I spent Sunday afternoon stirring barley malt and hops into a kettle of boiling water in the garage. Tell me that’s not living well.

I’m shooting for a darker brew this time. I don’t know why. I just like dark beers, that’s all. So I started by stuffing a couple bags with a mix of 1/4 lb UK Chocolate, 1/4 lb UK Black Patent and 1/2 lb TF & S Dark Crystal roasted barley to give this batch a deep, dark color, as well as some body, and I think it turned out pretty much the way I wanted it. This is my favorite part of the process, actually. I start out with a big pot filled with two and a half gallons of plain old water, and after steeping roasted barley in it for about 45 minutes while the water slowly comes to a boil, I ended up with what looks and smells like, well, beer. It tastes disappointingly weak, because it’s just the first step, but it looks and smells great.

When steam was shooting out from under the lid I shut down the burner, picked out the bags and dangled them over the pot to let the yummy, yummy wort drain from the grain. Then I stirred in 8 lbs of Munton’s Plain Amber dry malt extract into the brew. That took a little over five minutes, almost ten, because the sugars coagulate into lumpy dumplings as soon as they hit the surface of the soup, and it takes a lot of stirring to break them up. When it looked like the extract had finally dissolved completely, I dropped in a 1-oz bag of Newport hop pellets, rated 12% Alpha, and lit the burner again. The brew took about ten minutes to return to a boil.

About thirty minutes after stirring in the DME and re-lighting the burner, I dropped in another 1-oz bag of Newport hop pellets and gently poked it with the end of a spoon to soak it through. I don’t know why I decided to add the hops in increments like this. Just felt like it. Forty-five minutes after relight, I plopped a final 1-oz bag filled with Cascade hop pellets, rated at 6.2% Alpha, for the finish, and fifteen minutes later, I shut down the burner.

After bringing the temperature of the soup down to a safe seventy degrees using a wort chiller of my own invention (ten feet of copper tube from Home Depot coiled around a paint can, real high-tech stuff), I poured it through a funnel into a carboy on top of two and a half gallons of filtered water, pitched a bag of Wyeast (1056 American Ale) in with it, fixed a blow-off tube to the neck and called it done.

Clean-up’s not as much fun as brewing is, but it’s still somehow satisfying, and then there’s always the celebratory glass of beer afterwards. Tonight’s will be a pint of Hinterland Saison. Salud!