Brewing and stewing

I got a pot for Christmas.

As pots for personal use go, this one is rather on the large side measuring in at 40 quarts of gleaming polished aluminum and steel. For people like my daughter, who dozed through the conversion of measurement units in their science classes, this works out to being 10 gallons.

When people think of 10 gallons, their first thought is usually to the misnamed 10-gallon hats that were worn by movie cowboy in the spaghetti westerns I grew up watching on Saturday afternoons. In reality those styles of Stetsons would at most hold about a quarter of that amount, not that anyone would destroy just to use it as a make-shift bucket.

As the saying goes, a pint is a pound the whole world round, 10 gallons of water equals out to being about 80 pounds. I say about, because again, as those who didn’t zone out in science class could tell you, judging weight by volume is a tricky business at best and one that is prone to error. Regardless, 80 pounds of anything is not something you would want to carry around on your head.

There are many practical uses in the food service industry for a pot of this size and even larger. The uses are less so in home kitchens. Even growing up as part of a family of 10 (eight kids and my parents) the largest pot we had was 16-quarts and would be pulled out when my mom would make a batch of her famous stuffed peppers or our “enthusiastic stew” – so named because we threw everything we had into it.

For those of us who grew up in big families, it was never unusual that in addition to the immediate members of our family, there would be assorted friends and other guests joining us at the table. Perhaps it is a bias of my perception, but larger families always seemed more inclined to share what they had, no matter how modest it was, than the far smaller families of my classmates. No matter how crowded the table became at our house, there always seemed to be space for one more.

As I eagerly unwrapped my massive shiny pot, it occured to me that my wife and I are much closer to being empty-nesters than in having a houseful of hungry mouths to feed. This would make getting such a large pot comically impractical if food service was on my mind.

While a bubbling vat of 40 quarts of chicken soup sounds like a cure for an entire neighborhood of cold sufferers, the primary purpose of my new pot is for the brewing of beer. In addition to its large size, the pot has a thermostat telling me the exact temperature of my bubbling wort - that is wort with an “O” and not with an “A.” One is a sweet broth made with grains, malt and hops and the other is something to see a dermatologist about.

I currently use a much smaller pot as my primary brew kettle meaning that I must make a more concentrated wort which I then end up adding water to in order to bring it to the 5 gallons of a typical home brew batch. For those who measure beer by the can or bottle this comes out slightly more than two cases of brew. By comparison a small batch for microbrewery would be six times that amount while a commercial operation would produce many thousands of times that amount at one time. As the only beer drinker in my household, five gallons at a time is plenty.

My new pot will allow me to cook an entire batch of brew all at once giving me greater control and hopefully improving the end product. It also gives me the potential to try my hand at doing some all-grain brewing through the brew in a bag process before trying to convince my family of the need to invest in sparge and liquor tanks and further make my neighbors and people driving by wonder what exactly I am cooking up in my driveway.

For now, I am left to admire my shiny new pot and begin plotting out what I will be brewing up in the coming year. At this point, I am like the gardener this time of year who dreams about next summer’s harvest. Fortunately for me, a batch of beer takes far less time from planning to enjoying, so chances are pretty good that the next mild day this winter may see me putting my fancy new pot to the test.