The 18th Amendment to the Constitution of these United States was an abomination imposed on the masses by a very vocal minority. The lobbying group for temperance who swayed the Congress to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol had good intentions. Health and crime were their main concerns. But what it gave rise to was organized crime and a higher mortality rate from the consumption of such poisonous beverages as “bathtub gin”.

Thanks to these unforeseen consequences and other pressures, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution became the first and only amendment to ever be repealed in the history of this country. The Twenty-First Amendment reversed the Eighteenth and restored to us the freedoms that were given away by the few back in 1919.

For the past month, Chad and I have been exercising our Twenty-First Amendment right to produce intoxicating beverages.

It all started with Chad getting the itch to start a home brewing operation. He had already had success with brewing his first batch of beer and wanted me to share in the experience. I was curious about exactly how much work goes into the creation of a batch of beer.

It requires about nine man-hours of time and four weeks’ worth of fermentation and maturation in order to have a decent batch of beer.

The ball gets rolling with the creation of the wort. The wort is beer before the yeast and the fermentation process. It requires massive amounts of boiling water, cold water, specialty grains, malted barley and hops. Beer definitely doesn’t smell all that great while it’s in these first few stages. What we had was, basically, a foul-smelling grain & hops tea in a giant brew kettle.

The different grains and hops and the amount of each and what is done during the fermentation process all determine what style the beer is.

In the case of my batch, we were making a cherry stout. This involved three pounds of bitter cherries as that little something extra to give it a distinctive taste.

Normally, after the wort has been made, the mix is strained (sparged) into the primary fermentation tank where yeast is added and the mix is left to sit for ten days. With this mix, the sparging was left for five days in order to let the yeast feast on the cherries and to let the taste sink-in a bit.

After the batch was sparged, it was placed in a PETE Carboy for secondary fermentation.

After that was over, it was time to start cleaning all of the empty bottles that were lying around. Each 5 gallon batch is roughly fifty 12oz. bottles’ worth of beer. Thoroughly cleaning fifty beer bottles so that they are ready to receive beer takes roughly two and a half hours. Most of the work is done in the bathtub in a volume of hot water to make the glue on the labels soft enough to get them off. The insides of the bottles are rinsed-out about 5 times in various solutions in order to promote sanitation. A bottle brush was used as necessary in order to get the insides of the bottles spotless.

When all the bottles were immaculate and the priming sugar was added to the mix (for carbonation), it was time to start filling bottles. That was a fun process that for which I apparently had a knack. The batch of cherry stout yielded forty-four bottles.

While the beer was bottled, it still wasn’t ready to drink. It was sampled but it’s not ready for wide-spread consumption yet. While still uncarbonated and warm, the beer was the best I had ever tasted. It came a long way from the putrid tea on the stove.

The taste of a home-brewed beer is matched by none. After drinking a full-bodied beer like that, Budweiser, Miller and Busch seem to be watery, tasteless and cheap by comparison. Also, nothing beats the sense of accomplishment.