By Aimee Welch
There’s a stainless steel pot at a low boil on the stove, a giant orange cooler with a spigot on a short stool beneath it, a huge tub of stuff that looks kind of like oatmeal, several groups of copper coils around the sink, a 5-gallon bucket of light brown water with some floating gadgets inside, a couple of small packets, a test tube, and an Excel spreadsheet that made the journalism major in me recoil in utter fear.
I’m in the kitchen of a real-life rocket scientist, and it looks like he might be preparing to launch something into space…from his kitchen.
Nope. Ron Carter builds rockets by day but, for fun, he brews his own beer. Ron, an electrical engineer with Orbital Sciences in Chandler, has been brewing at home for almost as long as he has been building rockets.
About 10 years ago Ron was on a business trip in California with friend and co-worker Art “Bud” Meyer when he drank his very first full pint of beer. He had tasted beer before, but never liked it. “I grew up in a small farming community where people only drank domestic beer,” he said, with a look that said “yuck.” So, he waited until his late 20s, in a California microbrewery with Bud, to try again. Bud was an experienced home brewer who validated Ron’s distaste for domestic beer, then ordered a sampler of microbrews and had him try each one, from light to dark.
By the end of the line, he ordered his first full glass of beer—an amber.
That October, Ron attended Bud’s annual “Hawk-Meyer Oktoberfest” party (named after the founders, Scott Hawkins and Bud) at Bud’s house, where home-brewed beers were being served. He was hooked. Bud then taught him—along with several more engineers looking for a challenge (because rocket science isn’t challenging enough?)— all about home brewing and, by the following October, Ron was ready to serve his own beer at the annual celebration.
Fast-forward 9 years—Ron is still brewing beer, and the Hawk-Meyer Oktoberfest is still going strong. In 2012, 160 people showed up to mingle and sample the 15 home-brewed beers that were on tap (plus three more in bottles). Last year Ron’s Dock Jump Porter, named after his beloved yellow Lab Midas, took second place in the Brewers’ Choice competition, after a revote broke the tie for first place. “Always room for improvement,” says Ron, which is exactly what he set out to do for 2013.
It’s not as hard as it looks
Back to the kitchen…Ron is busy preparing the very beer he’ll be serving at the 22nd annual Hawk-Meyer Oktoberfest this fall, which will be held at his house. This is not a hands-off process. He is carefully monitoring boiling points and temperatures, and cleaning his hands and every piece of equipment in a large bucket of iodine water in between uses. While you’re technically just following a recipe, Ron emphasizes that keeping everything clean and sterilized is “major.”
Brewing beer is definitely a process that requires a little patience and a lot of attention to detail, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out.
Ron says the easiest way to get started is to buy a starter kit. Brew Your Own Brew in Mesa and Brewers Connection in Tempe are two places you can buy beer brewing kits that come with most of the supplies you need, including a recipe, for about $120. The Brewers Connection website says you’ll need to get your own stainless steel or enamel pot (at least a 4-gallon capacity) and reusable bottles to store the final product.
Your kit might look intimidating with its buckets, winger cappers, siphons, hoses, hydrometers and packets of stuff, but if you follow the instructions, you’re on your way.
Ron started brewing his batch of porter at 10 a.m. For the next 6 or 7 hours, he heated the warm water/grain mixture to create the “wort” (basically the beer before fermenting), boiled the wort, then cooled it (easier said than done) and pitched the yeast. Before he poured it into the carboy (huge glass jug) and topped it off with an airlock to begin the fermenting process, he gave us little sample. To an experienced brewer like Ron, a taste of the wort gives you an indication of how your beer will taste. To everyone else, it tastes a little like “bread water.”
Ron’s beer will ferment in the carboy for 1 to 2 weeks before being transferred to a 5-gallon oak barrel, and Ron will wait patiently for another chance for a first-place finish at Oktoberfest.
While he’s hoping for the Brewers’ Choice trophy this year, Ron has stiff competition. His wife Kirsten, a graphic designer who has created labels for the couple’s “Wet Dog Brewery” name, is also a brewer, and she’ll be entering her own batch of spiced wheat beer, using a recipe from an Australian pub they visited on their honeymoon. Because her beer is lighter, she doesn’t have to start the process for a few more months.
It’s harder than it looks
The above is an over-simplified version of what actually occurred in Ron’s kitchen that day, but brewing beer still looked like a lot of fun.
One explanation for the home brewing fascination among these analytical thinkers is that it’s a scientific process. There are smart-sounding acronyms like IBU (international bittering unit) and OG (original gravity). There are problems to solve. Oh, and also sometimes things explode.
Unfortunate events could indeed happen, hypothetically speaking, during the beer brewing process.
Say, for instance, your beer gets contaminated somewhere along the way. While your contaminated beer is fermenting in a bucket in the bathtub, it could blow the lid so high it leaves a mark on your ceiling, and covers your entire bathroom in Blueberry hefeweizen. Hypothetically.
Or, if your beer continues to ferment after you’ve bottled it and stored it in your pantry…the bottles could break. All of the bottles, all over your pantry.
If the temperature isn’t just right in the place where you’re fermenting, your beer may undergo an awesome but un-tasty chemical transformation that looks like a spongy solid mass and completely destroys the entire batch, but is super-cool to watch.
In Ron’s humble homebrewer’s opinion, drinking the beer is a lot more enjoyable if you haven’t contaminated it along the way.
The question I didn’t ask Ron was why all of these people brew their own beer. Don’t they know there is beer at the store? It’s already made, too.
But after watching him passionately at work, standing in a room full of memories centered on this hobby, and hearing the great stories he and Kirsten have shared along the journey, I didn’t have to. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the answer.
