Homebrewing in the collective

 

I dreamed I was living in a collective with some of the guys from work. For fun, someone had initiated a home brewing challenge to see who could brew the best beer. The process was more like distillation than actually brewing from scratch. The science behind it was pretty sketchy, since it relied on evaporation, and no provisions were made for collecting the vapors. Basically, we were taking bottles of beer and opening them, placing them near various heat sources and then drinking the leftover contents once a certain percentage of the liquid had boiled off.

I placed my beer bottles in a 4 cup glass Pyrex container and hung it on a nail near the door. I could tell right away that this wasn't going to work. The nail was bent and sagging in the weak drywall, and I knew it wouldn't take much to knock the container off the wall. It was just one of those things that you do, knowing full well that it will have a poor outcome.

Sure enough, after 5 minutes or so, I returned to find all my beer bottles empty and on the ground. I was dismayed. After scrounging around to rustle up a couple more beer bottles with which to start over, I gave up and went around  to see how my friends' projects were coming along. David Chanh had boiled his on the stove, as had James Reed. 

"Can try a sip of yours?" I asked James, noticing that he was drinking out of one of my Weller House coffee mugs.

He nodded and handed me a cup full of the warm brew. I took a sip and was underwhelmed. It tasted like warm water with only a hint of alcohol. It confirmed my suspicion that rather than enhancing the beer and making it more concentrated, we were actually boiling off the alcohol.

"This tastes like weak tea," I told him. 

"Tastes fine to me," he said, convinced that his project was an unqualified grade A success.

"But we all know that alcohol is the first thing to evaporate," I said, "and boiling beer with the tops off, or letting it sit out in open bottles all day, will only result in weaker beer. If you pour rubbing alcohol on the counter next to some water, the alcohol will evaporate first." I demonstrated my theory right there on the kitchen counter, and the elements behaved as I'd predicted.

"That doesn't prove anything," James said, continuing to sip from my mug.

I wasn't thrilled that he'd appropriated my mug, but I was mostly miffed that my beer had been mishandled while I was away for 5 minutes. I suspected that it was one of my other roommates who had simply taken the beers and drank them, placing the bottles on the floor to make it look like an accident. I went off in search of the offender, but nothing came of it. I woke up, and that was that.