First Homebrew: Fighting with a ceramic cooktop

As some of you may know, I have decided to try home brewing. I have got all the stuff. I have tried it. This is my brief report: I hate our stupid stove.

Making the beer was a challenge, but the biggest challenge was that our stove could not be bothered to heat things to the boiling point.

As you can imagine, you need to boil a lot of water to make a big batch of beer. Three to four gallons (roughly 11-15 liters) at a time, in fact. The biggest pot we owned had a capacity of about two gallons. So I went out to Zeller’s on Saturday night and bought a $29 stock pot. Got it home and found that it wouldn’t really boil water on the stove.

Why would a pot not boil water you may ask? Well, our #%@^%# stove has a flat ceramic surface. The pot does not have a flat bottom. If you were looking at this pot upside down, you’d see a depression like a bowl cut into the bottom. Almost like looking at the bottom of a frisbee, except not as deep and with a much larger rim. I assume the purpose of this is to sit right down over an electric stove burner, kind of hugging it or something.

Our stove has no damn burners except under a sheet of glass. This means that when the pot is on the stove it has a nice air gap between the bottom of the pot and the stove. In other words, the pot is incompatible with our stove. Who thought you were going to have to evaluate compatibility of cooking appliances.

Of course, by the time I convinced myself of this I had 3 gallons of not-boiling beer on my stove.

I threw out the batch of beer and went to the Bay and bought a proper pot. $179 on sale for $80. Grr. Then I went to a homebrewing store and bought more ingredients with which to start again. Grr.

Got the new pot home. It worked better, but not that much better. You see the stove element is probably 8” across, and these pots are like 14-15” across. The stove manual pompously explains that the stove will only work if the pots are “matched to the burner size”. I hate this stove. How likely do you think I am to find a 20 quart pot that is 8” across at the bottom. Grr. Anyway, the beer boiled a bit, so I am hoping that that will be sufficient.

I was prepared for problems with the beer, but I don’t think that it’s a stretch to suggest that a stove should be able to boil water in a stock pot. A stove that doesn’t cook: Who decided that this was going to be a good plan? (And you can’t cook with Aluminum. And you can’t cook with cast iron. And you can’t move the pots around while you’re cooking. And it can’t be cleaned except with expensive cream. And. And. And. Who are these people!)

I started at 9:30 am and finished at 9:30 pm. Phew. I am very tired now, and a bit surprised at what can go wrong in a recipe with only three steps: Boil grain sugars. Add pinecone bits. Add yeast.

Despite all this, I am hopeful that the beer will be good. I am working from Palmer’s How To Brew eBook which is excellent. I have read much of the book, including all the beginner stuff. I do like the idea of brewing my own beer, but I think it will take several batches before I get the hang of things. In particular I need to develop techniques to avoid dirtying sanitized things that I’ve used and will use again.

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