Nice Homebrewing Deal

Any of you who get (and pay attention to) Groupon emails got a nice offer this morning. Midwest Supplies, a popular and well-respected homebrew and winemaking store, is offering a decent beginner’s homebrew kit for a cool $65. As spring begins to rear its head, now is a great time to get started brewing your own beer. It’s so much easier than you think.

Here’s what’s included in the kit:

• A 6.5 gallon fermenting bucket with lid. This airtight plastic bucket is where your wort (pre-beer) hangs out and ferments for a couple of weeks after the boil.
• A 6.5 gallon bottling bucket with a spigot. Once it’s bottling time, you siphon the fermented wort into this bucket, mix with sugar, and fill your bottles using the spigot.
• An airlock. Well, since I mentioned the fermenting bucket is airtight, you need one of these. CO2, the biproduct of fermenation, escapes through here, but oxygen can’t get in.
• A hydrometer. You might have made one of these in middle school Chem. It measures the relative density of liquids, which lets you figure out how much alcohol is in your brew.
• A thermometer. As you’re doing the boil, you’ll need to know the temperature at various benchmarks.
• A racking tube and siphon tubing. When you transfer the fermented wort into the bottling bucket at bottling time, you don’t want to disturb the yeast sediment, so siphoning instead of dumping is the way to go.
• A bottle capper and bottlecaps. This handheld clamp thingie caps your bottles so your beer doesn’t spill out. Pretty important.
• 8 oz of no-rinse cleaner and a bottle brush. As anybody who’s brewed will tell you, whether a rookie homebrewer or the head of a major craft brewery, the vast majority of brewing is being an extremely thorough janitor. So many microscopic nasties can ruin your beer, so you need supplies to go Saddam on their asses.
• An ingredient kit for either an Irish Stout, an Irish Red Ale or an Autumn Amber Ale. Making up your own recipes is most of the fun of brewing, but I definitely recommend using a pre-assembled ingredient kit for your first attempt. It will help you get the feel and the routine down, which is a big part of homebrewing.
• An instructional DVD. Given the abundance of great online resources and actual books, watching a DVD to learn to brew seems like more trouble than it’s worth. But that depends on your learning style.
• A $25 gift certificate to buy your next ingredient kit. Cool!

All in all, it’s a great deal for a beginner’s package. You’ll still need a large pot. The ingredient kits make a 5 gallon batch. If you don’t have a big enough pot, you can do a partial boil and add the balance of the volume in water at the end. You still need a 3.5 gallon or so pot to make that worth it, though.

Go get started!

Beer Ingredients: Malt

Malt is the 3rd of the major beer ingredients I’ll examine. (Catch up on my hops and yeast primers if you’re just joining us.) If yeast gives beer life (i.e. booze), and hops give it flair, then the malt is the meat and potatoes of the brew. It’s not for nothing that reviewers often refer to a beer’s “malt backbone”– the malt gives the beer its primary flavor (except for really hoppy pale ales), its color, and its alcohol percentage. It’s also the primary determinant of a beer’s style.

Mouth watering yet?

The term “malt” technically doesn’t refer to a good, but to a technique. Malting means soaking a grain to get it to start germinating, and then hitting it with a blast of heat to stop the germination. This blue-ballsing of the grain activates a bunch of enzymes that let beer happen. Without being too chem major-y (again), malting produces enzymes that convert the grain’s starch into fermentable sugars. In other words, it transforms the sugar in grain from a form that yeast can’t turn into booze into kinds that it can.

As you probably know from reading or Budweiser commercials or whatever, barley is the grain that’s generally malted for beer. As you can guess if you’ve ever heard of a wheat beer, other grains can be malted for beer, too. Wheat beers, rye beers, and oatmeal stouts are made with some proportion of the eponymous grain. (Even these beers are generally made with a large proportion of barley malt as well, since barley has a much higher enzyme content, and it keeps its husk during germination, which makes it easier for the brewer to work with.)

The Dark Side

“Now hold on,” you might be saying. “I’ve seen those Budweiser ads on the subway cars. They say that the reason their beer is so crisp and refreshing is  that they use rice! Don’t have an answer for that one, do you, smart guy?” Let me introduce you to adjuncts. You may have noticed that Bud, Miller and Coors and their ilk are classified as “adjunct lagers” on BeerAdvocate and other sites. You know how disreputable coke dealers cut their product with baking soda, lactose, anthrax or whatever? The industrial lager producers cut their malt with cheaper fermentable ingredients, like rice, corn or sugar, to achieve a higher alcohol content for less cash.

Flaked corn. The difference is cheapability.

Okay, the bad cocaine analogy isn’t exactly fair. Adjuncts generally don’t taste bad. It’s just that they don’t taste like much of anything. Rice in particular can give a brew a crisp and dry character, which for a beer like Budweiser, is pretty much the point. With a few exceptions (mostly gimmicky beers, like Dogfish Head’s Liquor de Malt), craft brews don’t make use of cheap adjuncts. (Note for the geekier among you: Yes, I’m well aware that technically adjunct can mean any non-traditional fermentable in a beer, and that there are craft beers that make good use of them, like the honey stuff in Bitches’ Brew. I’m really just talking about cheap adjuncts, e.g. corn and rice, for now.)

Taste, Color and Style

As you know by now, hops give beer its bitterness, as well as a citrus or pine flavor that dominates IPAs and is detectable in various degrees in other styles. Yeast is responsible for much of the flavor in many German and Belgian ales. But malt is the backbone of flavor in beer. The base malt in most beers gives the brew a sweet toffee or caramel flavor. If you didn’t have hops to balance it out, the beer would be too sweet to drink.

Black patent malt

Ever wonder what makes a stout dark, a lager yellow, or an amber amber? The answer’s in how the malt is prepared. Stouts and porters use a certain percentage of malt that’s been roasted black. That roasted malt also contributes a bitter roasted flavor. The beer would be too bitter if all the malt were roasted, but a small percentage is plenty to impart color and flavor. In fact, while most beers use the same or similar base malt, each style has a different specialty malt composition. Roasted (black patent) malt in stouts is a good example, since you can easily see and taste its influence in the final product. But since it’s the backbone of the flavor, having the right malt composition makes or breaks the brew.

Beer Ingredients: Yeast

Yeast is the second of the four major ingredients of beer that I’ll examine. You may be wondering, “Isn’t that the stuff that makes bread rise?” It is, but it turns out that there are thousands of different species of yeast, and different types have different functions. The main function of beer yeast is to convert fermentable sugars into alcohol. In other words, they eat malt and poop out booze. Nifty party trick. For the purposes of beer, it is most useful to split yeast into three categories, based on how they interact with the beer and what characteristics the final product will have. In fact, the category of yeast used during fermentation determines whether a beer is an ale or a lager.

Top-Fermenting Yeast

Top-fermenting yeast does much of its dirty work at the top of the fermenting liquid. As it rises to the top and eats those delicious, delicious sugars, the top of the pre-beer acquires a thick, frothy foam. (Though, it should be noted that both kinds of brewing yeast ferment throughout the wort, not only at the top or bottom.) Top-fermenting yeast works at warmer temperatures than the other kind; between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal. After ten days to two weeks if you’re a homebrewer, or less if you’ve sold out and gone mainstream, you’ll be the proud parent of a beautiful baby ale.

Bottom-Fermenting Yeast

By now you can likely figure out how this type of yeast comes by its name. And while top-fermenting yeast creates ales, this kind will give you a crisp lager. Without getting too chem-major about it, lager yeast can process a higher percentage of the sugars in the pre-beer. It also ferments at a much cooler temperature than top-fermenting varieties, at closer to 50 degrees than 70. Technically it’s not the yeast itself that makes the lager. A lager is characterized by the month-long cool storage of the beer after fermentation — lagering.

Spontaneous Fermentation/Wild Yeast

A Belgian fermentation hut

Folks have been brewing beer for millennia, but they haven’t understood how yeast works until the 19th Century. Until then, I believe the general consensus was “a wizard did it.” Spontaneous fermentation reached its zenith in Belgium. After boiling the wort, Belgian brewers simply left the open vats in cabins in the woods. They’d come back a few weeks later and MAGIC — there would be a delicious lambic waiting for them. The most prominent critter that made lambics is Brettanomyces bruxellensis, colloquially “Brett.” It’s a wild yeast endemic to the region that gives beer some very distinctive qualities. I talk about it a bit more here. You can brew a sponteneously fermented beer anywhere using whatever wild yeast is in the area, but it’ll probably taste shitty. The equipment they used and the yeast in the air, however, let brewers in that particular area of Belgium hit gold. Some breweries, like Cantillon, still use the technique today. By now smart science-type guys have cultivated Brett and other worthwhile wild yeasts, so you can get that wild ale character without spoiling your beer with whatever yeast your cat’s carrying around.

In the Brewing Process

Gimme a smack and I'll smack you back

Yeast is added to the wort (pre-beer) after the boil, and after the wort has cooled significantly. You want to pitch the yeast (add it to the wort) at close to fermentation temperature. Hot water/wort has an unfortunate tendency to kill invisible living things. You can buy yeast in dry form or liquid form. For batches of a certain size or strength, the homebrewer will want to make a starter before pitching the yeast, to warm the little critters up and get them chewing. One bit of equipment becoming more popular is the “smack pack,” in which a packet of yeast is suspended in a larger packet of nutrient. A little bit before brewing, you can smack the pack to break the inner yeast pouch and get to start eating the nutrient. You can also get multiple uses out of your brewers yeast. (I’ve never done it, so I’ll let BeerSmith explain it.) If you keep at it, you can develop what is essentially your own “house yeast.”

So What?

You might be wondering, “That’s all well and good, and thanks for the alcohol, yeast, but why do I really care?” As it turns out, the same way that brewers have developed dozens of strains of hops with different flavors and aromas, there are many strains of yeast that affect the character of the beer. Generally the change in taste is not as dramatic as with hops, but it’s definitely there. Different strains of yeast produce different byproducts from fermentation. Some of these byproducts are very pleasant to taste and smell, and some not so much. A great example is the German dunkelweizen, which has an overwhelming aroma of bananas. Nothing resembling a banana has ever (hopefully) been anywhere near that beer. The banana aroma and taste, which you may notice is also present (though not as prominent) in other German ale styles, derives from the yeast. The clove and bubblegum characteristics in many Belgian beers come from yeast, too. (Yes, some Belgian beers are actually spiced, but we’ll talk about that another day.) American and English beers do not have as dramatic yeast characteristics as their European counterparts, but they’re there.

So now you’re acquainted with the workhorse of the brewing process that gets ya drunk. In the next installment, we’ll examine malt, yeast’s meal of choice.

Beer Ingredients: Hops

This week and next, I’ll be examining each of the 4 main ingredients of beer. So where else to start than with the component of the brew that most often ensnares new beer geeks? Humulus lupulus may sound like some sort of anti-werewolf charm in Harry Potter, but it’s the name of the plant whose flower gives beer its mojo and helps make it a unique joy. You know that hops are one of the key ingredients in beer, but what are they really? Whose idea was it to put them in beer? What do they taste like? They look like weed, can you smoke them?

Hops History

Beer, or some precursor of beer, is one of the oldest beverages in the world. Hops, whose widespread use began in the late medieval period (hi Sarah), are a relative newcomer to the formula. While we today think of hops as a crucial component of the taste and aroma of a beer, their original value was as a preservative. It turns out that the hop cone kills bacteria and other nasties that like to feast on beer and ruin it for the rest of us. While brewers back in the day used various herbs and spices to flavor beer, only hops proved to have widespread staying power. The combination of the flavor and preservatives qualities is why you’re drinking Victory Hop Wallop, instead of Victory Juniper Jam.

Hops were traditionally used most styles to balance out the cloying sweetness of the malt. Pale Ales, however, let hop flavor and aroma play a starring role. It’s a truism that the India Pale Ale was created when English brewers added more hops to their beer to preserve it for the long voyage to India, but that’s apparently how it happened. English Pale Ales and IPAs still have a sturdy malt backbone, but the floral, dry English hop varieties (more on those later) helped make them popular.

As is our nation’s wont, American craft brewers have taken hop flavor and mega-sized it. We are undoubtedly living in a hophead’s golden age in the U.S., though some insist that American brewers are engaged in an arms race to make the hoppiest beer, with subtlety and craftsmanship falling by the wayside. (For the record, I disagree. There are undoubtedly some brewers who just want to beat the drinker into submission with hops, but many of the hoppiest beers are also some of the most complicated and best around.)

The Hop Process

Other than as a preservative (essentially an arcane function these days anyway), hops have two major functions in a beer: bittering and aroma/taste. As will be explained below, hops come in a smorgasbord of different varieties, each with different flavors and aromas. Alpha acids are what give beer its bitter flavor, and each strain of hop has a certain alpha acid percentage by weight. The higher the alpha acid percentage, the more bitter the hop. A low-alpha acid hop, like the Czech Saaz variety, might have around 3%, whereas a high alpha-acid variety, like the American Tomahawk, might approach 20%.

Because of the different alpha acid percentages, certain hops work better as bittering agents than others, and some work better as taste/aroma hops. While some hop-forward beers are single-hop concoctions, showcasing a single variety (Mikkeller has a terrific but expensive set of these), most IPAs and Pale Ales feature a combination of hop strains — one or more for bittering and one or more for aroma and flavor.

Because hop taste and aroma are fragile, the brewer adds those hops toward the end of the boil on brew day. Many IPAs and even some APAs are dry hopped as well: brewers add hop cones to the fermenter after a few days, to add more hop aroma without the volatility of the boil. Conversely, bittering hops are generally added at the start of the boil. These hops give little taste or aroma, but make the beer deliciously bitter.

Hop Varieties

Hops pretty much all look alike (they’re all the same species), but there are dozens of strains that provide distinct tastes and aromas. Like anything humans cultivate, these characteristics are influenced by selective breeding and environment. Hops can grow pretty much anywhere, but the climate, the particularities of the soil, and other environmental factors affect the final product.

In the United States, the Pacific Northwest is the primary hop basket. This heritage is apparent in the names of some American hop varieties — Cascade, Chinook, and Simcoe. The Cascade variety, along with the Centennial and Columbus strains, are the three “big Cs” of American hops. These three are powerful and citrusy. If you’re drinking an American IPA, especially one from the West Coast, chances are at least one of these varieties are part of the backbone. Some other common American hop varieties include Amarillo, which is citrusy and somewhat spicy; Simcoe, which has more of a pine aroma; and Galena, which is mild but is the most-used commercial bittering hop. This is just scratching the surface — there are dozens more, and growers are still developing new hybrids.

English hops tend to be milder than their American counterparts, with a more floral or even earthy flavor and aroma. The ones you’re most likely to come across are Fuggles, Kent Goldings and Northern Brewer. There are various other hop varieties from Belgium, Germany, and basically any nation that makes beer. (A Japanese variety, Sorachi Ace, is exploding in popularity — I reviewed a Brooklyn Brewery beer made with it.) You might hear about “noble hops” (e.g. Sam Adams’ Noble Pilsner, that brewery’s very nice Spring seasonal). These are 4 varieties of continental European hops (Tettnanger, Saaz, Hellertau and Spalt) which combine strong hop aroma with low bitterness. They are characteristic of German and Czech lagers and some other European-style beers.

What now?

Now you know a bit about why and how brewers use hops. What’s the next step in your hop appreciation quest? You don’t have to go as far as some brewers I’ve spoken to who have made hop tea to better understand different varieties. As I mentioned, some beers are single hop brews. They showcase just one strain of hop. Mikkeller has a set, each named after the particular hop, but they’re pretty expensive and not always easy to find. Lots of homebrewers and small brewpubs make single hop beers themselves to better understand each variety. I myself made a single hop APA with Centennial hops for New York Rock Market‘s blog anniversary party. If you brew, I suggest giving single hop ales a try. If you don’t, get your homebrewing friends to make you one, or go to a homebrew fest.