Brewing in Memoriam

I love homebrewing. I love diving into the details of the recipe, geeking out on equipment, connecting with a rich and timeless community of beer lovers, and understanding just what RDWHAHB means. During the last fifteen years, I’ve learned that brewing is more than just making beer. It’s about connecting with fellow brewers and sharing the experience of beer with friends and family, celebrating birthday parties, weddings, holidays, and other special events. There’s something quite special about showing up to a neighbor’s picnic with a handful of fresh German Pils. And nothing beats a yearly tradition of brewing a strong beer with a couple of buddies for the winter months. For me, these joyous experiences are the essence of home-brewing. Otherwise, it’s just beer.

While brewing can be meaningful for celebrations, it also can be a therapeutic distraction during difficult times. During uncertain times, normalcy helps us stay grounded and sort through chaos. No matter what’s happening in the world around us, we can still escape into our brew space early Saturday morning. There’s a comfort in fretting over pH and starch conversion when the world around us is heavy. After these past years, I’m sure many of us can appreciate the relief of the simple and the familiar.

In May 2020, my world shifted from lockdown Zoom meetings and homeschooling to flying to Jim’s home to begin working through the shock with my family. It was hard and unsettling to be there without him, but there was one moment of peace when I found two familiar friends tucked away in his refrigerator – hops and yeast. When I saw Jim a few months earlier, he told me how he had picked up the ingredients to get back into home-brewing but couldn’t find the time to do it because of his demanding work schedule. Jim wasn’t a hardcore brewer, but he brewed 1-gallon BIAB batches with friends to relax and escape the real world for a bit. As we sorted through his house, I found the few pounds of grains he had stashed away for a happier day. It was a gift – something familiar amidst the chaos.

The chaos of the following days and weeks turned to months of disbelieving grief. I tried to piece together the puzzle of what really happened that fateful night, searching for answers to why someone with no previous history of mental illness was now gone. As I worked through the grieving process, talking with counselors and finding support with family and friends, I realized one thing I was seeking was a personal connection with my late brother.

Because of these similarities, finding ways to remember Jim wasn’t a problem for me. I could connect with him when hiking, fishing, hunting, smoking his pipe, or wearing his jacket, but I wanted to find something deeper, a unique shared experience between him and me. After a few weeks, it hit me – brewing was the bond I was looking for. Though we never brewed together, we were always connected through homebrewing.

The year following a death is a year of firsts. I knew Jim’s first birthday without him was going to be tough, but as the day approached, I found comfort in our shared hobby. While it was a very hard day, brewing helped tether me. It kept me from retreating too deeply into dark places by giving me a purpose and allowing me to stay focused on something tangible. That day, I celebrated him by making the beer he never got around to making.

I’ve been making a Christmas barleywine every year for about a decade, and I used the same techniques for this beer. I perform a partigyle mash to get the richest sugars in the first runnings with a long boil to develop deep caramel and dark fruity flavors. To be true to his ingredients, I added more Rahr Pale ale malt to bump up the gravity. The hops in an English-style barleywine are there to balance sweetness, so Sorachi Ace and US Saaz worked for a bittering addition. I was a little short on hops, but I lucked out and grabbed the last ounce of Sorachi Ace in the homebrew shop just before brewday. Muton’s ale yeast isn’t quite world-renown for making fine beer, but I think that’s more to do with the product than the yeast strain. Since the tiny packet of unknown age and origin would be problematic in such a huge beer, I grew up a starter with a tiny amount of yeast and saved the rest of the packet to pitch alongside the starter.

To add a personal element to this beer, I decided to age it with oak and bourbon as a nod to Jim’s love of bourbon. After racking the beer to secondary, I added a medium plus-toasted American white oak spiral that was soaked in bourbon for a few weeks along with excess bourbon (maybe a few tablespoons). After four months of aging at cellar temperature, I transferred it to a keg, force carbonated it, and bottled.

One thing none of us could quite understand was his seemingly strange call sign. While highly adventurous, Jim was introspective, practical, and humble — not the type of personality that you would call a “pimp”. His closest friends didn’t even know the origin of this call sign until we were all sitting at my parent’s dining room table after Jim’s funeral. One of his buddies disclosed a story we had never heard before, that PIMP was an acronym for “Poop In My Pants.” Apparently, pilots simply can’t take a break while flying a mission, so sometimes things happen… This perfectly described Jim — poop jokes are always funny, but the joke was much funnier by him not telling everyone.

I will never have a chance to brew with my brother in life, but I will continue to brew with him after his death. Our shared love of brewing is a gift I will always treasure, and this barleywine will connect us even long after the last bottle is empty.