Many people, when they write about brewing beer, start at the very beginning: A theoretical brewer somewhere in Egypt or Sumeria who discovered nearly eight millennia ago that by some miracle of nature, wet barley would ferment given exposure to wild yeast. It’s a relatively nonsensical place to start because you have to assume that Imhotep or Enkidu or whatever you want to call the jammy bastard who suddenly discovered that it was possible to create beer didn’t really do anything other than stumble along at an opportune moment. I feel relatively certain that the public school system in Ur didn’t have courses in microbiology and that the Tigris-Euphrates Polytechnic Institute (The Fighting Agrarians!) did not explicitly understand that millions of tiny eukaryotes were in there eating sugars and pooping booze.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; You can bet though that shortly after this discovery, early man, with an imperfect understanding of exactly what was happening, was in there trying to replicate the results. I don’t mean to belittle this ostensible pioneer: he or she demonstrated the spirit of discovery and the sheer bloody mindedness of human endeavor. It must have been frustrating to have very little idea of what was actually going on. Brewing is, after all, a relatively complex process involving a certain amount of subtle chemistry. It would have been basically impossible to control the results. They would have been lucky to produce something similar in quality to a stale forty of Olde English. Early man must have spent a lot of time quietly whimpering in a corner with a crippling hangover and a sense that whatever sacrifice had been made to Sneddon, the God of good harvest, it must have really ticked him off.

The good news is that we’ve come a long way since then: We have all sorts of things that make brewing easier. We have sterilizing solution. We’ve got hundreds of kinds of barley and dozens of kinds of hops. You can buy millions of little dormant yeast cells for less than a lunch out. We’ve got glass carboys and plastic buckets and indoor plumbing and refrigeration and air conditioning. We don’t have to break down maize starches with our saliva anymore. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve got the internet, which will provide you with all of the information you could possibly need in order to get started with homebrewing and then just enough information to confuse you utterly. Fortunately for you, there’s also the library. I say give it a shot. You’re at least as clever as a prehistoric Sumerian and probably more hygienic to boot.

St. John's Wort. Literally.

I have no intention of walking you through the homebrewing process. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that this is my fifth or sixth batch and I don’t want the blame for your inevitable misadventure. Suffice it to say that at some point, you’re going to screw up. Probably badly. You might pitch the yeast at the wrong temperature, killing off half of the population resulting in a half fermented batch of undrinkable liquid. You might decide to clean your bottling bucket with Sunlight and end up with an unintentional lemon tang. Probably, you will follow all of the instructions precisely, but your first attempt at creating your own recipe will just result in something you don’t like a great deal and which you will drink five gallons of slowly over the course of months because you can’t bring yourself to pour it out.

I will share some minor pointers, though:

Nylon Mesh Grain Bag/Ladieswear

First off, if you’re brewing an extract recipe like the one that I came up with that has a number of specialty grains involved, you’re going to need a nylon mesh bag for the grains. You’re going to want to steep the grains at about 150 degrees farenheit and you’re going to want to be able to get them out of the wort in fairly short order. Boiled grains can create off flavours. If you’re like me and you forget you need a nylon mesh bag, you can always go down to the drugstore and purchase a pair of pantyhose. They’re nearly ideally suited for the purpose, and with a decent pair of scissors, you can convert one leg into a grain bag and use the other one for dry hopping. If the clerk gives you a strange look at the checkout counter, feel free to make an offhand remark about the fact that they don’t seem to carry junior miss sizes.

Secondly, you’re going to want to calibrate your hydrometer prior to taking your original gravity measurement. The paper scale on the inside of mine has managed to slide down inside the tube over the course of several batches of beer. If you get to the end of the boil and you’ve aerated your wort and it seems like the original gravity is impossibly low, it probably means that you’re going to need to compensate. If you forget about calibration you’re liable to stand there with your mouth agape wondering how it’s remotely possible that the fermentables in the liquid don’t seem to be registering properly. As it stands, my beer came out to approximately the gravity that it should have, but there was a moment of mind bending panic where it seemed as though something had gone horribly wrong.

Hops!

Finally, if you have created a recipe that you think is going to work, don’t deviate from the recipe. You’ll get to the point where there’s 15 minutes left in the boil and there are lots of hops left to go in. Follow the hopping schedule that you decided on originally. You may be tempted to put aside an ounce of hops for dry hopping, but let’s face it: You’re an amateur and you have no idea what you’re doing. There are many situations where that extemporaneous creative instinct will serve you well. This is probably not one of them.

This also includes the fermentation process. Don’t open the carboy. Don’t futz with the airlock. If it’s bubbling away, you’re probably going to be alright. It’s a process that will take a couple of weeks and there’s very little benefit to compulsively worrying whether a yeast krausen has formed and whether or not there’s anything you can do about it. Leave it alone. Go about your business. Put the fermenting vessel somewhere that’s not in your direct line of sight. You’ll just drive yourself crazy.

At the end of your brew day, you may be worried: About your yeast. About your badly misaligned hydrometer. About the rumors now circulating the neighbourhood about your possible transvestitism. About the possibility of poisoning several accredited beer judges at the end of the process. It’s best not to think about it.

Besides. You can always blame it on Sneddon. It’s a time honored Sumerian tradition.