St. Paul Brewing Helps Customers Create Tasty Brews

ST. PAUL, Minn. (WCCO) – Have you ever wanted to brew your own beer but didn't know where to start?

Well, a St. Paul company will walk you through the steps, and even do the dirty work for you.

WCCO's Kim Johnson headed to Vine Park Brewing Company to learn all the tricks to making tasty beer.

Between the ingredients, equipment and nailing the recipes, brewing beer just sounds hard.

But at Vine Park Brewing Company you can leave the tricky stuff up to people like Andy Grage.

"I started home brewing in 1990 right after I graduated college and fell in love with it," Grage said.

Since 1996, Grage has been sharing his passion with others at this state-of-the-art facility.

Vine Park provides the tools and the guidance to brew your beer of choice.

"We take care of the clean-up. We pay attention to all the details," Grage said.

First step, pick out a recipe.

"We have about 50 different recipes for people to choose from," Gage said.

"I'm a big IPA person. Do you have IPA," Kim Johnson asked Gage.

"Oh, absolutely. IPA's are huge right now," he said.

Then,  you start measuring ingredients.

"Well, the first thing you're going to want to do is measure out your malted barley extract. And that's going to provide most of the flavor in the beer," Gage said.

The barely extract is poured into a kettle. Then we talk the heart of an IPA, hops.

"So hops are going to provide the bitterness that offset the sweetness of the malt. And the way hops work is the longer you boil them the more bitterness you extract from them," Gage said.

After we add the hops, we measure out distilled water and sprinkle in the yeast

"Yeast is going to eat the fermentable sugars in the malted barley extract and convert them into alcohol," Gage said.

The yeast is pitched in our kettle, poured into bucket and tagged.

"You are done," Gage said. "We are now going to hang on to it for two weeks."

Vine Park babysits your beer for two weeks while it ferments and cold ages in the cooler.

Then you come back for bottling and Kim's favorite part: tasting.

A batch of beer, which is 72 - 22 ounce bottles, will cost you anywhere from $150-$200.

You can also make wine, or buy root beer there.