It Takes a Village to Raise a Beer

“You want to make what???”

At first I thought maybe my meager Spanish wasn’t good enough to get the point across. It turned out that I did a sufficient job explaining, but it was such a ridiculous thing to do that she couldn’t comprehend it. For some reason it didn’t seem that strange to me that I was asking a woman in a village in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon if I could hire her sons to build a cooking fire for me so that I could brew beer.

After spending a month in the jungle doing volunteer work, it didn’t take long before I was trying to think of a way that I could brew beer there. I already had dry malt extract, dry yeast, sanitizer, and hop pellets and could purchase a kettle and plastic bucket in the city of Iquitos before heading upriver to the village. With this plan in mind, I carefully packed up my dry malt extract, hops, sanitizer, thermometer, spoon, airlock, and rubber seal and headed to Iquitos, Peru, the largest city in the world that can only be reached by boat or plane.

There I was able to buy a kettle and a large plastic bucket to use as a fermenter. Once in the village, I looked into procuring the brewing necessities: fire and water. The people in the village cook on wood fires, so I was able to hire a couple of kids to make one for me and loan me their metal grate. Water is readily available there, but it has to be retrieved from the well and includes a healthy amount of moss.

After hauling up several gallons of water, we got the fire going. While waiting for the water to boil I used a colander to get out as much of the moss as I could. My assistant brewers did a great job on the fire and the water started boiling surprisingly quickly.

Once I added the dry malt extract, it started boiling over, so they pulled some wood from the fire and it went down almost immediately. The one hour boil was pretty boring for the people that came around to see what the crazy foreigner was doing. I think they were expecting something more exciting than a pot of brownish-green boiling liquid.

The hardest part turned out to be chilling the wort. Unfortunately, I didn’t come up with a plan for this beforehand, so I had to simply let it air cool. Cooling the kettle in the river would have been a better solution, but it was too far away from the spot where I was brewing and carrying the kettle that far would have been a risky endeavor. The wort didn’t get down to pitching temperature for several hours, so it had to sit out overnight. I put a colander on top of the fermentation vessel to strain out the moss, poured the wort in, and pitched the yeast. Then all I could do was seal it up and hope for the best.

The bucket also turned out to be a few gallons too big. A smaller bucket with a tight seal would have probably yielded better results. I cut a hole in the lid of the bucket and put in a rubber seal and an airlock, which turned out to be a mistake. The lid didn’t fit tightly enough on the bucket even with the tape I put around the edge and the hole for the airlock didn’t seal well. Therefore, I didn’t see any airlock activity at all, so I wasn’t sure if the yeast were at work or not. And with sanitation being such a challenge in the jungle, opening it to check was completely out of the question. I didn’t even take a hydrometer with me since I didn’t want to add risk of infection and wasn’t concerned about gravity anyway. Luckily the bucket had a spigot at the bottom, so I was able to take a sample without taking off the lid. It didn’t taste good, but it did taste fermented, so I knew that things were progressing.

I let fermentation go for about two weeks, during which time I was constantly asked how the beer was going. The people there make a fermented drink from yucca, but to them beer is something that comes in bottles. The fact that someone was making it in their village was very interesting, so when I invited everyone over for a tasting they happily accepted. It had a bit of skunkiness to it, but it was certainly the best that I had ever had in the jungle and everyone that tried it seemed quite pleased.

I felt that I had accomplished a great feat by merely producing drinkable beer. We sat around outside drinking my homebrew and listening to stories until the rain started, then moved the party indoors. The five gallon batch was gone in just a few hours and I was asked many times when I was going to come back and make beer again. I hope that I will have the opportunity to go back again someday and do just that.