What’s Brewing?

The end of the world can be pretty depressing stuff. It leaves some of us aching for a place to drown our sorrows. Unfortunately, with the collapse of breweries that managed their inventory and shipping on Windows systems, the human race may be forced to make alcoholic ends meet themselves.

Hobbyists have been taking preemptive measures and brewing from home for 7000 years. I talked to 5 friends in an apartment in Astoria, New York who bought their first home brewing kit, advanced to develop their own recipes and created an entire brewery-- without changing locations.

The guys behind BFA Brewery are so passionate about this process they have fermentation buckets in their bedrooms. BFA founder Andrew Strassell sees this as the ultimate quality control. “The up side is that we can easily monitor the fermentation 24-hours a day, to ensure only the most premium of brews!”

The brewing process depends on what style of beer you are creating. BFA Brewery specializes in ale, which requires 2 hours of boiling the ingredients, and about 10 days until it is ready to drink.

Like any chemical experiment, homebrewing can blow up in your face. Typically, a bad batch occurs because the beer is contaminated by a foreign bacterium that doesn’t let the yeast establish itself as the primary vehicle for fertilization. Sterilizing your materials before the brewing process usually helps prevent this contamination. But some variables are harder to anticipate. One summer, the guys at BFA took a vacation during an oppressive heat wave in NYC, and came back to vats of spoiled beer in an apartment that had reached over 100 degrees. Although at that temp you should be drinking water, homebrewers out there should take note before skipping town…

Share your brewing experiences below. Any other good mishap stories we can learn from, or at least laugh at?