Philly is a beer city. And we as Wharton MBA students truly do our part to sustain this municipal reputation as if our careers depended on it (or maybe just to drown the sorrows of the market downturn). And just as much as I love my pre-prandial cocktail rituals, I also love beer-centric rituals, such as cracking open a Tall Boy before busting out my Henckels knives to make dinner. (Safe, I know. I’m wild like that though.) Other beer rituals include drinking myself silly while catching up on all my recorded television shows (OMG, did Blair just really slap Serena?!) and celebrating life’s milestones with a Guiness float (vanilla ice cream – Häagen-Dazs works best – with Guiness poured over). In addition, with the recent creation of the Wharton Brewmasters’ Guild club and weekly penny pints found at Roosie’s, it’s prime time in our lives to be a beer drinker.So, in true Amni fashion, I decided to kick off my Jimmy Choos, roll up my sleeves, and put on an apron to brew my own batch of brown ale in a deep bow of deference to my long-standing favorite: Newcastle. A certain WG ’09 once shared one of his own homebrews with me last year at a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner, and since then, I’ve been intrigued. This past October, I made him take me to Home Sweet Homebrew, a make-your-own-beer store on Sansom Street (between 20th and 21st Street), practically next door to Melograno.
I was a bit turned off when I was greeted at the door by two fat cats lazing on boxes, and by the overall lack of order and cleanliness, but I trudged on in the name of beer. I tried not to breathe too much for fear of taking in dander, and concentrated on the menu of “starter kits”. My friend walked me through the process: You pick a type of beer, and Home Sweet Homebrew assembles the ingredients (malt, hops, yeast, dextrose), as well as all the equipment (fermenter, glass carboy, hydrometer, pipes, hoses, capper, caps…). Easy.
I couldn’t get my act together until just yesterday to start brewing and embarking on this month-long process. We have, technically, been working on the process by drinking a lot of store-bought beer so that we can collect two cases worth of brown bottles to eventually fill. I just found out last night when I actually read the instructions that bottles cannot be of the twist off variety, which just about decimates half my collection. I guess my husband and I will have to get through another case in the next week or so.
I’ll go into some detail about the process, but one of the key outcomes thus far is that I think I broke my stove.
One of the reasons as to why I didn’t start brewing until well over a month after purchasing all my materials was that I do not have a large stockpot. The largest in my kitchen could hold about 2 gallons, whereas the instructions included with my kit recommended one that could hold 4 gallons. Yes, I could have purchased one, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing so and then it became Tuesday which meant that had to brew with what I had in order to make my deadline with this story. I went ahead with my 2-gallon pot and, well, had a huge boil-over of malt and hops, which flooded my stove top and consequently put out one of my pilot lights (or so I think… it could be a much graver issue once I actually look into it).
Then there was the issue of sanitizing everything. SANITIZE, SANITIZE, SANITIZE! This OCD mantra holds true for beer-making, too. It’s hard to keep everything sanitized when all you have is the bucket you’re supposed to use for fermentation and a small apartment sink. By the time I had everything cleaned and put away at around 1 a.m., my hands were dry and ashy from prolonged exposure to a bleach solution and all my pretty polished nails were chipping.
The brew, though only time will tell, has not been a complete disaster. After great frustration and fatigue, I sprinkled yeast over my wort (I’d be worried if you were just turned on by my beer taxonomy), sealed the cap to my fermenter, plugged the hole at the top and stuck my S-shaped airlock in. Done at last.
Did I do everything correctly? A wave of self-doubt and questioning came over me, but I was too tired to think about it. Instead, my anxiety haunted my dreams and I tossed and turned to my subconscious yelling at me for having infected my beer through improper sanitary techniques, whatever that means. When I got to school today morning, I shot an email to that friend who introduced me to home brew. Did I attach the airlock correctly? He wrote back almost instantly: “All you need to do on the airlock front is make sure that you have some water or sterilizing solution in it to start with. Generally mine is half way up both chambers at the start and then gets pushed over to just one side once the pressure from fermentation gets going. You will know that you have a good seal on your bucket if you can push lightly on the top of the lid and the water in the airlock moves from one side to the other.”
I had sterilizing solution halfway up both chambers, so I was good on that front. I was at school and could not check the efficacy of my seal, but I was dying to. When I got home this afternoon, not only did the solution push up with a gentle pressure on the lid, but it was already pushed over to one side! Hooray for fermentation!
The great thing about Wharton is that with such a large student body, almost every interest in the world is at least minimally represented. The fact that I ran into a beer-maker has exposed me to new challenges. Yes, such as making beer. Making beer is much tougher than a case interview, an investment pitch, or perfect attendance at Pub. I feel that if I can do this, I can do almost anything… even find a job in this economic downturn.
We’re still a month away from reaping the rewards, which means you’ll have to wait until January to hear how things went, but keep your fingers crossed and have a great holiday from the Wharton grind.
