Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

Thanks to all who participated in the beer naming contest of a couple posts ago. Mike and I decided to go with "Hauerwas Hefeweizen" because of the delightful alliteration and the fact that Stan is a theologian that we're both quite fond of. So, congratulations, Ben. Runners up for the name include "The Vicious Chewbacca Defense Brown Ale" from Jana (that's the one that made us laugh the hardest, and if we ever brew a brown ale, we'll know what to call it). Also, Phil's "Bork and Buma's Ineluctable Modality" wins the prize for the most pretentious, and potentially delicious sounding of all the names. A late entry from Adam Petty was pretty good too: "The Beer Than Which No Greater Beer Can Be Conceived." Deliciously Anselmian.

Brewing day started off with a hunt around town for a live yeast culture. Yeast is fundamental to good beer - it can affect the taste more than the grains or the hops. The kit I ordered included a packet of dry yeast, which works well, but live yeast works much better, and makes the taste much more complex and savory. I had called around London for a few days to try and find some live yeast, but none of the 15 or so "brew-yer-own" type places had any live yeast for sale. The last place I called did have some available, and he said he'd give it to us for just over 7 bucks. We figured he'd have a diverse array of yeasts from several different companies. Instead, he handed us a sack full of beige goop, claiming that it was yeast he got from the folks at Sleeman's because of his "connections." Indeed, it smelled like yeast, and we took him on his word that it would help us ferment some wonderful ale. He also warned us that this was an especially potent yeast - we were not to seal the lid on our primary fermenter, lest the animal virility of the yeast cause the bucket to burst at the seems. (As it turns out, his yeast wasn't as strengthy as he claimed. Maybe bragging about yeast is just a brewer's way of asserting masculine dominance - sort of like how King Kong thumps his chest).

After purchasing a few gallons of distilled water, and a brief discussion of Reformed Epistemology, Mike and I got down to business. The first step in making beer is to steep the grains. The process is sorta like making a 2 gallon pot of tea - basically one cooks grains in a cheesecloth for about a half an hour at 155 degrees (by Fahrenheit reckoning). A higher temperature will cause the grains to release some less-than-tasty flavors, so one needs to be careful to monitor the temperature.

After steeping the grains, one needs to add the malt. The malt for this kit came in two states - one was a goopy mixture that looked and tasted a little like honey, and the other was powered, like sugar. The purpose of Malt in beer is to provide food for the yeast to eat, and help it produce alcohol.
If one were to stop cooking the beer at this point, and add the yeast, one would get a really sickly sweet beer. In order to ward this off, one adds hops to the kettle. There are basically two kinds of hops: aroma hops and bittering hops. The more hops one adds, the more bitter the beer will taste. For instance, India Pale Ales are just about as hoppy as beer gets - drink a bottle, and you'll know exactly what I mean. Since the hefeweizen is not a particularly bitter beer, we only cooked bittering hops in this particular batch.
Once the hops have boiled in the kettle for about an hour or so, the beer is ready for the yeast. Yeast can't survive in a temperature over 80 fahrenheit, so one needs to cool the mixture (known as "wort") as fast as possible. The reason the wort needs to be cooled rapidly is that the longer the wort sits below boiling, the greater chance there is for contamination from bacteria. If unwanted bacteria makes it into the wort, the yeast will feed off of it and produce some really bad flavors.
The fastest way to chill the mixture is to use a "wort chiller," which is basically a spiral of copper tubing through which one runs cold water. We couldn't afford one of these, so we employed a much simpler apparatus - a sink full of ice. This actually cooled the wort really fast - it only took about 25 minutes to cool it from 90 degrees celsius to 30 degrees.
Once the beer was chilled, we poured the wort into the primary fermenter, and added the yeast.

We stepped back and gazed at our creation, anticipating the tasty joy it would soon bring to our lips.

Here are some more pictures. Enjoy:










Joel, laughing at one of his own jokes.









Beer brewing is an excercise that demands the utmost precision and care. Note the high-tech equipment used to measure yeast. Also, note the resemblence the yeast has to cat-sick.









Mike blows Joel's mind with a brief explication of his hockey-themed dissertation. Most intellecutally astounding of all of Mike's comments was the decidedly-Derridean declaration that: "Il n'y a pas rien dehors de la patinoire."









Though it may be falsely attributed, Churchill is reported to have said that the only traditions of the Royal Navy were "rum, sodomy and the lash." Regardless, we discovered that the essential soundtrack for brewing beer is the Pogues album of the same name.









Steady as she goes, cap'n!