home brewing in Korea

Here it is, the long-awaited home brewing post. You'll probably wish I'd included more pictures, but those pictures, when we remembered to actually pause and take them, were either full of screw-ups and mistakes or could give away our secrets. So I'll include one or two and you can use your imagination to fill in the rest, like you would with one of Hunter S. Thompson's columns. (I finally got around to reading The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1, a compendium of Thompson's essays from the mid '50s to the late '70s. Solid gold.)

And so, to business.

Joseph (previously known as Mr. JA on this blog) is a fellow I work with at Sejong University. For anybody who's close to us, or just anyone who lives on this island of a peninsula, it won't be hard to figure out who he is. Brant (also called Mr. BP) is a little more tricky to pin down, but that's how he would like it. How we came together isn't important. It was a baseball game or a horse race or some other venial sin. There was lots of beer involved. The topic of conversation turned, as it so often does, to the outright shittiness of Korean beer and ways of remedying it. (Not Hite D Dry Finish, nor even the Queen's Ale, can rise above cloying mediocrity.)

Well, as the beers disappeared and the innings (or heats or whatever) wore on, the talk got crazy. We started thinking about home brewing ourselves. A year ago this would have been absurd. We'd've had to MacGyver a brewing kit together from whatever junk we could salvage from the foulest alleys and byways in Itaewon, and heaven knows what we would have used for sanitizing—a bucket of cheap off-brand Purell?

Fortunately, we no longer live in such a benighted state. Korean expats who feel the need to rustle up a better brand of brew now have hope: Seoul Homebrew, located just across from the Wolfhound on Bogwang-ro 59-gil in Itaewon. A harrowing trip down two flights of narrow stairs leads you to a tiny concrete-floored chamber, which looks for all the world like a garage with no door. Wooden shelves line the walls, displaying plastic hydrometers, hoses, siphons, rubber bungs, carboys, air locks and beer buckets. Tubs of grains and hops are stacked neatly against the walls, giving the room the aroma of a small-time feed store. Stark yellow lighting comes from bulbs inexplicably stuck on the end of faucets embedded in the walls. A grain grinder, an industrial sink, and a storeroom filled with white grain sacks completes the scene.

Joseph, Brant and I, having hashed out the basic kit we would need to start, betook ourselves to this mystical place and stocked up. At first, we bought a single kit, consisting of a beer bucket (spigot included), an air lock, a hydrometer, and a laser thermometer; this was kept at Joshua's residence over in Yangcheon-gu, southwest of the Han River. Since then, both Brant—who lives in the Gangnam area—and I have acquired our own sets of buckets, hydrometers, measuring cups, air locks, grain bags, stock pots, and bottles. Especially bottles. We need at least 30 for each batch, and that takes a lot of drinking.

But I digress.

Let me take you through the process quickly so what I have to say next will make sense.

There are two ways we brew beer. The first uses malt extract. After thoroughly sanitizing our beer bucket, hydrometer, tools, pots, and spoons, we boil water. We dump in some dry or liquid malt extract, stir, cook the resultant mixture (known as wort) for an hour, add in some other kinds of malt extract at the thirty-minute mark if needs be, and then begin part two of the process.

The second species of home-brewed beer is partial mash brew. The process is similar to malt extract brews, only this time, real hops and/or grains are put into porous bags and steeped in the wort as it's cooked. This adds extra flavor and kick, though it does complicate things a bit. 

We then dump the hot wort into the fermenting vessel—in our case, a beer bucket. We add a few more gallons of water to cool the wort down, pitch the yeast, add it to the bucket, fill up the air lock with sanitizer, stick it on the lid, put the lid on the bucket and let the whole shebang sit for anywhere from five days to two weeks.

After the fermentation period is over, we bottle. We add sugars to the fermenting brew. The yeast will eat the sugars and excrete gas, making the happy bubbles we like to see in our beer glasses. After the sugar's added, the bottling process is fairly straightforward. We fill up our sanitized bottles, cap them with a capping tool and set them in some dark, lukewarm place for another two weeks. After that, they're ready to drink (after being properly chilled, of course).   

Our first batch, done at Joseph's sunny, airy apartment in the Yangcheon District, turned out largely as expected: flat and tart. It was supposed to be a nut brown ale. We tried the same recipe again with the second batch; my bottles received carbonation when the requisite two weeks were over, 'cause I screwed all my caps down real tight. The brew was still unsatisfactory, however. Our third batch, intended to be a partial mash Irish red ale, was a failure—or so we thought. We opened it up and our nostrils were assailed by a hair-curling bitterness. There was also quite a lot of sediment in the bottom of the bucket. Certain that the brew had somehow acquired a fatal bacterial infection, we dumped it. Sanitizing your equipment thoroughly is imperative. Otherwise, bacteria will elbow the yeast aside and devour the sugars, creating acid instead of alcohol and irrevocably ruining the brew.

But perhaps not as irrevocably as we thought. The guys at Seoul Homebrew later told us that we should have bottled anyway. Oftentimes a brew will smell bitter and be full of sediment but still be A-OK. Stung by the knowledge that we may have chucked a perfectly fine Irish red ale (and ₩60,000 apiece) down the john, Joseph, Brant and I rolled up our sleeves. We pulled out all the stops for our next brew: a chocolate porter. That one has been bottled. This is the first time we've used glass bottles...things really feel legit now. Nine of those bottles are sitting on the lower level of my jerry-built kitchen shelving unit. They'll be ready to drink come Tuesday night.

On Friday evening, the boys came over to my place to inaugurate my own set of brewing supplies. It was the first time we'd ever brewed at my apartment. Miss H and I busted our humps to clean the place up and make it presentable (and open enough for three grown men to work). We just about managed it. The brewing process came off more smoothly than ever before, apart from a forgotten air lock left at Brant's apartment in Gangnam. This time around we brewed an IPA, somewhere between an extract and a partial mash. We used two different kinds of hops, as per the instructions. To add some holiday zest to the beer we also steeped some fresh-cut ginger in the wort for 20 minutes. It refused to cool down, preventing us from adding the yeast. So Brant and I stuck the bucket on a footstool in my bathroom and rigged up the shower head so that it would spray cold water on the bottom of the bucket. It worked like a charm. There are genuine wort coolers you can buy for your home brews, but who needs 'em? Just use your shower.

That weird red dot on the side is Brant taking a temperature reading with the laser thermometer.

The beer bucket is still sitting on that footstool. It's now under our desk. The sanitizer in the air lock is bubbling away contentedly as the fermentation process moves along. I check the temperature once every 12 hours or so. I'm trying not to be paranoid or obsessive or manic. I got the used hops out of the house as quickly as possible so the smell wouldn't upset Miss H, and thoroughly washed and put away all the supplies. I can't wait to taste it.

And that's how I got into home brewing in Korea. Yet another reason it's so good to be alive.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.