Do you ever wonder what professionals in the brewing industry do on their off days? Well some of them, like Drew Huerter, homebrew. Last week I was invited over to Drew’s house, along with Brennan from Schlafly and Charlie from O’Fallon Brewery and Jeff (another excellent local homebrewer), to help brew up two different batches of beer. The first beer was a rye pale ale. The second beer was a very special beer, it’s going to be a wedding beer.

When you’re a Schlafly brewer and you’re going to get married, you get the privilege of brewing up a beer specifically for your wedding. In this case it’s Brennan that’s getting married and he’s decided to brew a American Brown Ale with a hell of a lot of hops. He wanted to homebrew the recipe first before brewing a big batch at The Tap Room. Brennan asked his friend Drew to help, as he is probably one of the best homebrewers in St. Louis. So I headed out on Sunday, which is part of my excuse for forgetting about the St. Louis gift blog, to brew with some of the brewers that make our local beer.

I arrived at Drew’s house on Sunday around 11:30. Drew had given me the heads up that since this was going to be a double brew day he was starting around 8AM. But a pillow was calling my name at 8AM on a Sunday. When I arrived the boil for the rye beer was almost complete as was the mash for Brennan’s brown. The copper device you see to the left is an immersion wort chiller, it uses cool water to cool the wort down as quickly as possible.

No sooner than Drew turned on the hose to start pushing water through the chiller it sprung a leak, which causes Brennan and Drew to find a way to clamp it. Hose water and cooled wort can be a dangerous combo. You’ve just spent a good amount of time sanitizing your wort, so the last thing you want to do is contaminate it with hose water. Little did we know that hose water would be the least of our concerns. Find out what else happened after the jump. Read the rest…