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In case you can't tell by the endcaps at your local big box store, which are no doubt filled with all things leprechaun and shamrocks by now, St. Patrick's Day is coming. 

And you know what that means: Beer is about to happen. Lots and lots of beer. 

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With the passing of each St. Pat's, more and more beer drinkers are opting for craft-style beers over the ol'-reliable varieties. Hand in hand with that has come beer lovers who are enthusiastic about learning how the stuff is made, and they're making beer of their own by the gallon at home.

When it comes to figuring out how to put a beer together, we Tulsans are lucky. On the southwest corner of the 71st Street and Memorial Drive intersection is High Gravity, a homebrewing and winemaking supply shop, and the folks who own it, Dave and Desiree Knott, host a free beermaking workshop each month at the store. 

A group of friends and I went to it a couple of weeks ago, and here's what I learned: Whipping up a batch of homebrewed beer is a pretty easy process. The key ingredient? It's time. 

I think most of us can more or less deal with that. If you can boil water, and if you can sit around and wait for long periods of time, you can make beer. 

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First in beer making, of course, is that whole boiling-of-the-water thing I mentioned.

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Next, add some malt extract, whether it's the liquid or powdered form, and bittering hops. 

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Know what a hop looks like? 

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Kinda like that. They're these beautiful little cone flowers from the hop plant that add that lovely bitter taste for which beer is so widely known. Hops can also add citric and floral flavors to a beer, as well as a variety of aromas, depending on the hops you decide to use. 

Mmm...bitterness. Me likey. 

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Something cool about hops is that their use in beer is, as Dave at High Gravity puts it, likened to a good spaghetti sauce. Because while boiling hops adds bitterness, it destroys delicate flavors. Think about how different garlic or basil can taste, depending on when you add it to a recipe. With hops in beer, it's the same sort of thing. So, hops are added to beer in stages to sort of build the flavor profile of the finished product. 

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You can add other ingredients, too, depending on the type of beer you're looking for. 

After you bring that mixture to a rolling boil, cool it rapidly to about room temperature. Then, transfer the whole mess to a fermenting vessel. 

Which is, in the case of many homebrewers, a good, old-fashioned five-gallon bucket. Then, add yeast. That's when the magic happens. 

At this point, you've got a big, plastic bucket full of something called wort. While that sounds pretty gross, it's just a word that means unfermented beer. 

Then comes the hard part: Waiting. It's time to let this sucker ferment for 7-10 days or so. 

At that point you might opt to rack the beer to a secondary vessel. This can help to clear the beer of yeast sediment and avoid any off-flavors that could happen should you decide to stick to the bucket. 

Let the beer spend another week at least in this secondary vessel. After that you can move the beer to a bottle bucket. Add priming sugar (this is a way of naturally carbonating the beer - cool that it does that, huh?), a bottle and leave at room temperature again for 7-10 days. 

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If you want to learn even more about the art of homebrewing, it'd be a good idea to check out a meeting of FOAM, or the Fellowship of Oklahoma Ale Makers. They've have a thing about teaching others and promoting the art of homebrewing since 1984, so if you're looking for some community instruction, there would be a good place to find it. 

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Their next meeting is March 10. That's a Thursday, and the meetings start at 7:30pm and wrap up by 9:30pm. Find it at the Unitarian Church Log Cabin, at 8432 S. Sheridan Road here in Tulsa. The doors open at 7pm. The next meeting after that is April 1. 

If you don't have time for a meeting, check out the FOAM website. It's chock full of beer and beer making information in the form of forums, recipes, news, quotes, homebrewing links and more. http://www.alemakers.com/



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