My best friend, Eric, and I made beer last weekend. We are kings.

Actually, we only bottled the beer. We made the stuff a few weeks ago, and it has spent the interim in a massive glass jug in Eric's closet, slowly transforming from smelly brownish liquid to sweet, beloved, almost-beer.

The fact that it is unfinished and not yet proper beer didn't keep me from tasting it, though. I love beer; even if it isn't yet beer. If I were reading this column, rather than writing it, this is what I would see: "Blah blah blah beer. Blah beer blah blah beer beer."

Presently, our not-really-beer tastes like, well, something that's been sitting in someone's closet for three weeks.

Now that the stuff is bottled, we've put it back in Eric's closet, where the beer fairy lives. Over the next several weeks, she will magically transform our almost-beer into full-on beer.

Brewing my own beer has long been one of those things I dream about. I'm a simple man -- I dream about having a closet full of beer and a wife who likes to get undressed. Sadly, both of those things require far more effort on my part than I would like. To be honest, I haven't got a clue as to how to consistently achieve the latter. But I think I'm getting the hang of this brewing.

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Well, Eric's getting the hang of it.

A little more than a year ago I pointed out that the person who originally thought up beer must have been an absolute genius. I've always imagined him walking through a field of barley and hops and saying to himself: "What a beautiful field this is. I wish I could drink it."

I'm not nearly that bright. I am the kind of person to be fascinated by popcorn.

While brilliant minds are brewing beverages and convincing their wives to pole dance, I am sitting at a table, my greasy, salt-speckled fingers dangling a piece of popcorn before my furrowed brow: "Ooh. What interesting shapes popcorn makes. I wonder if pieces of popcorn are like snowflakes? I think I will try to find a piece of popcorn that looks just like this one that I am holding. I will eat all the pieces that don't look like this one. Maybe I should make another bag of popcorn. Yay! I'm gonna eat two bags of popcorn today!"

So Eric was the brains of the operation. He has a large book on beer-making that he consults as frequently as Billy Graham consults the Bible, and he has gone to the trouble to learn the proper names of all the parts of his equipment. Whereas I would be content to refer to things as "that curvy tube," or "this big ol' thingymabob," he uses terms like "fermentation lock" and "carboy."

According to an extensive Google search, the first people to brew beer were the ancient Sumerians. If those original beer-makers were around today, Eric likely would have kicked them out of his kitchen because he approaches the process as if it were surgery.

"Are your hands sterilized?" he asked me as we got ready.

"They're clean, yeah," I said.

"No. Are they sterilized? We can't have any material getting into the beer."

He said "material" the same way you would say "monkey poop."

I was then directed to lather in hand sanitizer before being allowed to touch anything else. As I say, things got pretty complicated after that. Eric explained everything that we were doing and used all the proper terminology and lost me so completely that I would start to think about NASCAR. Then he would bring me back around by saying something like, "and then we'll get to drink the beer in about two weeks."

"Huh? What? Drink beer? Me drink beer," I would stammer, and he would put me back to work cleaning ... erm, I mean, sterilizing bottles.

At the end of it all, we had 47 bottles of beer sitting in Eric's closet. It will be a long two or three weeks as we wait for the beer fairy to work her magic, but I think it will be worth it.

How could it not be worth it? It is beer, after all.

Chris Cope is married, with no children. His column appears every other Tuesday.