WE DRANK OUR BEER!

Yesterday was the day we had been anxiously awaiting. We put ONE of our beers in the frige and tasted a cold one---and it was great! We were so blown away that we had actually made beer that was fizzy and yummy. Then of course we put a few more beers in the frige to have with our excellent dinner.


It's never been so satisfying to have a beer, as when we made it ourselves. This beer has been like a child. See it taking it's first steps in the carboy:


I think you can really see the pride in this next picture:


It was hard work making sure we drank enough beer to have bottles for OUR beer:


It was fun putting the caps on the bottles:


Our friend Ricky came over to try it and he agreed that it was GOOD!


At my last herbalism class my teacher informed that the full moon coming up on September 26th will be the "Vine Moon", sacred to Dionysis, and a particulary auspicious time for making alcoholic beverages, especially those containing blackberries.

I don't know where to go to get a ton of blackberries, although I know they are around here somewhere, but nonetheless, beer is an alcoholic beverage, and WE WILL MAKE MORE BEER!

A New Beer Begins

Inspired by the book, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation by Stephen Harrod Buhner, my bro Sam and I decided to try some brewing of our own.

The herbal beer book talks about several fermented brews sacred to indigenous peoples, as well as the history of beer and how many an herb other than hops has been made into beer. It includes tons of cool quotes and recipes from way back in the day, like the 1600s.

Being in an herbalism class I was quite excited to see that one can make ales from my herb friends like elecampagne, St. John's wort, coriander, clary sage, yarrow, borage, etc. One can even make a psychotropic ale of saffron, molasses, brown sugar, water, and yeast. How interesting. (What's the cost of half an ounce of saffron though? Pricey, eh?)

To start off we figured we should probably just get the equipment and make some standard beer from a pre-packaged mix to get the gist of the process, before we add coming up with a pound or what have of you of some fresh flowering magical herb to the list of things to figure out.

We got the kit and the mix at San Francisco BrewCraft, which was really great because they actually had the herbal beer book in stock, AND the guy that was helping us out happened to be the guy that LOVED that book. He also told us about the success they had making a lavender beer. That's good to know! Conveniently and fortuitously for me, I work part time at a lavender farm. Lavender beer is definately on the agenda for the near future. I've got 7 pounds of dry culinary grade lavender just waiting to be fermented into a real good time! (We probably don't need near that much.)

Making the beer last night was really fun, although we started kinda late and I had to give up and go to bed before we were done boiling our wort with the malt and hops. Sam had to stay up and finish it off without me. I didn't get to be there for pouring the liquid over the yeast into the fermenter, but I was most likely there in spirit. I'm so excited about our beer. We are making an IPA.

The beer is alive! This pic is of the fermenter under Sam's bed. He can hear it gurgle underneath him. It's like his little baby beer:



The beer is going to hang out here in this fermenter for about 6 days and then it gets to hang out in a huge glass jar thing called a carboy to ferment some more until it is no longer cloudy (?) and then we get to put it in bottles and 10 days after that we get to drink it. Woo hoo! Maybe I will even make some beer bread with my very own beer.