James Attempts Brewing an I.P.A.

The big pot on my stove, this cauldron, is filled with water, we poured in bags of malt, pinches of yeast. Handfuls of green pellets pass into the water underneath my shifting palm and now I am pulling out pellets of hops and taking jumpers from various places in the kitchen. I’m doing the Shawn Marion and pushing it out violently from chest level, the Shaq free throw with eyes closed and turning a sure thing into a crap shoot. I’m practicing my bank shot, and it ricochets off the range hood unpleasantly, and blends in with the distinct mess that is my kitchen. I have hundreds and hundreds of these hops, one with a superhero name (Green Bullet,) another with a this-is-what-I’m-doing-right-now name (Northern Brewer,) one name that took between six or ten repetitions, depending on who you ask, and I’m still not sure if I got it straight because the name on my recipe looks like a name tag scalded with sulfuric acid and mud- the last four letters appearing as diabolic scrawl by a psychopath with Down’s syndrome, (Tattanager,) and one boring one complimenting a particular region (Cascade) and they each have specific alpha levels and aromas, a purposeful device when plopped into the brew at a specific time. My bittering hops swell and collapse under the weight of the nearly boiling water. We bring it to a boil every so often, chaotically yank up the dial and watch the green cloud appear after I drop a handful of hops in, as if I’m creating something new to the universe entirely, birthed from some nether world of my imagination. Then it’s gone, it drifts towards the bottom, disintegrating and producing something positive in a way bodies never could.

It should almost go without saying, but we are drinking as we brew. My co-worker, who used to work at a brewery, has promised to come over and teach me how to do it the first few times. He is tall and has large features, which give a fluid life to everything he does, a light fleeting wonder over every corner, especially the ones that looked dull to me only an hour before. He brought over some beer he’s brewed called TeaBaggin,’ an ale brewed with black tea that is murky and provides a heavy stimulation to my senses. We occasionally lose track of the boil because our attention drifts, either towards the game, or towards the rapidly diminishing supply of lime flavored tortilla chips, or towards wondering whose beer is whose, a matter of constant confusion. My girlfriend rips the labels off her bottles; I am not sure if she does this to remember which bottle is hers, or if she’s frustrated with me for some reason. But she always tears the label, and I’m convinced she isn’t frustrated, she says it is just a habit.

We are habitual. Habitual drinkers. Habitual eaters. Habitual sleepers. Habitual talkers. I go out the same door at the same time everyday. I come back in through the same door at the same time. We are habitual in our actions. But the tangible evidence of these actions, real physical things, are constantly fluctuating. We both eat three meals a day and they are always different. We are always cooking a different meal for dinner. A different combination of entrée and sides. Usually a piece of cooked meat, sautéed vegetables of some sort, manipulated potatoes, rice made in our queer rice cooker, it somehow always knows when the rice is done, even if I unplug it mid cycle to test it’s effect, the switch pulls back up to “Keep Warm.” I know this fucker is fallible.

My girlfriend initiates this variety in our diet. She curses many of my ideas of what makes a meal. Shuts down a suggestion of a frozen food placed into the oven until it resembles food. These are all terrible, lazy, formulaic modes of eating. I make the same sandwich for lunch everyday, and I toss a banana and a small snack into a yellow Grocery Outlet bag that bounces against my knee as I walk into work. When she isn’t home, I’ll cook a frozen pizza, frankly, because it’s my weekly opportunity to pretend I am a lazy single snob. I see the difference now between preparing food for inert consumption in order to survive, and taking food and cooking it. She tries, she invents, she creates, and she is my model for a cook. She is the one who got me the necessary equipment to begin brewing beer; she kick started this stubborn horse into work.

And the work is sporadic. The pouring of the malt was stressful for me, it was double-bagged, due to the first bag splitting at the store, and the clerk re-bagged it for us. This doesn’t seem altogether very stressful without necessary context. Here’s the story. The last time I assisted my co-worker in a brew, the situation was identical with the bag of malt that he was using. I must tell you, he recklessly and irresponsibly gave me the job of pouring the malt into the brew. It’s important to note that my stove is electric, and his is gas, and we were brewing at this house, and as you can imagine this may go bad, and it did, because as I removed the first bag slowly with a look of solemn indignant fear cast upon my face, the majority of the contents of the second bag had flooded into the back of the bag or leaped out of the bag or something I didn’t expect/understand, so the malt came out in this vicious ugly clump that spread and burned up like lit gunpowder, (the malt is expensive to boot) so this pestilence fell over the side of the pot and over the gas burner, immediately igniting into this flaming caramel goo that ignited both of our pants and shirts, his eyebrows, and my hand in this white translucent orange heat that looks dark brown now, but then an orange pulsating terror, and we danced and hopped up and down in his kitchen towards the sink/the door/literally anywhere else, and our clothes and facial features and extremities aflame, and our friend sat in the corner screaming “Holy shit, you guys are on fire,” and after we managed to put out our burning clothes, we stamped out the remaining malt/caramel/fire that was staining the floor in front of the oven in this pitiful clump, this physical reminder of “that really did just happen, didn’t it!” and we both took a deep breath and silently blamed each other for the momentary crisis. Mind when the malt hit the floor in this flaming goo, it also hit the bottom of our feet, for which we are both thankful to have been wearing wool socks, it being winter. But now we have this awful sticky caramel embossed on the bottom of our respective socks, which we stamped all over his hardwood floors as we fluttered like school girls in a 4^th grade ballerina performance with our eyes closed whilst also combating a forceful fire, that threatens to overtake the house, which is wooden, and old, and filled with other people, innocent people, who may not be ready for death at the hands of burning orange oozy caramel.

Short to say it was a sight. I put my pair of socks in a closet to remind me that making beer can indeed kill or disfigure me quickly, and not just kill and disfigure me gradually. My singed hand recovered. My co-workers eyebrows may or may not grow back. He hung his socks in his kitchen to commemorate the moment as well as the three days of mopping that followed. He decided to call that particular brew Sticky Foot. I have yet to look at a bag of malt without a quiver running through my body, especially my hand, and my best outfit is now caked in that fucking caramel, and I’m not sure if my co-worker ever received the bill I sent him to replace the clothes, because I haven’t received a check..

ANYWAY, the work is sporadic. But the malt went in fine this time, though I was still nervous, even though my burner is electric, which is kind of ridiculous but also kind of isn’t. It’s like when a dog with an electric collar goes near the shock line even when isn’t wearing the collar, there is a pattern recognition, he remembers the pain from before, even when all empirical evidence points otherwise. At least, that’s my argument for my preoccupation. This is better than calling me a pussy. To me, at least.

Before the adding of the malt, we put in the grains, some named after European cities (Munich, Vienna,) one named after a mineral (Crystal,) and my co-worker (who is named Joe for future reference, I’m just sick of writing co-worker and thinking of him strictly as that, even though I won’t refer to him by name again in this post…) has this big cone that he places in the pot after we’ve filled ¾ of this 3 gallon pot with water, and I put this bag into the cone and pour the grains into the bag, and mix it with this big plastic spoon, which I am coming perilously close to naming Salad Fingers and not telling my girlfriend why. So I stir the bag with the spoon as it begins to disintegrate and work, like I was saying, and it smells interesting, and my arm is getting tired a little because I am stirring constantly, not in the proverbial sense. (Side note: I find in my note taking that I keep on switching between using numerals and the word to indicate numerals. It is much easier to write 2 5/8 lbs instead of Two and five-eighths pounds. This is also true in all my note taking, I am increasingly using more shorthand, something I was always stridently against. Am I getting lazier or more advanced in my work? Something to ponder on. Or not. Totally boring.)

ANYWAY, my arm is getting tired, so we slow down and drink and watch the game for awhile. I cook these porkchops I had been preparing during the downtime during brewing, and put ketchup and lemon on it, like my Betty Crocker Cooking for Two book says I should, and my girlfriend reminds me that the book was written in a time when all meat was cooked drier than an Arizona desert, and the calories are simply fucking astronomical, but I don’t care, it ends up being nearly unbearably dry on the edges, but tender and succulent on the inside, and I am happy. We cooked some brussel sprouts, soaked in butter and salt, and tossed them into the rice cooker at full capacity, apparently, it can steam veggies as well, it can do it all, this little bugger from Target has surpassed my exceptionally low expectations. So our dinner is decent. Finish shooting in the hops and fantasizing we are professional athletes, which goes on for nearly an hour and a half. And that’s pretty much it cooking-wise, and I shoot in some of the last hops for aroma as I turn off the burner. The brew can get infected, and moldy and nasty and utterly worthless, as it’s cooling, in this range between 170 and 120 degrees, so we watch with the thermometer and as soon as it gets near 170 we drop it into this vat of cold water I’ve prepared in the sink, and drop four trays of ice into the brew to shorten the amount of time that the brew is in this dangerous range, and gets below in about 15 minutes, which is very, very good.

Now I get down on my knees, and suck the end of this tube to get the brew running from the pot into the carboy, and I have to pull hard, but I finally get it going, and catch a bit of it in my mouth, and it is an I.P.A. and it tastes bitter at first but then the heaviness and thickness of the hops hits my senses and I’m happy, I’ve produced something that isn’t dreadful or poison and we cap it after the carboy fills up and I throw it in the bottom of my closet to ferment for two weeks. I clean up the hundred million spots on the kitchen counter before they settle into permanent fixturehood. I really am a talented cleaner, and I am not humble about it in any way.

The fermentation process was finally over as of last night and I bottled the whole batch, filling various pop-off bottles we’ve drank over the last month, and capping them with this cute black little device with arms that I pull that pushes this pin onto the cap and provides ample pressure for the cap and the bottle to become one. The satisfaction of finally smelling my brew, as it will smell as the final product, was quite memorable. I felt like a parent for a second. It was nice knowing I had created this smell, this liquid of  revelry. It had a hearty autumn pumpkin like smell, and will have an A.B.V. of about 9.5%, thanks to some ridiculous math I still don’t quite understand, involving arrows, charts and units of measurements that are foreign to me. The bottles are sitting in the bottom of my closet, and I think I want to name the “brewery” after our pet cat, Charlie. Pictured below. Expect to hear quite a rumble from Deaf Cat Brewery in the future.

Cats love hats!

Next post: Chocolate Chip Cookies.