Beer! Beer! Beer!

I've been wanting to brew beer for a long time.  I love beer, but hot weather countries tend to specialize in unremarkable, highly carbonated lagers that are best enjoyed very cold as a way of replacing electrolytes lost to heavy perspiration.  Or in the ocean.  That's always nice.

Despite having had all the equipment and ingredients for making beer for many months, and despite having finally collected enough empty beer bottles, I hesitated to do it.  It's intimidating.  There are many steps.  Sanitation is emphasized again and again.  Haiti is not known for sanitation.  I had organic chemistry flashbacks and that was not a class I excelled in.

I took advantage of The Santas' visit to enlist free labor for the brewing process.  This was not as glamorous as you might think.  In fact, Stacey, [who despite working on some of the most important research in HIV prevention, still giggles at the word "vagina"] kept making references to diarrhea.   She's not very mature.

There were lots of different steps and timing and temperature needs and I was grateful to have The Santas there to help out.

The beer smelled best during the addition of the malts but the hops were pungent and less appealing.  They could double as smelling salts.  We made wort, cooled it fast-like, added yeast, and put the beer aside to ferment for a couple of weeks.

The Santas left and I lured another group of willing assistants for the bottling phase.  I had already invested a lot of elbow grease to scrub all the old Prestige bottles, take of the labels and glue, and sanitize them (I underestimated how laborious and messy this step is).  

 

The bottling process was a lot of fun!  We didn't finish until about 11 pm, but by the end, we had 38 bottles of beer neatly stacked to bottle condition for 2 weeks.

The nest morning, I sat bolt upright with the realization that I had forgotten to add the sugar solution to the beer, without which the yeast can't carbonate the beer.  Skype call to my dad, frantic combing on internet home brewing sites later, I was uncapping all my bottles and adding sugar to each individual bottle.  Which, with a freshly sanitized spoon and home-made funnel, resulted in a lot of clumpy, suggary messiness.  Had this been an organic chemistry lab exercise, I would have gotten an F.

Two weeks later, I opened the beer: Haitian Vacation Petite Saison.

Aside from variable carbonation from bottle to bottle, the beer is good!  It's floral on the nose, but dry and refreshing.  Very drinkable, not too hoppy, and decidedly better than Prestige.

Thanks, Santas and other helpers!