Return of The Prodigal Brewer

...So it's been awhile.

Tuesday morning. "Yeah, I won't be able to make it in today, I've been up all night, sick, and I think I ought to just rest" Getting up at five thirty regularly, has its upshot occasionally.

I scrambled my eggs, brewed my coffee, and milled my grain. Actually, I'd had the grain milled the day before, but lists are better in threes. Today I would brew an ESB, which, for those of you too hopped up on Cascade and Amarillo to care about what goes on outside of the country, is a mainstay in the English pub. It stands for Extra Special Bitter, and while the Bitter bit may be relative to other English beers, it is certainly Extra Special.

A malty, yeasty, copper-hued beer that rarely reaches past the five percent alcohol by volume mark, this is the beer to drink copious amounts of while rooting your Premier League team to victory. And Seeing as you'll get more beers in your gut than Wayne Rooney will get balls in the net in 90 minutes, for god's sake just keep drinking . The best part? Even with an ABV that hardly rivals water, it has SO much more flavor than its best rival here for ubiquity, the American Light Lager. America may be the land of Beers That Taste Like Green Hits, but Britons are far better off, in my opinion, living in the Land Of Liquid Bread.

But now I'm becoming tangential. Back to the first brew day in a long while.

At around one I went over to my neighbor's house, who recently caught the Brewing Bug, and is blessed with the mechanical imagination of an engineer and the pockets of Scrooge McDuck (if said duck wore pants.) Subsequently he has a brewing system that makes my not so recent MSPaint doodling look, well...like I did it on MSPaint. Three kegs; gleaming, waist-height, aluminum towers, each atop it's own propane burner, greeted me as I drove in. These were all hooked up to one propane tank via a snake's den of plumbing and a three-way splitter. To the right sat a card table, under which one of those plastic tubs mom used to put your winter clothes in and then promptly forgot where she'd hid them, dooming you to another year sans jacket, was seated. The card table had a bunch of stainless steel fittings, valves, and instruments I'd never seen so organized, having just been meticulously deconstructed, cleaned, and reconstructed. It was all very impressive.

Anyone that's brewed all-grain knows what kind of hot liquid musical chairs/hoo-doo that goes on, so when I saw the electric food-grade march pump that I'd only seen on the internet and sometimes in my dreams, I think I peed myself a little. It moves all the liquid from vessel to vessel, so there isn't any of that pouring wort into a pitcher and hot-side aerating it into the next keg, or worse, coercing your brew buddy into lifting enough boiling (and sticky) wort to fend off a siege-army over his head so you can turn a tap and... hot-side aerate it into the next keg. For those of you who don't know (again, probably something to do with the Cascade and Amarillo) hot side aeration isn't a good thing - I honestly couldn't tell you any more why it isn't, but I remember you aren't supposed to introduce oxygen into the wort until you're moments from pitching yeast.

About three beers in and an hour and a half later, it was obvious that Nick takes this brewing thing more seriously than I do. For me, it had always been a little about making beer and a lot about drinking it, but Nick has this thing down. He knows his temperatures, and what's more, he hits them. I think we were about a degree off of our mash temp, and that was an average between the four or five different temps taken from as many locations in the tun. He did things I'd never thought of, like sanitizing the outside of the pack of yeast, and (insert other things I've since forgot he did, because let's face it, he had shit under control and I was drinking more than brewing at that point.) He knew where all the tubes went, and didn't say "righty tighty" before screwing on worm clamps.

The lesson? Don't watch soccer hoping for a basketball score, and keep a smarter brewer with you at all times.