[do it yourself]
brew it up
Joe Yoder, Lawrence resident and member of the Lawrence Homebrew Guild, with the help of other members, relocated beer from the barrel where it had been aging since May to a new sanitized keg for them to enjoy later, it is illegal for them to sell the beer. He brewed, aged and siphoned the flow of his brew from barrel to keg all inside the basement of his house.
In search of the perfect beer, students take matters into their own hands. BY MAGGIE KOERTH
The kitchen looks like any student ghetto cooking space. It has bare walls, ancient, oddly colored appliances and a stove, which looks like it's better suited to start electrical fires than prepare food. This particular kitchen transformed into an alchemy lab. A cauldron of carobscented brew bubbles on the stove and a glass jug big enough to hold a baby sits on the Formica countertop, a plastic tube coiling from its mouth and into a bucket on the floor.
"Paul," a KU freshman, stands over the stove stirring the bubbling, brown brew. He isn't a mad scientist; he's a homebrew enthusiast. He stirs and explains how he's steeping the grains, the same way that you'd make tea. "Normally I don't do this," he says. "It's going to be real fruity and put everybody on the floor." "Paul," who asked his real name not be used, because he is underage, usually brews his beer at about a 9 percent alcohol content, he doesn't have to drink a ton to get drunk. He likes making something of higher quality than Natural Light.
It's the quest for quality beer, which initially prompts home brewers to flee the
liquor store in favor of their kitchens, garages, basements and backyards. "Paul's" set-up is typical
of the beginning
beginning brewer: a large pot for boiling, a large glass jug for fermenting and plastic tubing and buckets to siphon the fermented beer out of the jug.
Geoff Deman, a former KU student and brewer at Free State Brewery, 636 Massachusetts St., began this way. "I was
interested in good beer and I had a friend who had home brewed before...I got started brewing and went whole hog," he says.
Alberta Rager got involved in brewing out of an interest in good beer. Today, she owns Bacchus and Barleycorn, 6633 Nieman Road in Shawnee, Kan., with her husband. Her store sells supplies for brewers of beer, mead, wine and other drinks.
In Bacchus and Barleycorn, there are rows of shelves stuffed full of different types of grain, hops, sugar, herbs, fruit extracts and syrups. Rager says new brewers opt to start with a simple brewing method, what she calls the "Campbell's Soup kits."
Lance Meneley/Kansan
10 jayplay
thursday, september 11, 2003