A couple weeks I took up the challenge to create a beer made entirely out of ingredients from my local co-op. Last week I posted the recipe. Today I finally taste it.

Beers usually sit for 10 days in the bottle, at least, to ensure that they are carbonated. There is a trick people used in their homes way back when to see if a home brew was carbonated: they dropped a raisin in the bottle and when it rose to the top, it was done. I’ve done that trick in the past and tried it again with these. Judging by when the raisin rose, it only took 3-4 days, left out on the counter, for the bottles to carbonate.

I carbonated these in beer bottles since I have tons, but you can carbonate in many different kinds of containers: plastic soda bottles, Mason jars, or anything else with a tight seal. I added about 1/8 tsp of sugar per bottle (or per 12 ozs).

I pulled a bottle out yesterday after refrigerating for a day.

To jog your memory, I was attempting to create a witbier of sorts. A wit is a light Belgian-style wheat beer brewed with orange and coriander. Traditional Belgian wits use a Belgian wit yeast which gives them some spiciness, a hint of fruitiness, and a little bit of a yeasty character. There’s no way to approximate at a grocery store the varied yeasts that home brewers have at their fingertips from home brew stores, so my yeast choice was limited. Up until about four months ago the only yeast that was locally available at all was baking yeast (available at any grocery store) and a couple of relatively clean tasting yeasts from Old Town Liquors on the Strip in Carbondale. (Now, of course, we have the fabulous Windy Hill Hops, a hop farm and home brew store that supplies all of our yeast needs.)

I was tempted to cheat on this recipe and use a simple, clean tasting yeast from Old Town, as I know from previous experience that baking yeast has a really bready, often somewhat sour character. But in the end I decided to go with the baking yeast because part of what gives a wit its flavor is the fact that the yeast has some character. Without it my beer might end up tasting too light — like alcoholic water. In addition, everyone who made beer in their homes once upon a time relied on ambient yeast strains and bacteria, and therefore their beer would have tasted not unlike the flavor you get from baking yeast: slightly sour. So I gave it a whirl.

This definitely ended up being a tart, bready beer with just a hint of citric acid and almost no trace of coriander. It was very cloudy (as wits often are, although this one was cloudy to an extreme), a result of both the flaked wheat and barley I used and probably the very flocculent baking yeast. I liked the flavor the yeast gave to the beer, though. It was refreshing.

Next time I would forgo some of the flaked grains since they didn’t add much in terms of sugar or flavor to the final product. That would help with the clarity. I took some measurements just to see how things were progressing and found that the baking yeast ate 100% of the sugars in the beer. It was certainly productive. And it left me with a very dry brew. I’d keep the baking yeast, then, and pump up the coriander and possibly add a tiny bit of pepper to make it even more aromatic, and similar to the spiciness you might get from a wit yeast.

One thing you can also do to counter the dryness, if you’d like something a tad sweeter, is take a taste of the brew every day and bottle it when it has a sugar level you like. If you do this, though, you must put the bottles in the fridge as soon as they are carbonated because baking yeast will continue to ferment until all of the sugar is gone, continuing to produce carbon dioxide. This could result in some exploding bottles, which, trust me, you do not want.

I must say, though, that some of the best simple and traditional home brews I’ve had have been ones that used fruits or herbs. Sima is a great example of a really easy crowd-pleaser. I think that when trying to create a beer using ingredients from a grocery store, probably the best thing you can do is use fruits, herbs and spices, rather than try to approximate a beer style that uses grains. For this all you need is sugar or honey and fruits, and you can get a very drinkable and inexpensive alcoholic beverage. I’ll be trying my hand at cider this fall when the apples in southern Illinois are in their prime.

This was a noble experiment, worth trying again, perhaps with a different variety of ingredients. The Co-op carries malt extract, which is what home brewers who do not brew all grain use to get the fermentable sugars in their beer. The malt extract available at the Co-op is a darker syrup so would be ideal for a darker beer. I think this winter I’ll try a spiced Co-op home brew.