Before & After, part I

Since this semester is getting very busy, I'm going to take a quick break from relaying stories about my travels to Denmark to share 2 updates on my side projects you may have heard about. First, I think I mentioned that our apartment here in White Plains was being converted to a Belgian monastery (at least in terms of brewing). Well, the transformation is complete (and successful)!

In case you forgot, this is what things looked like at the outset...

Following the excitement of our brewing evening, many boring weeks of fermentation followed, and they generally looked like this:

Pretty boring, right? It was exciting to see the bubbles produced from the fermentation process as they escaped from the airlock (at least when compared to the level of excitement contained in the cases we were reading simultaneously). In any event, it was soon time for bottling, so Dan and I temporarily re-prioritized use of our dishwasher (see photo)...

...and then we neatly bottled everything in our hygienically superior, monastery-like brewery (office closet).

Actually, it's not quite accurate to say that we bottled everything. There is actually a fair amount of stuff that you don't want to imbibe, as evidenced by the following photo (warning: the following photograph contains graphic depictions of deceased yeast. Not suitable for all viewers)...

Thankfully, none of the Ghostbusters-esque gloop escapes the notice of the resident brew monks, who suffered through some interim quality control checks before allowing the beer to bottle condition and carbonate for a further 2 weeks.

In the end, it was most definitely worth the effort, sweat, and tears (it's not easy to wash 100 billion of your yeast friends down the tub, after all). Look at our gorgeous Trappist ale (*technically, only a few monasteries in the world can produce actual Trappist Ale, so this is actually just Trappist style). Note the wonderful little champagne bubbles produced by the bottle conditioning process...you won't find many beers like this! All in all, we're very happy with our initial foray into an unknown hobby, and time permitting, we will probably be back at it soon!