On December 25, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Mom J gave her son, Brewmaster Z, a five-gallon beer making kit purchased from More Beer. You remember those days – we weren’t going much of anywhere or doing much of anything. We were bored and in need of a time-consuming distraction. And if a little alcohol was involved, even better!

After reading the instructions, we made a masked-up trip to our local More Beer showroom before they closed on New Year’s Eve. (We are fortunate to live less than a mile away from what is probably the largest More Beer location in the chain. This proximity was a catalyst for the adventures to come.) There we added an 8.5 gallon kettle and the ingredients kit for our first homebrew, American Ale, and yeast.

On New Year’s Day, 2021, we brewed our first batch of beer. Did our first brew day go perfectly smoothly? Well, the kettle barely fit under the hood of the stove. Even spanning two burners on high, it took forever to boil. We consulted the instructions approximately six million times. We had no idea what the hot break should look like. We looked up videos on Youtube. After the boil, we had to cool the wort by putting the kettle in a sink full of ice water, which took forever to reach the temperature for adding the yeast. Still, at the end of the day, we took a proper original gravity reading and decanted 5.5 gallons of wort into a plastic bucket, added the yeast, sealed up the bucket, and inserted the air lock.

Then we put the plastic bucket in the bathtub and we waited for two weeks. Was the temperature right? What activity were we supposed to see in the air lock? Was it fermenting? What was that ring of foamy crud around the top? Did we screw up?

Just shy of two weeks later, we went back to More Beer and picked up two cases of beer bottles. We took a final gravity reading, transferred the beer from the fermenting bucket to the bottling bucket, added the sugar solution for conditioning, and bottled two cases of beer, during which processes we again consulted the instructions approximately six million times.

Technically, according those frequently consulted instructions, you’re supposed to allow two weeks for conditioning/carbonation, but this was our first batch and we were impatient. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021, we chilled and opened three bottles of ale – one for Brewmaster Z (BZ), one for Mom J (MJ), and one for Dad E (DE). It was sufficiently, if somewhat lightly, carbonated. And it was tasty! So many subsequent adventures might never have happened had it been a complete failure.

Since it was American Ale, our first brew, and opened on Inauguration Day, we dubbed our beer “Inauguration Ale.”