Russ and his beer phase

About two years into the wine thing, Russ got into beer. Not casually. Russ got into beer the way some people get into CrossFit — with a lot of new equipment, a lot of opinions, and a lot of strong recommendations for the rest of us.

It started, as most of Russ's pivots do, with a podcast. He listened to one episode of some guy in Vermont talking about water chemistry and the next weekend there was a fifteen-gallon stainless kettle on the garage floor and a propane burner that looked, frankly, like it had been borrowed from a small-town fire station. He had not asked. He had ordered. There it was.

The kettle, the burner, and the binder

Within a month he owned a refractometer, a mash tun he had built out of a cooler and a length of braided stainless hose, two grain mills (one was "a backup," he said, which, sure), a kegerator he had not yet plugged in, a pH meter, and a three-ring binder with tabs. The binder is what got me. The wine, in ten years, had never required a binder.

He sat me down at the kitchen table and explained mashing. He explained sparging. He explained the difference between a single infusion mash and a step mash, with diagrams, on a paper napkin he kept turning over because the first side filled up. He explained hop schedules. At one point he said the words "diacetyl rest" and looked at me like I should already know what that meant. I nodded. He kept going.

I brewed exactly one batch

On a Saturday in October I drove over with the understanding that we were going to brew a porter together, drink some of last year's wine while we did, and be done by mid-afternoon. We started at ten. We finished at almost six. I have, since, lost entire days to fewer activities.

Most of those eight hours were standing. Standing while the strike water heated. Standing while the mash sat. Standing while the wort came up to a boil. Standing while we waited the exact correct number of minutes between hop additions, which Russ tracked with three different timers because he did not trust any one of them. The wine, by way of comparison, asks you to pour it into a bucket, throw a packet of yeast at it, and walk away for a week.

The porter, when it was finally done six weeks later, was good. I will give him that. It was a real, drinkable, slightly chocolatey beer that tasted exactly like a beer somebody who knew what he was doing had made on purpose. Russ kept a single bottle of it in his fridge for almost a year and would, periodically, hand it to a guest and ask them to guess what brewery it was from. Guests guessed real breweries. Russ was insufferable about it for a while.

Why I went back to grapes

Standing over that kettle for eight hours did something useful for me, which was clarify, in a way ten years of casually preferring wine had not, exactly what I love about winemaking. Wine, mostly, just sits there and gets better. You set it up, you check on it once in a while, you forget about it for two weeks, you come back, and it has done most of the work without you. Beer wants attention. Wine wants a basement.

I am, I have come to accept, a basement guy. I like the part of this hobby where you walk past a carboy on a Tuesday night, glance at the airlock, see it bubbling, nod once, and keep walking. There is no diacetyl rest. There is no fifteen-minute hop addition. There is just slow, quiet, patient transformation happening in the dark while you go live your life.

Where we landed

Russ still brews. He has scaled back, mercifully — these days it's three or four batches a year and he no longer pretends the grain mills are both essential. He gave the kegerator away in 2021. He keeps a few bottles of his own beer in the fridge alongside whatever wine we have open, and once or twice a year he'll text me a photo of a new recipe and I'll text back "looks good" and we both know what that means.

I still don't brew. I help him bottle, occasionally, because bottling day for beer is roughly as fun as bottling day for wine and the math on "two people, four hours" works out either direction. But I have not stood over a kettle since that Saturday and I do not intend to.

We still drink each other's stuff. He brings beer to my house in the summer when it's too hot for red wine. I bring a Cabernet to his house in November when it's too cold for an IPA. The blue tape has, somewhere along the way, migrated to his beer bottles too. He says he didn't plan that. I don't believe him, but I'm not going to win that argument either.

That is, more or less, the whole point. You find the version of this that fits your life. For Russ that's two hobbies, a binder, and a garage that smells like hops half the year. For me it's one hobby, a basement, and a workbench that I do not have to stand at for eight hours to make something good. We meet in the middle, around six p.m., with a glass of whichever one of us got it right that season.