nerdhouse brews

So the latest venture Colton and I have embarked on is home brewing our own beer. This is something we have talked about doing for a while and with the first talks of Corona sprouting up, we got to thinking about our bucket lists. What are the things we really want to do before we die? Oh also, what’s something we can do while we’re stuck at home for a while? Even though we had no idea the shelter-in-place order was going to go into effect or last this long, our home brew starter kit was delivered on the very first day we both stayed home from school and work, which is kinda cool. 

We ordered a basic starter kit from Northern Brewers because Colton really liked watching their YouTube videos. The kit came with all of the equipment we would need, plus a recipe kit that included all the ingredients and instructions for our first brew. We chose an amber ale, because it seemed like a happy medium between Colton’s favorite dark beers and my favorite light ones.

Our kit arrived on that Monday morning and we unboxed everything and read over instructions. Colton had to go to work that afternoon, so I stayed home and cleaned up the kitchen and dining room areas so we could work. Colton got home, we ate dinner, then embarked on our first brew day around 7 p.m. We followed all the steps of boiling, steeping grains, adding malt extract and hops, boiling some more, cooling down, sanitizing, testing, and fermenting. All in all, our first brew day took us 3 hours. We put the beer in a cool, dark closet around 10 p.m. that night.

We were already wanting to get creative, so a week later, we checked on our beer and decided to add peaches to give it an extra flavor. This was not part of the recipe, but we wanted to try it. The beer was foamy and gross-looking on top, but it smelled like beer already. Then we let it keep fermenting for another week until bottling day, which we started one morning around 9:30 or so.

On bottling day, you siphon the beer out of the fermenting bucket into a different bucket, leaving behind all the sediment at the bottom. Then you siphon it out of that bucket into the individual bottles. You crimp the caps on the bottles and set them back in the cool, dark place to ferment another two weeks. All in all, bottling day took about 2 hours, ending at 11:30. At this point, there is already alcohol in the beer and you can even test the ABV (ours was 4.46%), but it is extremely flat and not ready to drink. The second round of fermentation is when the carbonation happens.

After a solid month of waiting and holding onto this secret, we finally had beer ready to drink! We put some in the fridge and tasted it and it tasted like actual beer. It was fizzy and delicious with the teeny tiniest hint of peach (next time we’ll know to add more). We ended up with 45 bottles in our first batch.

And now that we have all of the equipment, we just need to buy the recipe kits from now on which are significantly cheaper. In fact, we’ve already started our next brew which is a stout to accommodate Colton’s tastes. 

This little venture has been so fun to do together. We are doing our research and figuring it out and spending lots of time together. We have been trying other craft beers while ours is fermenting to try to understand the flavor profiles so one day we can make our own recipes. With my creative background, I’ve even been playing with logos and bottle labels and oh yeah, we have an instagram account @nerdhousebrews.

For now, this is just a fun hobby for us to explore while we’re stuck at home together, but Colton is about to get his business degree, and I have experience in writing and marketing, plus we’ve both had the dream of opening our own business one day, so there’s a slight chance this could turn into something. I mean, check out the story of Monday Night Brewing. 

When we get to dreaming, we imagine nerdhouse brews as a place to get craft beer and support local creatives. We will have trivia nights, open mic nights, concerts and poetry readings, we’ll host local book clubs and Bible studies and it would be so cool! So get in now as an investor while you can;P

But seriously, get out there and do what you love while you can because life just isn’t that long.