Dirty Work: Making Beer from Your Garden Plants Is Easier Than You’d Think

Welcome back to Dirty Work, our new series of dispatches from the MUNCHIES Garden. We're inviting chefs, bartenders, and personalities in the world of food and drink to explore our edible playground and make whatever the hell inspires them with our rooftop produce. The results:MUNCHIES Garden recipes for you, dear reader. In the latest installment, our beer columnist, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø of Evil Twin Brewing, makes a light beer with ingredients from the MUNCHIES garden.

Joey Pepper dropped out of college to make beer. When we were in the middle of building out Tørst, it was a complete mess. We had already hired all the staff and this little guy came walking in off the street one day with a big smile on his face and asked, "Are you guys hiring?" Then again, he always has a smile on his face. I was like, "Uh, not really, man," because we already found all of the hires we needed. Joey Pepper said, "OK," shrugged his shoulders, and asked me if I wanted a beer while he pulled out two very good, hard to find ones from his backpack. That's when I realized, Alright, there's something about this guy that's pretty cool. We looked at the restaurant schedule and found a way to fit him into it. So he started at Tørst and has been there ever since.

Since then, we've named some Evil Twin beers after him, which even have his face on the labels. I think it's because he's such a funny, cool little dude. He was around 22-years-old when he started at Tørst. He's very knowledgeable, passionate, and service-minded. We sold 20,000 barrels of Evil Twin beer last year, so for me, it doesn't make any sense to make five gallons of homebrew anymore. Homebrewing takes the same amount of time to make a barrel of beer as it takes to make 100 barrels of beer, but Joey Pepper is a mad genius with homebrewing and knows all of the little tricks to making it taste great. And when we swung by the MUNCHIES rooftop garden earlier this year, we wanted to see if we could bottle our own beer with ingredients from the garden. Naturally, I brought Joey Pepper along to get some magic going.

Bikini Beer is one of our best sellers. We big scale brew the stuff. I created it four years ago. One day, I was working late at night, and I like to drink beer when I work, but if you drink an 8 percent one, you're going to get tired, so you can't really concentrate the work. So I thought about this idea about making a low-alcohol IPA—scale the alcohol content down while keeping everything else in there. The results: the same flavor profile, the same level of hops, but less of a gnarly hangover. So I took one of my 7 percent IPA's and scaled it down to 2.7 percent. In Denmark, if beer is 2.7 percent or lower in ABV, it's not considered "beer" for some weird reason, and there are no taxes. So it's kind of a fun little gimmick to say this is a "tax-free" beer. So that's why I picked 2.7 percent specifically. It's just a low ABV IPA. So we made this beer and ended up selling it all over the world. Then Brooklyn Brewshop—who makes beer kits—contacted me and asked if I wanted to make a beer kit to include everything for a homebrewer to make the Bikini Beer, and I said "Why the hell not?" They sell a shit ton of beer kits in the US and have recently created a series of kits from professional beer makers so that you can try to brew your favorite kind at home and see if your results match the professional's work. I gave them my recipe, and then they scaled it down to one gallon, put the kit together—hops and everything—and packaged it.

I wanted to give the kit a whirl myself, so a few months ago, me and Joey Pepper showed up to the VICE HQ lobby at 8 AM with a suitcase full of our brew kit and some ice cold beers (for drinking during brewing.)

We could have followed the Bikini Beer recipe to a T from the kit, but I also encourage people to experiment during homebrewing. That's the way you learn: if you just follow a recipe, you're not going to learn everything. Every cook, chef, brewer, and creative person wants to put their fingerprint something. When we got walked out onto the MUNCHIES rooftop garden in the new office and saw the giant herb garden, we thought it would be fun to try to make a MUNCHIES version of the beer.

So we walked around and tasted different botanicals and settled on lemon verbena—which I must confess, I have actually used in beers many times before. I think it really matches with pale ales and IPAs really well because it has that refreshing, lemony flavor. You have to be careful when you use herbs and spices, because they can overpower the brew, but with fruit, you can tone back the flavor. It can bring really good flavors or totally over do it and make the stuff undrinkable. I have had many star anise-flavored beers that taste like shit. Flavoring beer is not much different than cooking. Would you boil an orange or an apple? I wouldn't. Would you boil lemon verbena? Sure, lemon verbena tea is nice. You can add most of the spices during the boil. If it's fruit you're after, add it after fermentation when you want a clean, fruit flavor.

So after we snipped enough fresh lemon verbena leaves from the garden, we went back inside and pulled out our homebrew kit, strainers, a bucket, a glass fermentation vessel, an airlock, a thermometer, and a chiller. After the boil, you're gonna need to chill this stuff down before you add the yeast.

As we started boiling the mash, it was fun to look around the VICE lobby and get a bunch of odd stares, because our setup was not unlike a creepy science experiment. A lot of people came over and asked, "What the hell are you doing?" but once we told them that we were making beer, they thought it was awesome, or at least pretended like it was.

It's an unwritten rule that when you homebrew, you have to drink. It's inspiration. You can't be a good chef if you don't taste other people's food. If you never go out to eat or expose yourself to new flavors, how are you going expand your mind? That's why we starting drinking some beers from Treehouse Brewing while we started making the MUNCHIES Bikini Beer. It's a brewery in Massachusetts that's extremely popular right now. That stuff tastes delicious.

Great brewing starts with cleanliness. It's actually easier to brew beer at home than people realize. I always compare it to cooking. There are a couple things you have to do different but other than that, it's like going into a kitchen and cooking. Everybody can do it. Some are better than others, but everyone can put ingredients together and get something edible out of it. But of course, in brewing, there are certain rules: you have to use grains and hops; you have to mash and boil and all that. But if you can read the directions to a beer recipe, then you can make beer. The biggest hurdle for first timers is cleanliness. Many will tell you that being a professional brewer is 10 percent brewing, 90 percent cleaning. Be very strict and meticulous. When you make beer, you're dealing with a living organism, yeast, so like all living organisms that feel shitty, they can get sick. And if there is just the slightest amount of dirt or bacteria in there, it can make the beer go bad. It will happen to every home brewer. It's called an "infection," which can happen slowly or overnight. You might make a beer that tastes absolutely fine and save some of it for later, but a month later, it's completely undrinkable. I once made a beer in my basement and when I walked down there, there was beer everywhere because all of the bottles exploded. I wish it was the remnants of a frat party. Be very strict about cleaning and you'll be fine.

Once you're ready, you'll start making a beer by creating the mash: releasing the sugar out of the grains. You'll achieve this by boiling it at a low temperature. After that, you'll boil the beer. Up to that point, cleaning is not that important because when you boil, you are going to kill everything anyways. So if there is something unclean from the grains or the pot, you'll boil it it and kill off the infection anyway. But after you boil and cool it down and add the yeast, that's when the sugar turns into alcohol. That's where things can go wrong and get dangerous. Since you're adding the yeast at a low temperature, the yeast is alive and converting sugar into alcohol, but that's also where it can catch whatever bacteria is in there and get sick.

I've brewed beers all over the world, but brewing in the VICE lobby was extremely fun. People find cooking very interesting, but I think they always find beer a little more exciting because aside from it tasting great, it can also get you fucked up. Whenever I get through customs at JFK, the customs staff are always so angry—probably because they hate their jobs. Every time I approach them, they are so unfriendly, but when they notice that my visa says that I'm a brewer, they just light up and say, "Wow! I like beer! What is the brand?" It's funny how beer is a conversation starter. I felt the same way at the VICE office. "You're brewing beer? What the fuck?" people asked. All of a sudden, the work day became very interesting.