Our Beer and Wine Making - Directions, Recipes and Adventures
I must start out by giving a little history of my beer and winemaking. I made my first homebrewed beer in Pensacola, Florida in 1981. My wife was still in Germany and I had bought a home that needed some, well, ambiance. A friend of mine, Ken Pine, encouraged me to start making my own beer since homebrewed beer tasted better than store bought and I could control what went into it. His beer was very good so I made the plunge by visiting the local homebrew store. I successfully completed several batches but eventually lost interest in it (with a new baby in the house, other things took on higher priorities).
Bottling was a real pain. One of my batches actually exploded after bottling. Since I didn't use a hydrometer, I never really knew much about the beer. And, I mainly used the hopped malt extracts alone.
Fast forward to Austin, Texas in 2003. Sharon was attending graduate school at UT, the kids were out of the house, and we were enjoying life. We discussed how much we liked wine and we started looking at making our own.
After a visit to our neighborhood homebrew store (Austin Homebrew Supply), we came home the proud owners of a primary fermenter, carboy, and other hardware to make our first batch. The directions seemed simple (much simpler than I remembered from my first attempt at making beer). Since Sharon and I prefer dry, red wines, we selected an extract based on the Merlot grape.
Without getting into the details of making the wine (a subject of a different page), the wine was bottled on 27 February 2004. We waited impatiently for three months before opening the first bottle and were completely happy with the results! We were hooked.
After making our own wine for two years (and 10 different bottlings), we decided we should start making our own beer. So, Sharon insisted that we visit our new local homebrew store in Houston, DeFalco's Home Wine & Beer Supplies, where she bought me the rest of the equipment for making beer. Only this time, instead of bottling the beer, we were going to keg it.
I have decided to keep some records on the beer we make and, to a lesser extent, on the wines we make. Hopefully, you will be able to learn more about homebrewing and avoid the issues I've discovered along the way.