I’m drinking Strawberry Alice
A little more than a month ago I saw the Mr. Beer Premium Home Brew Kit on sale at Woot! for $20, about half what it typically sells for in stores when they pack the shelves with them around Christmas time. I’ve been curious for a while about home-brewing as a hobby so bought it on impulse without even really knowing what goes into beer making.
Mr. Beer makes brewing a fairly simple process by selling malt extracts chosen for their flavor profiles in the exact proportions you need to make beer in the 2 gallon fermenter that comes with the kit. There are plenty of flavors to choose from, lots of ways you can combine them, and you are free to add any other fermentable sugars or aromatics, or purchase different strains of yeast if you want to enhance the recipes. So it saves a lot of work, extracting sugars from gains, etc., but there is still plenty of room to be creative.
Anyway, I took the beer mix that came with the kit - the West Coast Pale Ale, and to make it interesting, I pureed three small jars of Strawberries and added it to the mix. If you add fruit, you are supposed to use pasteurized fruit from jars or cans to assure that you aren’t adding any foreign bacteria into the fermenter. It turns out that about 75% of the work that goes into making beer is sanitizing everything that comes into contact with your beer to prevent it from becoming a breeding ground for various non-tasty bacteria strains.
Sprinkle in the yeast that comes along with the mix, and stick the whole mess in a closet somewhere while the yeast colony converts the sugar into alcohol.
After about 10 days I gave it a taste - and it tasted like hot flat beer. That’s good, it means its done its initial fermentation. The next step is to carbonate the beer. This requires adding more sugar and sealing it into its final serving bottles to trap the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation. Here’s where it gets a little more complicated. I could have spooned table sugar into the 24oz plastic bottles that Mr. Beer came with…but the pros prefer corn sugar and beer drinkers in general prefer to have it served to them in a glass long neck.
So before my first beer, which I call Strawberry Alice, was ready for bottling, I made a trip to the homebrew store for some dextrose and some more bottling equipment, I picked up another Mr. Beer kit from a seller on Craigslist, and I ordered more beer ingredients from mrbeer.com. So my beer making operation has expanded somewhat and now looks something like this…
So after bottling Stawberry Alice (a process that involved collecting bottles from parties like a bag lady and the purchase of bottle-capper that cost as much as the entire Mr. Beer Kit), it sat in the closet for another two weeks. I took one out to cool it down and on the same day started my second brew.
This one has no fruit, but I did add brown sugar to the wort, and am adding hops (pictured below) to enhance the flavor.
So my second, as yet unnamed brew is bubbling in my bedroom closet, and Strawberry Alice is conditioning in the fridge. During the conditioning phase, the beer gains clarity and complexity as it ages in the refrigerator, but of course I took one out to try it as soon as it was cold.
And its good. It’s light and very drinkable with a gentle fruit flavor and most importantly - bubbles, which was the part I worried about most. The flavor ought to improve over the next few months so it ought to make a great summer beverage.
So you should come by for a cold one this summer because there isn’t going to be any shortage of beer in my fridge. I’m honestly more interested in making it than in drinking it in large quantities. Does anyone out there have an excess of meat? Maybe we should plan a barbecue.