Getting started: beers one and two

Chris is organised. He's the sort of person that, deciding he's going to do something, not only buys a book about it first, but spends time researching which book to buy, and then reads it from cover to cover before attempting to do anything for real. The book Chris bought for brewing was How To Brew by John J. Palmer, and it has proved to be a very useful reference.

Armed with instructions, we then had to get equipment. Having not long before moved into our house, a trip with a van to collect flat-pack furniture also included a trip to Brouwmarkt in Almere. I remember pushing the trolley round and trying not to giggle too much while we picked up all sorts of unexpected things; kilos and kilos of dried malt extract (DME) and tiny little packets of dried yeast, buckets and hydrometers and airlocks and glucose, mysterious silver vacuum-shrunk packages of hops and a refreshingly prosaic food-grade plastic stirring paddle. It wasn't what you'd call cheap, but as a considered investment in being able to brew our own beer, it felt worth a go.

On account of our differing tastes in beer, we decided we would brew beers in pairs, one for each of us. There's a chapter in Palmer that takes you through the whole process of brewing your first beer, using one of his own recipes, Cincinnati Pale Ale. So we did that. Two weeks later, we brewed the basic porter recipe from the book, Port O'Palmer. And then a few weeks after that, we had a party and drank it all.

(photo by Bram Nijhof)

Introduction

Welcome to the Fifth Floor Brewery blog. This is an attempt to catalogue the beers we have brewed, the beers we're going to brew, things that go right, things that go wrong, and anything else to do with our beer that amuses me as we go along.

It's called the Fifth Floor Brewery because we needed a name and we live on the fifth floor. In Amsterdam, yes the one in the Netherlands, and no we're not Dutch, but I'm trying to learn it, as well as enjoying a lot of Dutch beers and sometimes missing British ones. Everything is done in our kitchen, except the planning, which is mostly done on the sofa, and the fermentation which normally happens in the spare bedroom. We're not professionals, and this is fine.

'We' are Chris, a computer programmer, and Sherm, an engineer. Chris is the force for light and sunshine in beer form, and mostly prefers to brew golden ales, IPAs and things with sieve-clogging quantities of hops in them. Sherm favours darkness, in the form of porters and stouts, and one day dreams of making something that tastes like alcoholic dandelion and burdock. We both like each other's beers too, though, so this generally works out.

It's arguably ridiculous for me to write about, and you to read about, beer you're probably never going to taste. But hopefully there's some value in it anyway, and you could always come round some time?