystal malt and Target hops in the tea, and dry hopped with Kent Gold. We purchased our ingredients, based on a previously tried recipe, at the Winemaker's Shop, run by the super-friendly and always knowledgeable Scott Francis & Nina Hawranick.

Thankfully, I was working with some experienced beer makers--P had made beer in the past with her husband, and L was a former quality control engineer for Anheuser-Busch. My beer experience has been limited to drinking it and slinging it. I failed to take pictures of the first several steps--boiling the tea (malt, water, malt extract, hops, some maple syrup), and the initial fermentation, but did get it together to get some pictures of the latter half of the process. Above is the carboy shortly before bottling. What you see floating on the top are the Kent Gold hops we put in during the 'dry hop' phase--it's when you add the hops after the fermentation phase, and allows for the addition of aromatic oils that are lost when hops are boiled in the first phase of brewing. Basically, it makes your beer extra delicious.

After about of 10 days after we added the dry hops, we were ready to bottle. P had been saving bottles for a few weeks (So we drink a lot of beer...don't judge us!), and had them sanitized and ready to go on bottling night.

We siphoned the beer from the carboy to a sanitized plastic bucket:

And then siponed the beer from the bucket into the individual bottles, using some tubing with a handy little spring-loaded filler tip at the bottom:

We then capped the bottles,

And packaged our product:

From five gallons of beer we ended up with (if I'm remembering correctly) forty or so 12oz bottles and two 22oz bottles. After waiting very patiently for several weeks, we finally cracked open a bottle this past weekend. And holy crap, it was delicious! There are few things more deeply satisfying then spending over a month on creating something, hoping that all the elements line up, and impurities and bacteria stay out, and then, when you finally try it, not only is it drinkable, but it's really, really, good. Craft brew stardom, here we come!

Cheers and Merry Christmas from the Extra Sassy Bitches crew!