Wisconsin in January: Home Brewing

Saturday night was Packer Mania night.  Wisconsin is Greenbay Packer football country, and the Packers were in the playoffs, pitted against the San Francisco 49ers.  Dave, Ann and I met up with Dave's brother  "Crow" and his wife Jennifer at a local bar that is a football hangout.  I was about the only one there not dressed in the obligatory green and yellow.  The game started out well for Greenbay, and the locals were going crazy.  However, the tempo soon changed.  The hot shot young quarterback for the 49ers soon started to run all over "us" and the bar crowd's mood turned glum.  Greenbay lost.

Not one to cry over spilt beer, Dave had a project for Sunday to lighten to mood.  We were going to make home-brew.  Now, Dave is a bit of a traditionalist.  He likes to do things the old fashion way.  In this case, that meant we would not use some fancy brew kit, but instead we would start with the raw ingredients.  So, with some hand shelled Indian corn from the garden, yellow corn from the feed store, and some rye and barley from a brew store we started our concoction.  First we had to hand grind the grains.  Dave has an antique coffee grinder that fit the bill.

Antique grinder.

Ground Indian corn, barley, dark rye and light rye.

With the ingredients ground and measured, we mixed them in a large pot (actually the pail portion of an old milking machine that Dave found at auction) and added enough water to create a mash.  The mash had to be heated to 145 degrees for about two hours for the carbohydrates in the grains to be converted to sugar.  See, there is real science going on here.  Dave has an antique wood fired cook stove, and so we had to use that to heat the mash.

Checking the temperature of the mash.

Keeping the heated mash stirred.

Grain mash.

Grain mixture in the mash.

After the proper period of heating, we strained the liquid from the mash and added the yeast.  Then we racked the mixture into a glass carboy for fermentation.

Separating the liquid wort from the grain mash.

Checking the sugar content of the wort.

Racking the wort into the glass carboy to be fermented.

Wort starting to ferment.

Over a period of five or six days the yeast consumes the sugar and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol.  The carbon dioxide is vented off through an air lock and the resulting liquid contains alcohol.  I think Dave has aspirations of further "processing" his mixture to create something called "product."  I can't swear what that is, but I did see a show on TV once where moonshiners created something called "product."

This project took most of the day, so now I know one more way that Wisconsinites pass the time away in the winter.  Hard to predict what Dave has up his sleeve next.