While brand names like Budweiser and Abita have made their mark, some students are brewing outside the barrel.
“I’ve always liked drinking beer, and I love doing hands-on things,” said Spencer Wilcox, mechanical engineering senior. “I started working on little hobbies, figuring out how to do things and make them better. It’s one reason why I’m going into engineering.”
Wilcox said a friend introduced him to home brewing, the art of mixing up homemade beer batches, and after purchasing his first brewing set-up kit online, he was able to make his first batch.
“It came out really well,” he said. “It was actually one of my best batches.”
Although many beginner brewers buy their first kit online, Wilcox said anyone can purchase the necessary items at hardware stores like Home Depot or Lowes for less. Wilcox bought his first online kit for approximately $140 but said a beginner can buy the supplies for less than $50.
“You need a food-safe bucket with an air-lock lid, fermentation gear and a 5-gallon pot,” he said. “There are even some brewery shops in Baton Rouge. I would tell anyone interested in brewing that they aren’t going to save any money by doing it, but they’ll enjoy it a lot.”
Mechanical engineering senior Ryan Hildebrant said he and his roommate, geography junior AJ Beau, have been brewing for almost a year in their apartment’s kitchen.
During his free time last summer, Hildebrant said he often checked Stumbleupon, a discovery engine that recommends web pages, photos and videos online, and selected the option to find websites about beer.
“I kept finding all these sites about ‘home brew’ and ‘how to brew your own beer’ and other stuff like that, so I got interested in finding out what home brew was,”
he said. “I did some online research about it and found two highly recommended books for people who want to start home brewing: ‘How to Brew’ by John Palmer and ‘The Complete Joy of Home Brewing’ by Charlie Papazion. I also knew my roommate would be interested in doing this, so one day I gave him a call and asked, ‘Hey man, want to try to brew our own beer?’”
After Beau agreed to join the experiment, they bought the books and supplies to begin brewing.
“The actual brewing process only takes a day or two to clean everything and brew, and then, you just allow the fermenting process to take its course,” Hildebrant said. “This can range from a couple weeks to a couple months.”
But as simple as brewing may seem, Wilcox learned not all brews are created equal.
While brewing a batch of wine for a party, Wilcox and a friend, Clay, discovered the hard way that brewing beer and wine are significantly different projects.
“Basically in beer, you extract the sugars from grain, and in wine-making, you ferment the sugars already present in the fruit and add some [sugar] sometimes,” Wilcox said. “Yeast, when it’s young, is still in the stage where it is multiplying and making a lot of CO2 [carbon dioxide].”
As Clay stirred the brew, the batch of wine exploded. The eruption was so intense, the unfinished wine sprayed onto the ceiling.
“I don’t think we bothered cleaning the ceiling, now that I think about it,” Wilcox said. “We think that we exposed the yeast to new sugars, and they overwhelmingly made CO2 at once. It was an open vessel. The expanding liquid just went out of the top, which functioned as a nozzle. Hence the reason for the high wine ‘head.’”
No one was hurt in the accident, he added.
“We were kind of stunned but thought it was awesome,” he laughed. “We didn’t try to [make wine] again though. If I learned anything, it’s to not aerate the wine while the airlock is still bubbling.”
Through research and a number of trial brews, Wilcox and Hildebrant have learned the proper way to brew but will continue to learn more as they continue their craft.
Hildebrant said he recommends first-time brewers research before beginning.
“If you love beer and don’t mind spending a little extra money for quality brew, then home brewing is for you,” Hildebrant said. “See if you really want to spend the time and money on it before you invest a couple hundred dollars in it.”
