West Chester Dish

I love beer. I mean, I really love beer. Attribute it to my Irish heritage or the fact that I’m just a plain lush, but somehow a pint manages to find its way into my hands more days than not. So, you can imagine my excitement when a friend offered to sacrifice his apartment for one of the greatest undertakings in the history of mankind — homebrewing beer.

Homebrewing is experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. With craft brewers everywhere (think Iron Hill), more and more beer fanatics are taking things into their own hands (and bathtubs, basements, etc); however, this doesn’t necessarily mean that homebrewing is a walk in the park. Strange, overwhelming smells, danger of exploding bottles, bleach-covered kitchens and an initial minor hit to the wallet await those who venture into homebrewing. Luckily, my friend Joe took all the risks and let me stick around for the fun parts.

We started by going to a homebrewing store (the closest is the Wine & Beer Emporium, 101 Ridge Road, Chadds Ford; 610-558-BEER, www.winebeeremporium.com or Home Sweet Homebrew, 2008 Samson St., Philadelphia; 215-569-9469, www.homesweethomebrew.com) and getting a starter kit. You can buy a starter kit at any homebrewing store, and they contain just about everything you’ll need to brew your first batch. Joe dished out the big bucks for the “deluxe” kit (about $95) and got recommendations from the owner on additional ingredients. For our first go around we settled on an amber ale.

The process sounds complicated, but it’s really like baseball — a few key moments with lots of waiting in between. There are several major steps to homebrewing beer. First, boil water and hops. Add yeast and store in a 5-gallon bucket for about a week. Second, transfer the mixture — called “wort” — into a 5-gallon glass container and wait around for another couple of weeks. Third, mix the wort back into the original bucket with some priming sugar (eg, corn sugar or dextrose) and, using a fun, little bottling hose, squirt into 48 clean beer bottles. After another two or three weeks your beer is ready!

So, I’m sure you are wondering what was the result of our undertaking? Remarkably drinkable. Although, as my friend Joe put it, “the flavor profile leans towards the malt” (beer snob speak for “a bit too sweet”), I still managed to enjoy a cold one without feeling ill afterwards.

Now, armed with a slew of cool new vocabulary words and a fever for homebrewing, we’re already onto our second batch and are brainstorming ingredients for a third. Homebrewing isn’t for everybody — especially not if you have roommates, an aversion to foul-smelling living quarters, or an ounce of sanity — but it’s definitely my new obsession.