My name is Eve Rice and I am a Junior, almost Senior, here at Central Washington University. My major is Craft Brewing with a minor in business entrepreneurship and Wine Trade and tourism of the World. For this quarter Dr. Graham, our head of the department, and I decided it was time we came up with ideas and ways to help the program grow, and we decided that we should create a kit as a project that we could potentially sell.

The crazy thing about this project is that it started as something completely different and evolved into an even bigger project. So for this quarter my goal was to do a home brew and try to create a kit that we as a club and program would be able to sell.

So my first step was to create a recipe and see how we can make the best beer for a first time brewer. So Brian, our brew lab tech, spent almost nine hours in the lab testing out a recipe that we could potentially use in the kit for a first time brewer. The recipe we created was as simple as possible with getting maximum amount of flavor as we could. We used a base malt, a caramel malt, and amarillo hops as our main “trio” to create this wort. Once we let this beer ferment for a week and a half we dry hopped it and let it sit for a few more days. We kegged the beer and did a force carbonation in the keg.

We then served our beer at a CWU staff event in mid February and got tons of feedback from the attendees. What I did is I collect all the sheets that were filled out at the event and put all the information into an excel spreadsheet to create a graph to get more of a visual of what was most present and least in the recipe. This was a great help when trying to tweak the recipe into something better for our home brew kits. I then brewed at home and took pictures and wrote down my entire process of what I brewed and how I changed my recipe. I really wanted more hop bitterness and flavor so I altered the recipe so the hops boiled for a bit longer and I added half a pack more of the hop pellets then I did the first time.

Once I got my recipe fully planned, I started researching ways that we could put a kit together. I looked on amazon and at an Ace Hardware in Yakima that has multiple kinds of brew supplies we can get a good price. I then talked more with Dr. Graham and we came up with a game plan on how we are going to make multiple kits for all different levels of brewing from first time brewer to an expert home brewer and that we will put in supplies that one would need for each. We came up with our supply list of what would likely go into each kit. This is where we stopped for the quarter and my next practicum will be to create these kits with the recipe and instructions and take photos for advertisement. The idea and goal is to try and get these kits done and ready for selling by the end of this school year. I can’t wait to update the blog on the kits and post them when they are ready to sell. Thanks for reading!