This past Sunday at IGLOO Gallery was pretty festive. Nathan Langler from the PNCA Grad program came over and taught us how to brew beer, we got to help a band make music and we made delicious food.

We brewed a dark winter beer with sour notes and chocolate and caramel and I got to learn all about mash-tons, car-boys, and other cleverly named devices.

Nathan Langler, the brewmaster (left) and Damien Gilley, gallery curator (right) talking about how to bre beer while we are waiting for the water to boil to make the Wort.

The grain mixture for our beer!

It should be ready to drink around January 7th- just about a month away from Sunday. This is my second time brewing beer with Nathan and he is a fantastic teacher, very thorough and devoted to his craft. Nathan’s artistic practice is all about brewing beer and the social constructs around brewing and drinking beer.

Nathan stirs the grain into the hot water in the Mash-ton to make the Wort.

Nathan takes out some of the grain to make a filter at the bottom of a bucket. We will then pour all of the water and grain (Wort-making goodness) into the bucket and drain out all of the liquid back into the Mash-ton. Then it will be the Wort! The whole gallery smelled sweet and sour like malt and sugar. Very nice for a chilly, rainy Sunday. Oh and of course we drank beer the whole time we were making the beer.
Just cause.

Tristan, Anselm’s son is pointing at the liquid draining out of the bucket. It was very hot and I was freaking out that he would stick his fingers into it and get burned and also possibly ruin the beer!
This part of the process, from water-boiling to grain-adding to wort-draining took the longest time. Maybe like 3 hours. We ate a lot of rice and beans and talked and worked on the IGLOO website while we waited.

Once all the grain was separated from the Wort we dumped the grain and went back and put the Wort back on to boil and added these hops that smelled really, really good.

Then Nathan cooled down the whole mixture in the bathroom utility sink (which is huge) with this cool copper tube that had cold water running through the inside of it and then poured hot water out into the sink so that the whole thing cooled down to a specific temperature really fast.

He then poured the contents of the mixture through a strainer to get out the hops and it went into the carboy. The only thing left to do was to add the yeast!

We went through the whole process and now the beer is bubbling away in my kitchen. It sounds like a tap dripping slowly and it’s nice to know that something is growing and fermenting happily in the gallery.

If you want to see the full set of photos from our beer-making adventures go here!

THEN! The band Bones Made of Lazers (Sean Carney and Posie Currin) performed for us and we were able to participate and add to the music; as a group we all got together and clapped to create the rhythmic back-beat for the song. Carney and Currin’s Bones Made of Lazers is an open-source collaborative project involving downloading and reusing stock tracks and backbeats, layering them with keyboards, violin, base and guitar and then reposting the music online for further glitching/reworking and remaking. Sean Carney says he will get me a link to the tunes by this weekend so I will post it up for folks to grab.

And Kelvin Pittman played Sax while they set up for their show

While the music was playing we made a pizza that looked like a laptop computer which I seem to not have photos of but was quite delicious.