WonderAli's "I <3 Baking... or do I?" - and the discussion of the article in episode 13 of the Murmur podcast - inspired conflicting feelings in me.

On the one hand, the three awesome recipes Ali posted and the days of cooking Josh and Conor discussed made me incredibly jealous.  It sounds like a hell of a lot of fun to bake a giant cupcake with friends, and Ali is getting marriage proposals for her great apple pie recipe.  But when it comes down to it, I just can't bake.  I do my damnedest to stick to recipes, but there's always something wrong, be it runny pies or crunchy cupcakes.  Maybe it's a lack of need to bake, like Jim mentioned.  Perhaps it's the lack of improvization.  Whatever it is, JChristie no bakey.

On the other hand, I felt an affinity with the Murmur staffers when they raved about how much fun it is to bake.  While I'm not much if a cook and I certainly can't bake, there is at least one thing happening in my kitchen that is fun, allows for some creativity and ends up with some killer results.

I'll admit it - I'm a homebrewer.

Ever since Carter signed a bill legalizing homebrewing in 1978, thousands of Americans have taken up the hobby of brewing beer - usually five gallons at a time.  Personally, two factors played a major part in my taking up the hobby.  Mostly, a growing passion for good, flavorful beer started ramping up big-time after I turned 21, and I wanted to see if I could replicate what I was buying at the store.  After all, good beer can be expensive, and brewing your own beer can drive the price down to three bucks or so a six-pack.  The other driving factor was the fact that my girlfriend is a hell of a cook.  She's been cooking and baking up a storm since we moved in together, and I wanted to be able to do something - anything - in the kitchen.  With these budgetary, creative and face-saving concerns in mind, I picked up some homebrewing equipment and a kit and went to town.

Brewing beer is an easy and wickedly fun hobby.  From the lightest witbier to the darkest stout, you only really need four ingredients, a big pot and a 5-gallon bucket to brew some ale of your own.  Although you can add spices, chocolate, rice, and tons of other ingredients to beer, you only really need four ingredients to brew - hops, yeast, grains and water.  That's really it.  It's as easy as it sounds.  With these four main ingredients, you can brew dozens and dozens of different styles of beer.

Interested in whipping up some beer?  I'll again follow Ali's example, and run you through a beer recipe, from getting the ingredients all the way to drinking the stuff.  At the start of November, I brewed my most recent batch - five gallons of a dark, rich coffee stout.

When you're homebrewing on a stovetop, you'll be cooking your ingredients in about 2 1/2 gallons of water.  Since the grains and hops raise the water level a bit, you want a pot that can hold at least four gallons.  To get started, this water has to come to a bit less than a boil - about 155 degrees.  At this slightly-below-boiling temperature, the first ingredients enter the beer.  For this recipe, I steeped a mix of coffee malt, roasted barley, black patent and crystal malt in the hot water.  After about 25 minutes of this, it's time to pull out the grains, get everything to a boil and add some more ingredients.

Once the barleyed-up water gets to a boil, the bulk of the ingredients go in.  Seven pounds of dark malt extract (a ready-to-cook liquid version of the grains used in beer) and an ounce of Galena hops go in the pot, and then it's back up to a boil.  Then, the mix just has to boil for an hour.  That's it.  No other timers, no precise measures of ingredients, just an hour of boiling.

That is one thing worth mentioning - homebrewing takes a long time, which is at times fun and frustrating.  Heating a lot of water up to a boil takes a while, and aside from a few ingredient additions to watch out for there's a lot of sitting around literally watching a pot boil.  I find the whole process relaxing, but if you're lacking patience it might be worth it to you to just buy the beer at a store.

Anyway, after the mix has boiled for an hour it's time to cool it down to get it ready for the yeast.  Yeast is the magic ingredient in beer - the thing that eats all the sugars in the malt and releases them as sweet, sweet alcohol.  Yeast can be pretty particular - if you're brewing an ale, it needs to be between 70 and 80 degrees for yeast to survive.  Too cold and they'll be dormant, so no alcohol (and thus, no beer).  Too warm and they go nuts, creating all kinds of funky flavors you aren't looking for.  Yeast is also a fungus, which means any bacteria or other nastiness can send beer south fast.  So the other important thing to remember when you brew is sanitation.  It's a pain in the ass, but everything the beer touches after the boil has to be sanitized, or you could end up with 5 gallons of garbage.

Once the 2 1/2 gallons of hops, water and grain (called wort) has cooled down enough for yeast to survive, it goes into the fermenter.  The fermenter is an airtight 5-gallon container - usually a food grade plastic bucket.  Pour the mix into the (sanitized) bucket, pour in clean water until you have five gallons of wort, dump in some ale yeast, and stir it with a (sanitized) spoon before putting on a (sanitized) lid.  Find somewhere cool and dark to put the bucket, and let they yeast do it's thing.

That's pretty much it, actually.  One afternoon and you're 90% of the way to having five gallons of your very own brew.  All that's really left is more waiting, which can become unbearable.  After a week in the bucket, the beer is all fermented - the yeast is dormant, and has converted most of the sugar in the wort into alcohol.  Most homebrewers, if they have a second bucket, siphon the beer into it so it can clear without the waste from the yeast (called trub) floating in it.  Two weeks after boiling the ingredients, the beer gets mixed with 3/4 of a cup of sugar, which is just enough fermentable stuff to make the yeast carbonate your beer.  The beer-and-sugar mix then goes into (sanitized) bottles.  Pop a cap on those suckers, and you are DONE.

Well, other than the fact you have to wait a little while longer before you can drink the beer.

After about a week in bottles, the beer is carbonated and theoretically drinkable.  Still, it's usually about a week or two beyond that until the stuff really starts to taste good.  Y'see, each bottle has a liiiittle bit of yeast in the bottom of it.  While it isn't doing anything as dramatic as when it changed the wort into beer, it still makes the flavors more complex, fuller, and just better.  After a week in the bottles, the coffee stout tastes like a slightly thin, roasty stout - think Guinness.  Two weeks, and there's definitely a ton of coffee with a little bit of cocoa flavor in the background.  Three weeks, and BAM.  Suddenly, the beer has reached it's full potential, with a rich medium body of chocolate and espresso.

All from some grains, hops, yeast and water on your kitchen stove.

So, am I the only guy on Murmur that's ever done any homebrewing?  Any questions about the process?  Let me know in the comments.

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