XLXPA (Xtra Local Xtra Pale Ale)

The (il)logical conclusion to a two-year escalation of the concept “brewing from scratch”, which eventually brought me all the way to growing my own barley and hops in a city backyard… and it was a pretty good beer!

Brewing this beer was bit nerve-wracking– even though I’d gone through every step individually in test batches, I only had 1.5 lbs of grain from this year’s backyard harvest, so every loss along the way (from malting to kilning to mashing to siphoning) would reduce my yield. And the grains I’ve malted were never as high efficiency (meaning how many fermentable sugars you get out of a given mass of grain) as commercially-malted grains, so I expected to need more of them than a recipe would suggest.

In the end, after all these losses, I fermented a roughly one-quart batch of grown-from-scratch beer, and three weeks later filled two 12oz bottles. Yes, two. I have no regrets.

The Process

Growing my own hops, with two prolific harvests, meaning these wouldn’t be the bottleneck to how large a batch I can brew:

One challenge: I didn’t have access to tools to directly measure the alpha acids of these hops– depending on those levels I’d expect to need substantially more or fewer hops to hit the bitterness of the pale ale style I intended to brew. As a workaround, I ran a series of experiments where I made a ‘hop tea’ (hops in hot water) with both my home-grown hops and commercial hop pellets with known alpha acid percentages. I diluted the commercial hop tea with more water until both teas tasted similarly bitter, and used that water ratio to estimate my hops’ relative bitterness.

The same summer I grew a 25 square foot patch of barley, then harvested, threshed, winnowed, and sifted it into 24 oz of raw barley after all the processing was done– not a lot to work with!

I then malted the barley based on experiments I’d done on off-the-shelf seed barley the previous summer: by soaking, germinating, and inspecting it over the course of 4 or 5 days. This started the biochemical process that will enable conversion of starches to sugars during the later brewing process.

For my simple beer recipe, I kilned that barley into three different styles (based on specialty malt experiments I’d done previously): primarily a pale malt (which would supply most of the fermentable sugars after mashing), as well as smaller amounts of ‘biscuit’ and ‘crystal’ style malts to add more complex flavors.

From there, I was ready to brew. I started by cracking the grain mix:

Then I moved to a basic stovetop “brew in a bag” process I use for small batches (2.5 gallons or less), scaled down further to small pots for this small batch. An unexpected benefit of brewing this tiny, less-than-one-gallon batch is I could use water from a temperature-controlled tea kettle to sparge the grains after mashing due to the small amount of water needed.

Thankfully, a refractometer measurement and quick taste test showed this mashing process had produced a reasonable % of sugars (though at a lower efficiency than when using off-the-shelf malted grains), so I moved forward with the boiling and hopping steps (early hopping for bitterness, late hopping for flavor):

After two weeks of fermentation in a one gallon glass carboy, I dry hopped the batch with additional hops, for more aroma:

Finally, when measurements showed most of the sugars in the beer had been converted to alcohol, I bottled it. And what’s a home-brewed beer without a custom label applied with milk paste?

After a few weeks of bottle conditioning, I cracked one open. Very satisfying, even if it was an absurd amount of effort for a beer.