Start-Up Operation
The proliferation of cooking shows on cable has certainly helped inspire people to eschew processed, store-bought foods for homemade. It’s also demystified basic skills like baking, pickling and organic gardening that, for generations raised on the idea of convenience over quality, were lost arts. While the idea of whipping up a Thai curry at home 10 or 15 years ago may have seemed “out-there,” today it’s no more unreasonable than, say, brewing a batch of pale ale. Homebrewing is just another activity—that, granted, requires some precision—we can do in our kitchens. “Cooking is a pretty good analogy for brewing,” Robinson says. “It’s a little more than just putting on some water and making mac and cheese, but if you’re able to follow a few steps in a recipe and just pay attention to what’s going on, it’s just like cooking.”
There are actually a lot of similarities between baking bread and brewing beer. They share three common ingredients—grains, yeast and water—and require precision in the execution of the multiple steps in order to achieve the best results. Sure, you’ll be able to enjoy a slice of warm bread after just a few hours, while the fermentation of homebrewed beer takes at least a couple weeks, but both are solely dependent on the proper functioning of the yeast in order to produce something that’s edible or drinkable. Or as Perman puts it, “The yeast make the beer.”
Despite the similarities between the two, baking bread initially seems like a less difficult activity. Mustering the nerve to dip your toes into the homebrewing water may, in fact, be the biggest challenge you’ll face. And sometimes a little help from friends can provide the necessary nudge that will get you started. “My husband and I received a homebrew kit as a wedding gift in May 2010,” Jessica Murphy, a 31-year-old human resources specialist for the federal government explains. “We kind of stared at it for a few months not really knowing what to do and then one day we decided to just brew it. The experience afforded me this extra knowledge about beer and I was hooked.”
There is, of course, a learning curve when you undertake any new hobby or endeavor. But it need not to be too intimidating. “If you buy a homebrew starter kit, it’s not hard at all,” Perman assures us. “As long as you’re diligent with your sanitizing and you know how to follow basic instructions, it’s very straight forward.”
“For beginners, you can start out with a regular pasta pot, some malt extract, some water and some hops and you’re pretty much on your way to making beer,” Robinson says. “There are ways to make it more complicated, but to start off it’s really simple.”
For those who become enchanted by the magic of the homebrewing process—from so few ingredients comes such a wonderful product—“making it more complicated” offers the opportunity to expand your skills and experiment. “We started learning from [malt] extracts,” Tofte says, “and the next thing you know, someone taught me all-grain brewing. We started brewing once a week, making a mess, ruining the carpet, learning our lessons. It slowly turned into a passion, as it does for most people.”
