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After filling my keg for the first time last year, I swore I'd never bottle beer again. Filling the keg is as simple as siphoning from the fermentation vessel into the sanitized keg. It's one easy process. Carbonating the keg is as simple as connecting the CO2 tank and opening the valve to the desired pressure, then waiting a day or two.

Contrast that with filling bottles. You need to clean and sanitize dozens of bottles. Boil two cups of water and add an amount of sugar to that, then cool it and dump it into the bottling bucket. Siphon the beer into the bottling bucket, then attach the bottling wand onto the bucket's spout. Fill each of the dozens of bottles, and then cap them. Then wait a week or more before natural carbonation completes.

Bottling is a laborious, time intensive process. It's also been a pretty messy one for me, with no small quantity of beer spilled over the sides of the bottles and onto the floor. Cleaning up after bottling takes almost as long as the actual process of bottling itself.

Unfortunately, sharing kegged beer with coworkers and friends can be a little tricky. My friend Adam purchased for me the Blichmann Beer Gun, which allows me to fill bottles from my keg. This is a great option for sharing small quantities of kegged beer; but there are still times when kegging beer is not the best option. For example, I recently brewed a barley wine which is supposed to bottle condition for several months. I don't want to dedicate one of my kegs to this purpose for several months, and I'm not sure I'll want to drink the 5 gallons of barley wine with any regularity, so bottling it makes more sense.

Since I got my first keg, I've bottled just a couple of batches. I've taken steps to make it an easier process, like investing in liter bottles with flip-top (Grolsch-style) caps. I've also acquired a couple of half-gallon growlers. These mean less bottles to sanitize and fill. The avoidance of capping is also a tremendous time saver. But it's still a pain to bottle.

I recently moved into a new house. One of the amenities of this new house is a dishwasher. I've only ever lived in one residence with a dish washer before. That was the first house I bought, in which I lived for only three or four years. I'd read on various "how to brew" discussions that one can use a dishwasher to clean and sanitize bottles prior to filling them. I decided to try this technique with my barley wine, in order to save time.

While researching the process, to ensure I did it right, I found another little time-saving tidbit: fill the bottles over the open door of the dishwasher. Brilliant! Any spillage that occurs would simply land on the dishwasher door, which is supremely easy to clean. Armed with this new knowledge, I approached my bottling task with renewed enthusiasm.

For various reasons, I was unable to actually start the dishwasher to clean and sanitize the bottles until close to midnight. The cycle ran, and finished up much later than I expected. I prepared the priming sugar, and sanitized the bottling bucket, auto-siphon, and bottling wand. I racked the beer from my Better Bottle carboy into the bottling bucket, and placed this above the open dishwasher door. I simply removed one bottle at a time from the dishwasher rack, filled it, placed a cap on top of the bottle (I used regular 12 ounce bottles, not my flip-top liter bottles) and then placed it on the kitchen counter, next to the bottling bucket. I filled and prepared six bottles at a time, then affixed the caps to these bottles with the capper, and placed the bottles in six pack carriers.

The entire process was smooth, save for one brief moment when the bottling wand came off of the bucket's spout. With the spout in the fully open position, beer began to pour out onto the dishwasher door. I closed the spout, firmly reattached the bottling wand, and resumed work. The total amount of beer spilled -- from the opened spout as well as over-filled bottles and drippings -- ended up being negligible. Cleanup was quick, thanks to the dishwasher! I completed the whole process just shy of 3 AM, which was much later than I would have liked, but I really can't complain about the process.

Given the time-saving power of modern technology, I expect I'll bottle more beers in the future.

I found a homebrew recipe for Stone Arrogant Bastard, and thought I'd try my hand at brewing it. I like Stone's beers a lot, and the Arrogant Bastard is probably one of my favorites. To be able to replicate it on my own would be no small personal accomplishment.

I happily took the list of ingredients to Gentiles, my preferred local homebrew supplier. Alas, I was informed by the clerk that their ingredient selection was pretty slim, as there had recently been a larger-than-normal interest in homebrewing. Gentiles didn't have any of the Chinook hops called for in the recipe, only half the required 2 Row Pale Malt, and none of the CaraMunich.

I waffled for a bit whether to throw in the towel, or whether to try to alter the recipe based on what was in stock. After some deliberation, I finally settled on the latter, thinking that this was a good opportunity to learn a little more about the complex interactions of malts, hops, and yeast. Rather than recreating Stone Arrogant Bastard, I would create a beer "in the style of" Stone Arrogant Bastard.

I replaced Chinook hops with Galena, since they're close to the same alpha percentage. I used seven pounds of 2 Row Pale Malt, and six pounds of Pale Ale Malt. In place of the pound of CaraMunich malt, I used a pound of Crystal 40L. I also bumped up the Aromatic Malt to a full two pounds, since that malt was only sold in one pound packages.

I'm sure this will dramatically alter the flavor of the beer, but that's okay. This will be my beer, as opposed to Stone's beer. I'm not sure what to expect, flavor-wise, so this will be a good learning experience. As long as it doesn't completely suck, I'll be happy!

The mash and brew process was largely uneventful. I had a little boilover at the start of my boil, but that was quickly remedied and the remainder of the boil went smoothly.

In a couple of weeks Elevator Brewery will be hosting a "collaborative brew". They supply the wort, and homebrewers bring their gear to brew on-premise. The recipe they're making is Poor Richard's Ale, which looks pretty good. I'm hoping to get in on that.

I still have a German Super Alt fermenting -- I just racked it to the secondary yesterday -- so is looks like I'll have a number of beers going at once here. When these all settle down, I hope to try to brew a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA recipe or a Bell's Two Hearted recipe.

My breakfast stout was perfectly quaffable, but not particularly noteworthy. It was low alcohol, and much more cloudy than I would have liked. Otherwise, it was a fine brew. I realized with the breakfast stout that while kegging is much less trouble than bottling, kegged beer is harder to share with friends.

I've learned that one coworker, and two of the students in my department, are into home brewing. Another coworker doesn't home brew but is very interested in sampling my creations. Transferring beer from my keg into a bottle or growler can be done, but the bottled beer will pretty quickly go flat. For that reason, I'm likely to start bottling beer again, despite my previous statements that I didn't ever want to bottle again. To make the bottling process more streamlined, I invested in a couple growlers and one-liter bottles, in order to minimize the number of containers I need to fill.

While buying the new bottles, I also picked up a Better Bottle, to use in place of a glass carboy for the secondary fermentation stage. The Better Bottle is "made from a special, scientifically tested, polyethylene terephthalate copolymer (PET), which does not have all the disadvantages of other plastics." It is, obviously, a lot lighter than a glass carboy, which makes handling it a lot easier to do.

I brewed an English pale ale with my buddy Andy recently. This was the first all-grain batch I'd brewed of my own (I'd previously only ever watched Tom do an all-grain brew). The brewing process itself was rather unremarkable, and I think I got a decent enough efficiency from the sparging process. Aside from doing an all-grain as opposed to an extract brew, the only other change in process was that I whisked the wort as it transferred from the brew kettle into the primary fermentation bucket, in order to better aerate it. This isn't something I'd ever done before.

As usual, the beer sat in the primary bucket for about a week. It was fermenting pretty vigorously at first, and the airlock was still bubbling at day eight, but I decided to rack it into the secondary anyway -- mostly because I was eager to put the Better Bottle to work. Here's where my process substantially changed from my past brews. I had set the primary bucket atop a workbench in my basement as soon as the brewing was finished, and I left it there for the racking process. With past brews, I foolishly lugged the primary upstairs, agitating it and causing a lot of the sediment to rise up and float around. This sediment was then transferred through the siphon into the secondary, which partly explains why my beers have been so cloudy. With this pale ale, there was little to disturb the trub at the bottom of the primary, and the beer I racked into the Better Bottle was remarkably clear.

The full Better Bottle weighs about as much as an empty glass carboy. I placed the full Better Bottle atop the workbench in the basement, and I plan to leave it there for the bottling process in two weeks. I'm extremely optimistic about this pale ale: it smells great, it looks super clear, and it should be one of the better batches I've ever brewed.

I need to invest in some all-grain equipment, so that I can transition into more all-gran brewing. Much of the equipment I need I can make myself: a mash / lauter tun can be made from a picnic cooler and some copper pipe. What I'd really like, though, is a fancy conical fermenter to completely do away with racking to a secondary. :)

I bottled my third batch of beer last Sunday, and brewed my fourth batch of beer on Wednesday.

The third batch was a smoked porter, the kit for which I obtained from The Winemaker's Shop. As with the previous two batches, my friend Andy helped me brew. We made a few small changes in our brewing process for this one. Most notably, we elected to use distilled water, rather than tap water, when boiling the wort. This likely won't have a very big effect on the flavor, and was mostly done from a "why not?" attitude. The other major change to our process was the addition of a digital thermometer. For the prior two batches, we'd been winging it with respect to temperature as we cooled the wort before pitching the yeast. The first time, we cooled it too much, and the yeast took longer to ferment the beer. The second time we simply got lucky. For the porter, though, we carefully monitored the wort as we chilled it, and made sure that we didn't pitch the yeast until we were within the 70-75 degree range.

The bottling process was tedious, as usual, but working on it with a partner makes the whole thing much smoother, and far more entertaining. Andy and I laughed and giggled almost the whole time. I can't imagine bottling alone.

On Wednesday I brewed my fourth batch of beer, the Northern Brewer Single Hopped Best Bitters. Brewing the SHB2 was not particularly different from any of the other brews I've done. The big difference is that the kit included dry malt extract, rather than liquid. This was my first experience with DME. I found it to be slightly easier to deal with than LME, and plan to look for more DME kits in the future. (I'm not interested in stepping up to all-grain brewing yet, thanks.)

This batch is specifically intended to be kegged, rather than bottled. My sister and dad pitched in and got me a keg, CO2 canister, regulator, and associated hoses and couplings, so that I can enter the wonderful world of kegged beer. I wanted to brew this batch as quickly as possible so that it would be ready for consumption in time for the upcoming Habari Party.

My buddy Chris came over to lend moral support as I brewed the SHB2. He's a homebrewer himself, and has only ever kegged his beer. I picked his brain about his kegging and carbonation strategies, and learned a few good tricks: connect the CO2 to the beer out line to force carbonate faster: the beer out line goes down to the bottom keg, forcing the CO2 to rise up through the entire volume of beer. When carbonation is complete, remove the CO2 line from the beer out line and connect it to the gas in line as normal to maintain pressure. Neat!

I shared with Chris the secret of my wort chiller, which is nothing more than 50' of coiled copper tubing, some reinforced plastic hose, and a coupler to connect the hose to my shower head. One can spend a pretty penny on a commercial wort chiller, which will no doubt look nicer; but my D-I-Y chiller costs less and is every bit as functional. When my boil is done, I move the brewpot to my bathroom, connect it to the shower, and run cold water through it. It dumps directly into the bathtub. It takes about 30 minutes to bring the wort temperature down to a range suitable for pitching yeast (I'm usually impatient at this step, and pitch the yeast when the wort is still a wee bit hot.) The next time I brew, though, I'm going to immerse the brewpot into a cooler filled with ice water, and then use the wort chiller, in an effort to cool the wort as quickly as possible.

It's always an interesting experience to talk process with other homebrewers. The focus of our various interests are all over the map. Tom homebrews, and he seems to take particular interest in the science of brewing. He takes meticulous notes, and works to minimize variations in his process, so that he can have a repeatable, reproducible brew should he strike upon a recipe that he really enjoys. He's also moving more toward all-grain brewing because he enjoys the process much more. I'm far less interested in the science, and not overly concerned about reproducible recipes. I'm in this purely for the result: beer! I enjoy drinking beer, and it's fun for me to know that I created the beer I'm drinking. As Chris watched me brew, he declared that I was way more "loosey goosey" with my process than he was (particularly when I declared "Yeah, that looks like a boil to me. Toss in the hops!") Ironically enough, Chris admits that he's loosey goosey when it comes to carbonating his beer: the gauge on his CO2 regulator was broken when it arrived, so he's always just guessed at how much pressure to use. "That's too much, that's too little" he said, as he pantomimed fiddling with a dial.

Adam recently pointed me toward The Scioto, Olentangy and Darby Zymurgists. I may try to get involved with them, but I worry that they'll be overly focused on process, and science, and the fun I get from homebrewing will be absent.

My porter will be ready to drink on Sunday, August 29. My SHB2 should be ready to drink on Friday, September 11. If you'd like to taste the former, let me know. If you'd like to partake of the latter, keep an eye on the Habari Party details.

It's no secret that I like beer. I've been a beer snob for almost as long as I've been a beer drinker. I enjoy the flavor of good beer, and drink it specifically for this reason. Never in my life have I consumed an alcoholic beverage with the express intent of enjoying the effects it provides. I don't drink to get drunk; nor to get a buzz. I drink because I like the taste of a good beer.

I never had much interest (or opportunity) to drink beer before I was of the legal age to do so, which may account somewhat for some of my tastes. I drank a little bit of Natural Lite in college, and a fair amount of Rolling Rock and Miller Genuine Draft, before I discovered Samuel Adams Boston Lager. This quickly became my de facto beer, because it actually tasted good, unlike the swill I had been drinking before. Throughout college I continued to explore additional craft beers, and took a liking to many of them. It was an expensive proposition for a poor college student, but I felt it was worth it.

A couple years ago Tom tried his hand at homebrewing his own beer. I watched from afar as Tom got more and more into the process, and I thoroughly enjoyed the fruits of his labor. I was somewhat intimidated by the process, but helping Tom brew a couple of batches gave me enough experience that I was finally motivated to try it for myself.

Tom recommended How to Brew by John Palmer, which I studied. I discussed technique and style with my friend (and now neighbor) Adam, who also homebrews. I've since met a handful of other folks who also homebrew, and have picked their brains to varying degrees.

I went in with my buddy Andy, who also wanted to start homebrewing, and bought all the necessary equipment from The Wine Maker's Shop. Last month we met at my house and brewed our first batch. We selected a simple IPA, and followed the kit instructions fairly carefully. It was our very first time, so we made a few mistakes, and weren't quite as thorough as we should have been. We were confident, though, that we had managed to avoid infecting the wort so we weren't overly worried about any of the mistakes we made. The biggest problem we had was that we chilled the wort too much before pitching the yeast, which meant the yeast took a lot longer to activate than normal. As we put the lid and the airlock on the fermenting bucket, we congratulated ourselves on a relatively successful first batch of beer, and prepared ourselves for the tormenting wait until the beer would be ready to drink.

Andy came over two weeks later to help me rack the beer from the primary into the secondary fermenter. We struggled with the siphoning process for a bit, but finally transferred our beer into the carboy. Two weeks after that Andy came back to help me bottle. Of all the stages in our process, this was the most fun; probably because Andy's wife Beth, as well as Adam and his wife Julie, also joined us. The mood was silly, and the bottling process was sloppy, but we all had a great time. At the same time that we were bottling, we were brewing our second batch (another IPA). We were a little more thorough with the directions this time, and made a few modest adjustments to our process. The end result was a wort that smelled much richer than our first attempt. Needless to say, we're even more excited about our second batch than we were our first.

Once bottled, the beer is supposed to sit ten to fourteen days in order to "bottle condition". During this time sugar added before bottling carbonates the beer, and completes the flavoring. Andy just couldn't wait, and cracked one of his beers after a week. I waited until the tenth day before succumbing to curiosity.

The carbonation process wasn't quite complete, and although the beer wasn't entirely flat, it was duller than I prefer. The flavor is light -- much lighter than I had expected for an IPA. There's not much hoppiness to it, but it's not at all an unpleasant beverage. All in all, I think it's a roaring success for a first time brew!

Andy and I are both looking forward to gaining sufficient experience and comfort with the process of homebrewing that we can veer away from kit beers and explore more sophisticated recipes. We learned a lot just in the short time between our first and second batches. For example, the kit instructions tell you to boil 3 gallons of water for the extract, and to add 2 gallons of plain water to the wort in the primary fermentation bucket. This, I think, accounts for the lighter flavor of our first batch: we basically watered the whole thing down before ever getting started! For our second batch, we boiled all five gallons with the extract, and needed to top off the primary fermentation bucket with just a little bit of water to make up for what had boiled off. This should produce a much richer flavored beer. Also, we learned that an autosiphon is truly a wonderful device, and well worth the money.

While our first batch of beer was fermenting, Tom and I attended Beer Wars, a documentary about the craft brewing market. It was an interesting examination of the fundamental differences between craft brewers and the major beer labels in the U.S. It was a highly motivating film, and I left really wanting to brew more beer, as well as to continue to purchase quality beers from passionate brewers. If you haven't seen the film, you should.

If you have a beer recipe, do please share it. If you want to join me to brew some beer some time, let me know. Or, if you just want to drink my beer, let me know that, too! ;)