The whole of the last weekend and this week has been crazy. I get up, dry hop some beer, prime and bottle some beers, head to work, come back and continue bottling.
In between, I added mango puree to half the Foreign Extra Stout to make a mango stout and added 400 ml of freshly made grape juice to half the Palest Pale Ale and dry hopped the other half with Goldings. All this in between preparing for dinner.
Prior to bottling, I also have to prime the beers. This is a fairly simple task, and most of my time is spent when I have to wait for the priming solution to cool down.
It is also one of those times when I wonder if its worth the time and effort to brew your own beer. And after bottling my beers, I sit down and sip a beer I brewed earlier and the answer is obvious: it damn well is.
The end result of brewing beer and buying mas produced beer is the same: you get to drink beer. But the time and effort taken to do it is a lot more than driving down to a liquor store to buy beers off the cooling shelf. You have to have some equipment at home to brew, you have to plan for a brew day, have a recipe ready and perhaps half a day to brew as well. But the end result, oh the end result is so glorious all by itself that you wouldn't mind doing it again.
When I brewed the Palest Pale Ale, I woke up at 6 am on a Saturday. Saturdays are meant for sleeping in, the fist day of the weekend and a day when I would prefer (though not always) to start with lunch. The driving factor to get up at 6 am and brew was to see how well I could get a pale ale which would stand out in terms of the colour and taste.
I started brewing with extract and with some tinkering, the lightest coloured beer I got was a deep orange or amber shade. Which is what drove me to make the Palest Pale Ale. Of course, this is just one reason why I brewed this beer and different brewers have different reasons to brew, but at the end of the day, if asked whether its worth the effort to brew your own beer, the answer is hell yeah!!
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