With winter getting a little long we were getting a little cabin fever and need of a new challenge. What better thing to do than make some homebrew. Befoe you get any wrong ideas, we assure we won't drink the finished product all in one night!!Brewing beer is a multitask operation so we'll take you through the steps.

Our friend Jon had done it before and had a lot of things we need to get started. So he gave us a list and we headed off to the store in an attempt to procure the necessary ingredients. Needless to say we were lost on the finer points of yeasts and cascade pellets, and malts and the like. So we opted for the easy version. The prepackaged pack that comes with all the ingredients. Our difficult choices were limited to Irish ale, dark stout, fine pilsner and the like. Much more understandable. We decided on the Pale red ale.

We brought the pack over to Jon's and after enjoying a fine brew, not our own, we decided that we were indeed ready to best the commerical labels. We unpacked our handy pack and got down to business. The first step is to mix the batch and let it set for about 1 week. So we set to opening cans of malt, getting out the largest pan we could find, and washing the container the brew would sit in for that first week. Then we got it all properly mixed and had the mixture simmer on the stove for about an hour. Luckily it only boiled over once, making a rather sticky mess. The most impressionable memory of the night has to be the large amount of pretty much pure sugar that goes into beer. Definitely a sticky mess.

After letting the beer sit for a week (not exactly sure what the scientific reasoning is behind that) Jon took on the responsibility of cleaning out the 55 bottles our batch would fill, and used his handy dandy dispenser to fill each bottle with just enough of the now getting closer to beer product. In what is the most rewarding part of the entire process he also used the coolest invention ever to attach new a new lid to each bottle.

Well, that wraps up the process to this point. As you can tell we have not gotten to the most rewarding point of the process yet; the taste testing!! After the tops are properly attached it takes another month of sitting in the basement before the batch is ready. Ours is due to be ready next month. Check back for pictures and full review of the finished product then.