Waiting for Your Home Made Beer is the Hardest Part
When it comes to brewing your own beer the most difficult step is the fermentation and aging process. After all, the steps leading up to the time when you wait for beer to mature is full of activity.   From shopping for new equipment and ingredients, to cleaning and preparation to boiling the wort to cooling and preparing for fermentation, it’s a fun process; just what you want from a great hobby. Before you share your new beer with the guys at the next poker game and while you are waiting on your beer to ferment,  why not sharpen your poker skills with video poker games to help take your mind off the wait.

A wait that seems to take forever.  Especially if this is one of your first batches or if you tried a new grain or hops, you are eager to see how good the beer will taste.  And you are eager to serve your home made beer to friends and family.  But you also know that if you break in and interrupt the process too soon, the beer you drink will be unsatisfactory and not nearly as rich and flavorful as how it will be when the aging process is done.  So you wait, sometimes impatiently.

One way to continue enjoying the "fun part" of home brewing is to have fresh batches of beer in production each week. If you went that route, you would eventually end up with a lot of beer in various stages of fermentation and aging and you would have to date and mark the storage bottles so you know which beer is ready to use and which needs more time to reach maturity.  And when you consider that an average minimum size of a home beer brewing cycle results in five gallons of beer, that can mean you will have a lot of finished beer around that you and your buddies can sample on a regular basis.  

The time between when beer is bottled after the brewing process is complete until it is ready to taste can be anywhere from six weeks to six months if you include both fermentation and aging.  The actual aging process is pretty fascinating and understanding it helps you develop patience for nature to take its course.  During fermentation, the yeast will work to change the structure of the sugar that was part of the brewing process.  As the fermentation continues, carbon dioxide is created and this gives  your beer that bubbly quality that is a big part of the appeal of the beverage.  

Fermentation also pushes sediments from the yeast and proteins and these sediments would hurt the taste of your beer if the cycle were interrupted.  It's worth it to let the process naturally cure the beer so these unwanted byproducts naturally work their way out of the finished product.  It does take a lot of patience to be a brewer, even a home brewer because allowing the aging process to produce perfect beer may take over a month or even longer.  But this waiting is just as much a part of making great beer as the boiling and fermenting so you have to nurture the patient side of yourself to get a great outcome.