When I lived in Grand Rapids MI, the locals were always bragging
about being "Beer City." I was indifferent to beer at the time; I did
not like beer back then. I assumed “Beer City” was some lame marketing
campaign. Then I moved to Asheville , and the city is a beer cornucopia, with a
lot of buzz about being beer city. By that time, my tastes had changed and
I liked beer, so I was curious. I discovered numerous amazing breweries in
Asheville. My love for beer grew so much that I even learned to brew it myself.
And even though I had to use a sock in my first batch, it turned out
great. In my research, I learned that "beer city" happens
to be a moniker earned as a result of a contest. Asheville truly deserves the
title, as it has more microbreweries per capita than any other U.S. city. They
have over 100 local beers and microbreweries and the market continues to grow.
In 1978 U.S. President Jimmy
Carter signed a law allowing home brewing of beer and microbreweries.
This explains why, growing up in the 70s, the only beer in our house tasted
like raccoon urine. My dad would have made his own if he could have. It also
explains why American beer keeps getting better, as Americans learn to make
beer more like European style, which is dramatically better than ours. Crappy
American beers like Pabst, Miller, and Budweiser do not compare to German beer
or some of the great beers made in microbreweries in the USA. It's like
comparing the cheapest frozen pizza that tastes like Ragu on cardboard to Poppa
Johns. (Ok, I have never tasted raccoon
urine, I am making assumptions there.)
Thanks to the new law, Charlie Papazian's career exploded
like a bottle of fermented homebrew. In 1979 he founded the Association of Brewers and wrote the quintessential home brewing book. For several years, he ran a poll on USA today for
nominating the best beer city. The poll was based entirely on popular vote. Asheville
won more times than any other city, including a four year in a row run, at the
same time USA Today decided to stop running the contest. Grand Rapids also had
a few wins. Several other cities won through the decades that this poll ran,
including Portland, Fort Collins, Colorado, Tampa, and a long list of others.
Moving to Asheville reawakened and heightened my appreciation for beer. It was not too long before I decided to try making my own. It’s really not very complicated. You start by boiling hops in water, basically making a hop tea. Then you add malt. Cool it down and add yeast, and let it set for a few weeks. That's the basics. The first time I bought the raw ingredients to try this, I lost the little cheesecloth bag you put the hops in. The only thing I could find in my flat to use was a white sock. It was clean, honest. I tied up the hops in the sock (yes, it was a sock hop), and let it steep. The beer tasted great. It did not taste like feet at all. (Ok, I have never tasted feet at all. Nor have I eaten Ragu on cardboard, for the record.) The sock was too hot to wear afterward. Besides, my onychomycosis helped step up the yeast process a notch.
Making beer is actually fun and easy. If you buy a kit, it ends up
being about the same cost as buying a moderately priced beer. If you shop for
deals on hops and malt, you can actually make it for about twenty-five cents
per bottle, but it takes some serious effort to grab those deals and requires
buying ingredients in bulk.
Here is what the hops look like. They come in little pellets. I
know they look like rabbit turds but they are not. Rabbit turds make lousy
beer. The hops are processed into pellets and sold to homebrewers in this
fashion. I took a bite of one and they are intensely bitter. There are many
different species of hops with different intensities of bitterness and flavors.
The type and amount of hops you choose effect the flavor of the beer.
Here is malt; it is very sweet and tastes like malt. There are
also different flavors of malt that affect the flavor of the beer. The length
of time you cook the malt also affects the color of the beer.
Here, I was showing my sister and fiancé how to make beer. (My
fiancé and sister are two different people. I thought I should clarify since I
live in Kentucky.)
After boiling, you cool it down quickly with ice. This is called
"crashing".
When it's done, you put it into bottles and let it ferment a few
more days, before putting it in the fridge to stop fermenting. I have used
different kinds of bottles, including the type that you cap with a metal cap. I
prefer these old-fashioned bottles with the attached lid. These types of
bottles are a common way to buy beer in grocery stores in Germany
Making beer is fun, and so is drinking it, and so is going to the
microbreweries in Asheville. I have run way over on content now so I am going
to save my favorite Asheville microbreweries for the next post.