A Cold, Frosty Adult Beverage

My home brewing activities have finally borne fruit. I gave up on the ginger beer. I also gave up on the bread yeast. Good thing I nabbed some packets of wine yeast when I was in the US in February. Bread yeast just can't produce enough alcohol.

I am now making some relatively drinkable beer. Because everything in the Kingdom has to be approached in a bass-ackward manner, this is how you do it here.

0. Sterilize your 20 L bucket.

Yeah, it's a trashcan. Get over it.

1. Dissolve 3 kilos of white sugar in 6 L of bottled water.

2. Gently add two cases (48 cans) of non-alcoholic Holsten (available from the commissary bulk store--they even load it into your car for you!). Gently, grasshopper. Too much foam and you'll never get all 48 cans in your bucket.

3. Somewhere during all of the opening of the cans, get your wine yeast started. Add it partway through.

4. If you are lucky enough to have smuggled hops in, add those as you see fit.

5. Give everything a nice stir.

6. Place bucket in a warm, dark place. Wait a week or so.

7. On day 8 or so, sterilize 16 to 18 one-liter Rauch grape juice bottles. You never get 20 L of beer from 20 L of what's been fermenting. There will inevitably be spillage and you have to leave some of the precious liquid down there with the yeast sludge.

You need a starter set of bottles. Everyone on camp uses Rauch grape juice bottles (also available from the com bulk store). Notice their nice ceramic stoppers with rubber washers. The rubber washers wear out with time and are quite valuable. They are considered excellent hostess gifts for parties. I don't care for grape juice that much so I poured 24 liters of it down the drain. Someone told me to make whine. But what would I put it in? You have to start somewhere. Sloppy brewers rinse their bottles with sweet water. Careful brewers rinse with bleach. Wear old clothes.

8. Add 8 g (1.5 teaspoons) of white sugar to each bottle, then fill with beer. This step is rather more complicated and time-consuming than it appears at first glance. Spillage.

I got 16 L out of my first brew job.

9. Let it sit for at least 1 week. Two weeks is better. There is no headache quite so bad as the one you get from drinking too-young, too-sweet beer. Remember those 3 kilos of sugar? The yeast need plenty of time to eat it up. Patience, grasshopper.

10. Prior to serving, put one or two of those green bottles in the fridge for two hours. This turns the yeast at the bottom into a paste and makes it much easier to decant.

10. To serve, pop open the Rauch bottle (indeed, a nice, satisfying "pop" lets you know you have a good one), decant into a pitcher, and add two cans of non-alcoholic Holsten. What you've managed to brew up has an alcohol content that is rather too high to be drinkable as beer (could be as high as 18%!). You need to dilute it a bit. Enjoy!