If anyone cared to ask, I could define the beer brewing process with one simple phrase: Hurry up and wait. (Axiom: "And sanitize equipment while you're waiting.")

After the frenzy of brewing day last month, it was a relief to get my maiden batch of home brew into the carboy and forget about it during the primary fermentation.

The real challenge was to remember it in a week, not in six months, as beer-fueled Franken-mold bursts from the basement to stalk neighborhood pets and frighten townspeople.

My memory works pretty well where beer is concerned. At the one-week mark, my wife, Linda, and I were slopping beer on the floor (an essential part of the brewing process) as we divided the batch into two smaller carboys, adding black raspberry juice to one, then putting them back into the cool darkness of the coal cellar for a two-week secondary fermentation.

I passed the long wait with frequent, late-night anxiety attacks about mistakes (real and imagined) reducing our hard work to worthless swill.

I visited the basement more in those two weeks than I had in an entire year, popping down every day to check the progress, sniffing the air for suspicious odors.

Eventually, finished beer has to be bottled (or put in kegs) for long-term storage.

My subconscious, seeing this on the horizon long before it bubbled into my conscious mind, allowed two years of beer bottles to pile up in the garage, thus saving the cost of buying new ones.

(I boasted of my prescience, which I thought meant "knowledge of events before they happen" until Linda, a linguistics major, told me it actually derives from an ancient Greek word meaning "lazy.")

Had I known what a pain they are to clean, especially poorly-rinsed hefeweizen bottles with fossilized flakes of yeast sediment glued to the bottom, I'd have been a lot more conscientious about redeeming my empties.

On bottling day, we set about making another mess on the kitchen floor (my next kitchen will have floor drains or a bigger dog) as we siphoned our brew from bulk containers to 12-ounce bottles.

A fine old iron capper from my father-in-law sealed each one with satisfying finality.

Then it was back to the basement for the two more weeks needed to convert priming sugar to carbonation.

Every beer lover should consider trying, at least once, to make their own. At the very least, you'll gain new insight and appreciation for the effort and skill a professional brewmaster puts into the creation of your favorite brew.

If all goes well, you may even hear four glorious words of validation from a complete stranger, as I did while pouring samples at the Independence Brew-B-Q: "This is good beer."

We can now proudly say we made beer. And it is good.

Prost!