Here's the first installment of a three part series. 5 or so hours of work, compressed into less than 15 minutes.

Not our carboy below ;) And yes, I do realize is misspelled "hops."

Step 1: Background

My good friend, Brodie, has an awesome hobby. Last weekend he invited me to watch (and help a little) his next batch of beer, an Irish Red Ale. Between cleaning, sterilizing, boiling, brewing etc. - it Took roughly 5 hours... of mostly waiting. Ironically, it took about the same amount of time to import, cut and edit that video showing off my lacking video skills and my very not radio host voice :) You'll also notice some possibly superstitious beliefs in there (such as the BierBierBier song ;) )

I'm not going to go into the major details of how to brew. It's covered for the most part in the video, but there's some excellent instructables on brewing beer. See links below. You will find some helpful hints, tips and see what your brew should look like.

By far the best part of brewing was the company. We had a good time goofing off and afterwards, a celebratory meal!

Links!
Make Beer - like ours
How To Brew Beer - from scratch

Suppliers
Homebrew Heaven - Where our recipe came from
Northern Brewer - I think he got his hardware (brew pot, fermenter, carboy, keg, etc.) from here

Other Fermentables
Big Batch of Kombucha
Making Kombucha
Root Beer - Only a tiny bit :)