By Dale Conour, executive editor

Our beer is starting to look and taste like, well, beer.

Just to recap, there are three basic stages in making beer:

1. Combining the ingredients (water, hops, barley, yeast, and in our case, wheat and honey) and getting them fermenting;
2. Moving the fermenting beer into a secondary fermenter (a big glass “carboy”) to remove the growing sediment (called “trub”);
3. Pouring the fermented beer into bottles, capping them off, and letting the beer mature and gain a little more clarity.

Last week, we dealt with step 2, taking the opportunity to taste how our brew was coming along. It still had quite a big of sugar to it and was “flat,” but the distinctive hoppiness of beer came through and the honey and wheat flavor made their presence known.

Our beerless leader, Rick, wants to repeat step 2 again to remove more of the trub, then, within a week or two after that, we’ll be bottling. If we can come up with enough empty bottles to sterilize.

A friend has vowed to increase his beer intake to generate the necessary bottles for us. The guy deserves a medal.