Wort
As badly as you feel about this most recent presidential election, you should probably find something to occupy your time and take your mind off the inauguration tomorrow. I, for one, will be brewing beer. I will get up in the morning and start the rather laborious task of sterilizing the equipment involved in the brewing process: the ten gallon pot, stirring tools, wort chiller, hygrometer, sieve, carboy, transfer tubing, air lock. Everything must be hospital O.R. clean or else some rogue bacteria will render the concoction skunked. Next I will lay out the ingredients. I am making an English bitter, which an easy-drinking, low alcohol beer loaded with flavor.
The basic ingredients for making beer include water (clean, good tasting water, and lots of it), grain, malt extract (canned, because I’m too lazy to make my own malt), hops and yeast. The water must first be heated to about 150 degrees. In the meanwhile, I will put the loose, crushed grains in a couple of cheesecloth bags about the size of a pair of bull testicles and drop them in the water. The grains will be steeped for thirty minutes, producing a slightly aromatic, golden liquid. This is the very beginning stage of what is referred to in beer-making vernacular as wort. The grains will then be drained and removed from the wort. After that, I will slowly pour in the thick malt extract and raise the temperature of the pot to a boil. Next it’s time for the hops. I prefer to use freeze-dried leaf hops. The aroma from the hops after the bags are torn open is astounding. There’s nothing quite like it that I know of. In fact, the entire process of brewing beer is aggressively fragrant. The smell is easy to take for the home brewer, because it builds up slowing in the olfactory canal during the lengthy brewing process. However, if you happen to walk into my kitchen halfway through the one hour boiling period of the hopped-up wort, the smell could easily knock you off your feet.
As a matter of fact, if you were to ring my doorbell, say at 12 noon tomorrow, inauguration day, coincidentally about the time that George W. Bush is raising his right hand and mouthing some words on the subject of protecting the Constitution of the United States of America, and you were to comment something along the lines of “man, something really reeks!” I would have to say that it was just the beer. But deep down inside, well, we would both know that something else really does reek, and this ale cooking on the stove is a bouquet of roses by comparison.
9:45:11 PM  Stories
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