This month’s Fermentation Friday topic (hosted by Ted’s Homebrew Journal) is “Brewday Joy & Stress”:

a. What part of the your brewday brings you the most JOY?
b. What part particularly brings out a good deal of STRESS?

Fortunately, our brewday involves a heck of a lot more joy than stress! Especially now that we’ve been brewing for a few years. All the improvements we’ve made to our system and our processes along the way have been to make brewing easier, more efficient, and to produce the best results possible.

So, brewday joys… Wow, how could I ever list them all? I will do my best. I’ll just go in chronological order to make it easier.

When we first start our brewday, I measure the grains, and Tim measures the water. We get all our equipment set up on the deck (or screened-in porch, depending on the weather), stick the water on the burner, and mill the grains. The whole getting-ready process is always full of the joy of anticipation! Plus, for me, there’s just something about measuring out all the different grains, seeing them all laid out and ready for milling, the smell of the barley… Mmm… Tells of things to come.

Mash-in = relax time. Sure, we have to get water ready for the next step temperature, but for the most part, we just get to kick back and hang out at this point. We usually end up talking and geeking out about brewing, because that’s just how we Webers operate.

I wouldn’t call this a stress, per se, but when we miss a step temperature, it’s a bit of an annoyance. We don’t have a mash tun that we can apply direct heat to, so if we undershoot, we’ve got to quickly boil some water to add. If we overshoot, we’re stuck stirring the mash until it drops down to the right temperature, which usually happens pretty quickly. Like I said, not a stress, just an annoyance.

pH-ing is fun. I like choosing which salt we’re going to use based on how it will interact with the malt and hops. Plus, this is always a nice reminder of just how much brewing knowledge we’ve acquired over the past few years, a joy in itself.

Sparging used to be a real stress for us when we first started all grain. But we’ve definitely gotten rid of sparging stress, simply by buying a giant water filter to assure we have a hefty supply of 168° F water on hand.

The next brewday joy would be the boil. God, it smells good. The only regret I have about brewing outside is that we don’t fill the whole house with the aroma of boiling wort. It’s so good that our neighbors have been known to wander over when they smell brewing in the air. We always share a homebrew with them when this happens.

So, the boil smells awesome, and then you have to go and add hops to it! As if it weren’t already awesome enough! Just like with the grains, measuring out hops and taking a big whif of each variety is one of the best parts of brewing. It’s always a joy to experience each ingredient separately, and knowing that they will all combine to form something even more marvelous.

The only real stress I can think of during the brewday is if a boil-over occurs. Sometimes, we’ll walk away for a moment and not pay attention. If we hear a *ksssssssssssssss* sound, we both drop everything and run at full speed to the kettle to avert the crisis. We’ve never lost more than a few mouthfuls of beer from boil-overs, so really, it’s a short-lived stress!

In general, every brewday, the whole brewday, is an absolute joy. You take four ingredients (water, malt, hops, and yeast), combine them in all sorts of long, drawn-out, complicated ways, and in the end, you get this wonderful, magical substance called beer.

Then, after a few weeks, you get to enjoy said beer, which flows freely from the taps in your living room. I mean seriously, how amazing is that? How insane is this hobby that we all share?

I love it. I love this homebrewing community of passionate, crazy, beer-loving nerds and the camaraderie that comes with it. And I know I’m not alone in this!

Get I get a “hell yeah!”?