One of the best things about being a beer drinker in Toronto this year is the fact that the number of events keeps increasing. There was Ontario Craft Beer Week, the Hart House Craft Beer Festival and starting on Thursday of this week, we’re going to have the Toronto Festival of Beer which will be interesting if for no other reason than the ability to watch a large of number of people staggering about complaining about the price of a sample of light beer.

On the horizon though is Toronto Beer Week, which is starting to differentiate itself from the other events this summer in the variety of events that it’s going to include. As I understand it, a fairly large number of pubs will be involved and they’ll all be playing to their strengths, which is as it should be. According to the website there are going to be neighbourhood pub crawls, beer dinners, cask tastings, meet the brewer nights and even beer trivia nights for those of you who have amassed a wealth of comparatively useless knowledge over the years.

The most interesting development was announced last week, which is the introduction of a Toronto Beer Week Homebrew Competition. It’s a great idea because it not only creates discussion about Toronto Beer Week in lead up to the events, it also allows people to take part in an activity instead of having all of the events for the week determined by pub owners and the governing committee. It’s a great event in that it creates recognition for those talented amateur brewers from around the city who would normally only be able to show off their skills when people come over for a drink.

It’s especially interesting to me because I’m a closet homebrewer. I don’t mean to say that I’m ashamed of my homebrewing; I mean that I’m literally forced to brew in a closet. I live in a one bedroom apartment so small that the clichéd jokes are hunchbacked. Periodically I think about getting a cat or a dog and I realize that keeping an animal in a space this confined would be cruel, which inevitably prompts the thought that while it is probably also cruel to keep myself here I am at least spared having to take monthly heartworm medication.

I have made a number of attempts at homebrewing over the years, starting back during university. Fortunately we currently live in an age when online homebrewing resources are extremely accessible and there are very well illustrated, easy to follow guides for those who are attempting to do it for the first time. They walk you through all of the steps of both all grain and extract brewing. There are even videos on youtube available for those of you what don’t read good. In university, though, we didn’t really have the same number of resources and there weren’t really a huge number of instructional sources. We were pretty much limited to the information on the back of the can of hopped malt extract.

Theoretically, brewing beer as a university student is a fantastic idea. It’ll save money and you’ll be able to list it as a hobby. Realistically, however, you end up with wort stains on the stovetop, exploding bottles in the closet and, if you’re trying to brew a coffee stout, grounds in your teeth. I wish that I could claim that this was in the days before cheesecloth, but the better claim is that it was in the days before common sense. We didn’t understand any of the chemistry behind brewing and the results were so disappointing that the second batch of beer never got bottled and may still be sitting at the back of a closet somewhere a decade later having developed sentience.

In the last couple of years, there have been more successful attempts and while nothing that I have made is anything to write home about, it has at least been drinkable. They’ve all been ales, and at least at this point I understand the process. It’s frustrating attempting to brew in a one bedroom apartment, though. I have a window air conditioner, so temperature control is a problem, part of me wants to shop at PortableACNerd.com for a proper set up. Last august I ended up trying to brew an American style wheat beer that had to be poured out due to a heat wave. It was no great loss at that point because it had begun to smell like soy sauce. When it’s not unbearably hot out, though, I’ve done pretty well. There was a mild bitter that was pretty drinkable and an American IPA that was good enough that I never quite got around to sharing it with anyone. Truly, the only beer that I was disappointed in was the ESB that I tried to create a recipe for; I seriously misjudged the amount of crystal malt. You know that you’ve done badly when you’d rather have a nice mug of cocoa.

Over the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot about brewing and have even completed grade 12 biology, so I think it’s time to dust off the ol’ carboy. I’m relatively sure that I can come up with something that, while unlikely to win any prizes, will probably not rank with the Hindenburg in terms of man-made disasters. In truth, I’m aiming to do slightly better. Possibly between “unfortunate train derailment” and “collapsed overpass.”

After all, I’ve got all the equipment already and it’ll give me an excuse to give the kitchen a good cleaning. All I need is some decent bottles, a recipe and the ingredients and I’m good to go. Sure, there’ll be a lot of Star-San rinsing and a certain amount of obsessively checking to make sure that the yeast is forming a krausen (which is slightly more compulsive than Farmville). I’m willing to go to these lengths for two reasons: Firstly, there’s an entire closet which is essentially unusable since it’s full of brewing equipment anyway. Secondly, the rules for the contest on the Toronto Beer Week blog suggest that anyone who provides an email address will receive feedback on their submission and I’ve always wanted to see how many times a BJCP certified individual can use the word travesty in a review.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon poring over the beer section of my library in an attempt to develop a recipe that is unlikely to result in a mob of pitchfork wielding beer judges chasing after me.