Homebrewing: Adventure & Invention In Beer
By Jonathan Trump

“Hey, did you know that you could eat these things? Here, taste it!” My friend held up a bean pod from a mesquite tree. The mesquite is a gnarled desert tree, with as many thorns as little green leaves: it certainly doesn’t look like it would provide a friendly snack.

Mesquite pods litter the streets where I live in Tucson, and they look like sugar snap peas, but thinner and longer and colored a light tan. I took the pod from my friend and held it up. I didn’t see any thorns, and I suppose it looked pretty harmless… so I popped it into my mouth. It was crunchy, and I had to spit out some unchewable stuff like when eating sunflower seeds. But the taste was surprisingly sweet with a round, caramel flavor and a bit of smokiness.

Something about the flavor jump-started my homebrewer instinct, and I got to thinking. “I bet you can make beer from these things!” There are plenty of other reasons to make your own beer. It’s generally cheaper than buying commercial beers: my beers usually cost me about $1 per 22-oz “bomber” bottle, compared to over $5 per bottle for comparable quality microbrews. Homebrewing is also often a social event. I usually brew with a group of friends, each of us making a different batch of our own invention… although we usually have plenty of non-brewing onlookers, eager to imbibe our latest creations. Tucson also has a homebrewing club that gets together once a month to swap bottles and compare recipes. I like to give out bottles of my homebrew as uniquely personal gifts for birthdays and other occasions, and I’ve even provided 5 gallon kegs of homebrew for friends’ weddings. But in the 5 years I’ve been an amateur homebrewer, my absolute favorite part has always been experimentation. I love trying to invent strange new beers with bizarre ingredients.

Thirty-five years ago, the variety of beers in the US was extremely limited. Only 44 brewing companies operated in the US, compared to over a thousand in operation today. Homebrewing was illegal, simple because no one had bothered to repeal the Prohibition-era laws forbidding it. The only beers widely available were boring mass-produced lagers specifically designed to be light on flavor. Before Prohibition, commercial beers were as varied as today’s microbreweries. But only the largest beermakers could survive the dark years of 1920-1933, and when Prohibition was finally repealed most of the smaller American breweries were long gone. Then came World War 2, and with it shortages of malt and imported hops, necessitating lighter and less flavorful beers. Light-flavored lagers continued to dominate the scene until the advent of homebrewing. In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed a law allowing states to legalize homebrewing, and beer could be adventurous again. (Alabama is the only state where it remains illegal to homebrew, but there are homebrewing stores operating in the state, so I have to imagine that arresting homebrewers is low on the political agenda.)

Amateur homebrewers started challenging the mass produced lagers, and microbreweries began to spring up when drinkers learned what they’d been missing. Today, it’s easy to find a homebrew store that carries everything the amateur brewer needs: from basic brewing kits with kettles and fermenting buckets to kegging systems to pre-made kits of ingredients. Shopping at my own local homebrew shop is a special trip for me, and I especially like ranging the buckets of grains, pulling out handfuls of different malts to munch as I decide exactly what I’ll put in my newest homebrew. But the battle against the mass produced lagers is waged with a lot more than hops, grains, and yeast. Homebrew stores generally carry all sorts of fruit and nut extracts, plus saffron for meads, lactose for milk stouts, and even bottles of stuff like spruce essence. Additions like ginger, cloves, agave nectar, maple syrup, and molasses are a bit more unusual, but not crazy. But why can’t we include crazy in the toolkit too? My proudest homebrewing adventure was making a beer which contained a chicken.

That’s right, a chicken.

It was based on an old 17th-century recipe for a beer called “Ye Olde Cock Ale.” I found it in Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, collected from an original manuscript fantastically titled “The Closest of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt. Opened.” The recipe reads with wonderful tidbits like the following: “take a large cock, the older, the better; parboil, flay him, and stamp him in a stone mortar until his bones are broken (you must gut him when you flay him). Then, put the cock into two quarts of sack, and put to it five pounds of raisins of the sun.” I mean, come on: the vile puns nearly write themselves. I had to try it. So I baked a chicken, rubbed with thyme and cloves, and then ate half of it with a tasty homebrew. I cracked the bones of the remaining carcass and left it to soak for two days in a gallon of dry white wine, with some raisins and some more cloves and nutmeg. Meanwhile, I made 4 gallons of a pale ale.

The first part of making beer is just like making soup: you cook the grains a bit, partly to sterilize them and keep out bacteria, and partly to convert some of the malt’s starches into something that the yeast can feast on. Hops are added near the end of the cooking phase, and then you cool it down to room temperature, and add the yeast. Fermentation happens in a 5-gallon bucket, plastic or glass, with an airlock to let the yeast breathe out CO2 as it works its magic turning sugar into booze. (I also keep a wooden beer Buddha with my fermenting brews as a superstitious good-luck charm to keep out pesky bacteria or wild yeast intruders.) After two days, I had some fresh beer and a pot of chicken/raisin-infused wine, and I mixed it all together. I combined it all in my brew bucket and let it continue to ferment and age for a few weeks. Now, when I started to make the beer, I really didn’t expect it to be good: I was just looking for an adventure. But in the end, it tasted like an excellent spiced Oktoberfest kind of ale, and I could hardly believe how tasty it was. The eminently learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt. would have been proud. Even besides the endless puns the beer generated (e.g., “even the fellas can’t get enough of my cock… ale”), I was quite proud to share it with all of my beer-loving friends.

So when compared to chicken as a beer adjunct, mesquite beans are hardly strange. From their flavor, I guessed that they’d lend a round caramel-like flavor to a brew, like molasses would but not so dark and heavy. The yeast would eat most of their sugar, but some of the sugars would probably be too complex and so the final beer might end up a little sweet. To me, this all suggested barleywine, the heavy malt-rich style with 10% alcohol content or so. But I worried that such a strong-flavored beer might overpower the mesquite flavor, and I’d never find out how to use it properly in making future beers. In the end I settled on an IPA as a “test beer.” I figured that the hops would balance the round caramel flavor from the mesquite, yet I’d still be able to fully judge how the bean pods work as a part of my arsenal of ingredients. I used an old rye IPA recipe as the base, and simple subbed in two pounds of mesquite beans for one pound of rye malt.

Homebrewing is a fairly forgiving art: the first step in most recipes and how-to guides, before you even fill a pot with water, is: “Relax, have a homebrew!” But I hate to ruin a beer, and I try to taste all my ingredients before I let the yeast do its magic. I’ve only failed once when making an experimental batch, when attempting an apple-smoked maple porter. I used apple wood to smoke two pounds of the malt for about two hours… and it turned out that I should have smoked it for at most fifteen minutes, since the final beer ended up tasting like barbecued bacon. The beer was ruined, but I learned my lesson for the next time I smoke my own malt. I try to tell myself that such lessons are an important part of building my own brewer’s arsenal of ingredients, but it’s a lot easier to learn those lessons when they come with a few gallons of successful and delicious beer.

Brewing the mesquite IPA was quite an event. I invited friends over for the occasion, and kept a bowl of the raw bean pods for snacks. Plenty of people had their first taste of a mesquite bean pod—just as I had only a few days prior. We also tentatively named the beer “Desert Teabag Crunch.” It’s been fermenting for a few days, but the yeast is happily at work and the flavor seems reasonably balanced (for a way-too-young beer). I have high hopes for when I keg it in a few weeks, and I’m hoping I get a good handle on how to use this new ingredient in future beers. Until then, I’ll be looking for other new adventures in homebrewing, on the hunt for my next beer invention.