Several years ago now, Mom gave me a beer making kit called Mr. Beer. I wound up making some beer and then helping Mom and Jeb make beer with generally acceptable results. After a not so great batch I realized I would rather have someone else make the beer. I think you can get better results by going full home brew, but there is a fairly large initial investment involved (at least $500) and you make 5 gallons at a time which is probably more beer than I drink in a year. Plus if you screw up 5 gallons of beer, that’s a lot of money to throw away (about $50). Mr. Beer takes a major shortcut by providing the malt extract and hops so that all you have to do is heat it up and add water and yeast, which takes no technical proficiency.
Ultimately I was willing to leave beer making to the experts (though it was fun going on brewery tours where they often ask if anyone has made beer before and I would get to raise my hand) and enjoy the variety and quality that professional brewers provide. But Mr. Beer started sending me emails again recently and then they went and had a Buy One Get One free sale on beer mixes with free shipping on orders over $30. So I bought four cans of beer syrup, and therefore must make 4 2.5 gallon batches of beer.
I know the house is too hot in the summer to make beer, but thought maybe I could get one batch in. Reading further however, temperature control is critical and just because the house is 70 degrees, the brew, with all the yeasts doing their thing, can get a few degrees hotter, so it is best not to try that. There are ways around it and some people use heating and cooling equipment to keep the temperature just right, but that is more than I want to get into. If I am going to start buying a lot of equipment I probably just need to do a homebrew setup (you can often find barely used homebrew kits cheap when someone thought they wanted to try it and gave up).
The Germans had the same problems and would only make beer from October to March, drinking the last beer of the previous season, a brew called Marzen for the month of March, at a big festival in Oktober just before beer of the new season became available. Then refrigeration was invented and now they drink any kind of beer any month they want. Without my own refrigeration equipment, even though I have some beer kits on the way, it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing anything until October or November. But I do have some Marzen in the fridge.
Got the beer kits in the mail yesterday. They don’t expire until September 2021 so that gives me two winters to brew 4 batches. The kits include “booster” which is a powdered corn sugar that increases the alcohol content of the beer. Two packets each are supposed to raise the alcohol content by 1.3%, getting it to 5%. I may only use one packet and then add some dark malt which will add flavor and alcohol. Plus I am going to add more hops since that turned out well on Jeb’s batch.
I read today that yeast should be refrigerated, so I will take the yeast packets that came with the beer kits and put them in the fridge.