A
u-brew is an establishment which provides brewing equipment, beer
ingredients and all important instructions on how to brew your beer.
They charge money for these services, of course. However, they usually
do not have licenses to sell beer, and they are only legally allowed
to rent equipment and space, sell brewing ingredients and bottles,
and provide you with some instructions and help. The amount of instructions
and help they are allowed to give you before they are construed to
be brewing the beer for you (and, therefore, selling you beer) varies
according to local regulations. So the amount of help you'll get depends
upon how uptight your local regulators are.
The
best places to pick are those that give you a set of detailed instructions
and the option to ask questions of the staff if you're confused. Even
more importantly, make sure your u-brew-establishment-to-be is spotlessly
clean. Brewing must be done in the most hygienic of circumstances,
because otherwise bacteria can get into the brew and ruin it. If the
place doesn't look clean, go to your second choice and check it out.
Repeat this procedure until you find an acceptable establishment.
Otherwise your beer might not taste so good, which violates a Commandment,
if we are not mistaken.
We're
not going to say much more about u-brews, because the procedure varies
depending on the state and the company, and we want to get back to
homebrewing, but we will leave you the testimony of a very happy u-brew
user who's been brewing stuff at these places for years:
"You
will have a beer which is twice as good as any beer sold commercially
-- at half the price. You will know exactly what is in your beer because
you will put the ingredients in yourself. The ingredients are all
natural; there are no nasty preservatives or other chemicals. When
you have chosen your beer the person at the u-brew will give you the
recipe and show you where all of the ingredients are and how to measure
them, etc. I
recommend that you split a batch with a friend because the
batches are huge. By splitting the batch you will avoid having the
beer go skunky (you do drink in moderation, don't you?).
By
the way, there are two enemies of beer: heat and light -- and light
makes beer go skunky faster than heat. Best to store the beer in a
cool, dark place. Another benefit of sharing a batch is that you can
quickly move on to try another beer. There are many choices, all the
way from very heavy, dark beer to the lightest lagers. They are mostly
copies of famous international commercially-produced beers and the
u-brew will have cutesy names for them, e.g., Bass (an English ale)
would be 'Small Mouth' (get it?) at your local u-brew.
What
to bottle it in? You can collect empty soda bottles, particularly
the 2-liter size. But don't forget that a 2-liter bottle is equivalent
to a 6-pack and you should not drink a 6-pack at every sitting. Once
you have opened a bottle, you should drink it as soon as possible
because it will go flat quickly. The 2-liter size is great if you
are having a few friends over. The most versatile size is a one liter
bottle and you can buy these -- and the caps for them -- from your
u-brew. When you have consumed the beer, the bottle should be rinsed
two or three times in warm water and stored upside down, with the
cap off, until the next time you are ready to bottle. It takes about
an hour to bottle the beer. This includes rinsing the bottles and
caps in an iodine solution provided by the u-brew before bottling.
The u-brew people will show you how to bottle the beer, but essentially
one person slowly pours the beer into the bottle from the spigot and
the other puts on the caps as tightly as possible. This
bottling time is a great social time; you have a great opportunity
to catch up on the life of the person with whom you are sharing the
batch. It is essential to sample some of the product during this time,
for two reasons: first, it is important to ensure that you have the
correct beer and, second, for quality control reasons. My u-brew now
only provides a glass about the size of a shot glass for this purpose
--something to do with the fact that it is not a licensed bar. "
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