What we know about brewing so far
Jan. 15th, 2012 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaI've had a cold for two and a half weeks now. In the first week I sounded like I'd managed to develop a decades-old 60-a-day habit overnight. In the second week I stopped croaking but started sneezing everywhere. By of the end of the second week I'd gone back to croaking, especially after spending Friday evening in a biercafe/restaurant in Rotterdam with several colleagues. It wasn't a big night out, just some food and some interesting beers and some card games, but there was lots of chat; good for getting to know people, but bad for a sore throat. And last night we went to a beer tasting event in 't Arendsnest; a blind tasting of six beers that all had a theme, and we had to guess strengths and score them all out of ten. The theme, it turned out, was Westvleteren 12 and associated beers, which means the lightest beer there was 8% and most of them were over 10%, and what with the cold too, the booze went to my head a bit, so when we carried on drinking afterwards (marvelling at the fact that Westvleteren 12, a ridiculously exclusive Belgian trappist beer that's meant to be one of the best in the world, came 5th out of 6 on score when no-one knew what it was) it seemed sensible to deal with my cracking voice by forging on through anyway. Which means today, I basically can't speak at all, except in a sort of thick whisper. What with also feeling somewhat off from the booze (if I hadn't already been drinking I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have agreed to the last beer being De Molen's Bommen & Granaten, Bombs and Grenades, which while it comes in a 150 ml serving, is still 15%) then I doubt I'm going to get anything else useful done today at all, so I'm going to try and document some of what we've been doing with the home brewing.
Taking up home brewing was basically Chris's idea, but something I'd thought about trying before too. I've been subjected to some right dodgy stuff in the past, but three or four years ago I remember being at a party where someone had brought along a home-brewed stout that was not just good considering, but genuinely good. Ever since then the idea's been around, but it was Chris who took action on it, going and doing the research and buying a load of books, as he tends to do, while I, er, offered to contribute my vital experience with things like handling large volumes of liquid, thinking through disinfection, and mixing up big batches of chemical stuff. Which is to say, Chris found out what to do and I've helped him do it, more or less. Okay, definitely less, because I've also read some of the books too, but that's generally where it feels like our responsibilities lie. But I like to know why I'm doing what I'm doing, and this how that all works, as I understand it.
There are a lot of ways to do home brew, starting from buying a tin full of sachets and doing everything it says on it right through to taking a heap of barley and some yeast and customising every step yourself, and we decided right from the start that we'd go in as far along the progression as we felt comfortable with, and keep on pushing forward from there, trying to add in extra value every time. Or every other time, because the other thing we decided was that we should brew beers in pairs, one light, one dark, to match our tastes. The fact that the beers I prefer, the dark ones, are always going second and therefore already benefiting from the lessons learnt from the light ones, I attribute entirely to my natural cunning. Also somewhat to Chris's excitement to make his long-planned beer first.
So. You have a pile of barley, and you want to make beer with it, right? The barley needs to be sprouted, enough for the seeds to start converting starches to sugars, and then you dry the seedlings to stop the process going any further, and then you bake them in a variety of ways to darken those sugars, from lightly toasted right through to you wouldn't even bother trying scraping it. This task is, from everything I've seen, a right faff and a job for an expert. Fortunately, you can go to a brew shop and buy the barley pre-roasted to various grades, and use those and that's already a lot simpler. But to get the sugars out of the barley, you need to grind it and soak it in hot water in quite a narrow temperature range, and the extraction starts to really depend on the exact chemistry of your water supply, and handling that much hot water and grain, having to drain and filter and rinse and all sorts, is also a faff. People build impressive contraptions in their garages to do it with, involving barrels and stainless steel piping and insulated picnic tubs and PID heater controllers and whatnot. We are not yet at the impressive contraption stage.
The next level down is to use dried malt extract, or DME. This is where someone else has already done the business of extracting the sugars from the malted barley, taken the resulting sugar solution and spray-dried it into a fine powder. This is not a faff at all. This is well handy. Our first pair of beers were brewed using only DME for the barley part, and apart from the minor problems involved in handling fine powders and getting them mixed with water, that worked pretty well.
Predictably, though, that level of processing and convenience comes at a price. Some of the volatiles, some of the flavouring compounds, are lost in the drying process, and those can be the things that really make a beer. So for this pair we've moved half a stage up, to steeping speciality grain. It's tricky to properly extract the required sugars from malts, but it's relatively easy to get the flavouring compounds out. The darkest, roastiest malts don't really add any sugars anyway, so what we're doing now is using dried extract for the main body of the sugar, the light stuff whose main purpose is being fermented into alcohol, and adding colour and flavour via this steeping process. It requires quite a bit of work, crushing grain in a mortar and pestle, or with a rolling pin on a baking sheet if it's dark and therefore brittle enough, but the operation itself is pretty straightforward; crush the stuff, stick it in a grain bag, and dangle it in heated brewing water for half an hour before the DME goes in. It feels a bit ridiculous, brewing beer with something that manages to simultaneously resemble a tea bag, a sock and a bollock, but the benefit in terms of colour is instantly obvious.
The teabag-sock-bollocks were dunked in about one-fifth of the total brewing volume, and the brew coming out of them had the colour and the colour intensity of soy sauce. A few drops of it, when cleaning up afterwards, were enough to turn a sink full of washing-up water a noticeable brown. That was going to have to be enough to colour the entire brew, but looked like it was up to the job. Of course, I'd like to be more precise about what colour it was, but while there are scales for the colour of beer, and there's a number in the recipe that indicates what colour it should be, as well as colour numbers that identify all the malts, I can't actually measure any of them. Brewing has lots of units in it, and some of them are arbitrary, and some of them, like colour, just might as well be. This isn't the future and we don't all have home spectrophotometers to tell us the light absorbance of our beer at 430 nm, and failing that, the only alternative is comparing it to a printed colour chart. Bit of a discrepancy in accuracy levels there, yes? At which point, we may as well call it 'soy sauce' and have done with.
While passing the subject of units, though, let me whinge for a minute. Because home-brewing is big in America, many of the useful user-produced things like recipes, calculation guides and sanity-checking rules of thumb are infested with imperial units; ounces and gallons and bloody Fahrenheit all over the place. Imperial units make me bristle at the best of times (all the more so when they're called English units) and trying to do something relatively accurate in them is a right pain. Our main reference book for this process, Palmer's How To Brew, has conversion tables for just about everything, which is handy, but even then managed to miss out the vital information that a quart is a quarter of a gallon. That's obvious, you could say, but when you see so many other ridiculous imperial factorisations in there, it's hardly paranoia to expect to have to check. So when I say about one-fifth of the brewing volume, Palmer thinks that should have been a gallon but I know it was four litres, and the steeping rate was not, therefore, a bit over a pound per gallon, but a bit over 100g per litre. Yeah, that's how I stick it the Yanks and their stupid units, man.
Also while on the subject of units, beer number two was meant to be the same recipe as the one we've just done, but it's the colour of a light best, a sort of brownish gold. Because the recipe was assuming a particular brand of malt extract, and while every manufacturer names these similarly, as pale, amber, dark, chocolate, that kind of thing, the labels don't necessarily stand for exactly the same colours. But they all have numbers to specify more closely, so it should be trivial to check the numbers, right? Right. Yeah. Somewhere in the book there's a table for what the author is expecting those labels to mean, with numbers, but they're on the Lovibond colour scale, an old-fashioned system basically equivalent to comparing things to a colour chart, while the local brew shop round here sells their malts with numbers on the EBC scale, which makes sense because EBC stands for European Beer Convention and is also based on a real actual measurement, with the aforementioned spectrophotometer. We had to make a spreadsheet converting the numbers back and forth to work out what was the nearest equivalent to what, and looking at the results, it's no wonder we got nothing like what we expected. Still, we know this now.
So anyway, with the colour (and hopefully some more flavour) sorted out, we added some more water, up to about half of the final volume, and half of the DME. The whole lot was brought to the boil, at which point the proteins in the malts do something odd and cause a spectacular but brief foaming-up known as the hot break. Once that settled down, the first lot of hops went in, which in this case was Northern Brewer. The first addition is usually high potency but lower flavour hops, added for the bitterness, and they get boiled in the wort for an hour. Other hops get added over the hour, depending on what you want to do, and in this case we did two more additions of a lower-strength but more flavoury hop, Williamette. More hops can be added later in the fermentation to keep on upping the bitterness, and we did that earlier in the day for beer number three, transferring it from the first fermenter to a second one after the first week and adding a bunch more hops in the process, but that's an IPA and four is a porter so that was its hops tally complete. At the end of the hour, the other half of the DME went in, so that it got heated and effectively pasteurised, without having been affecting the concentration and therefore the hop oil extraction in the preceding hour.
But why were we only boiling half of the liquid? Why give ourselves problems with concentration at all? The problem is, once wort has been boiled, it needs to be cooled quickly, for three reasons. One is that it does something else complicated to the proteins which prevents the beer going hazy when it's chilled, known as the cold break. Chilling twenty litres of water from one-hundred-ish degrees C to 25 inside inside half an hour (the recommended time limit) is tricky without veering into the impressive contraptions department again, and boiling only ten litres is an easy way to cut the problem in half. The second reason to cool it quickly is that what you're essentially doing in brewing is making a nice hospitable solution of sugars for some microbial life, in the form of yeast, to thrive in, and if you're not careful, you're going to get all sorts of other microbial life having a party in there too; infection control has to inform everything you do. Unless the vessel is sealed, leaving it sitting around waiting for it to cool is only going to increase the chances of infection, and left in a sealed vessel in a warm room, it takes hours and hours for ten litres of water to get down to room temperature. And the third issue is that wort that's no longer boiling but not yet cold oxidises into off-flavours very easily, so you also need to be careful how you handle it while it's cooling. That means the requirements for the cooling method are that it must a) work fast, b) avoid infection and c) not mix in any unnecessary air. There are devices you can get, counterflow coolers made of sheets of steel, all enclosed and with layers of water and wort flowing against each other, but they're expensive, fiddly and right bastards to clean. Our answer to these requirements, in our current set-up, is putting the whole pan in a bath full of iced water. Dead high tech. To get it to cool in half an hour still takes effort, tending to it carefully, stirring the water in the bath so as to keep the cold water in contact with the pan, stirring the stuff in the pan to keep the hot parts circulating to the cool edges, and all with as little splashing as possible, and without getting any of the bathwater into the pan. It's a bit precarious, but so far it seems to be working.
Once the wort is cooled, things get easier. Then splashing becomes your friend, because you need to oxygenate it as much as possible to give the yeast something to start on. You pour the wort into a fermenter bucket, filtering out the hops if you can, and then the other ten litres of water gets to join in. That got boiled earlier, to sterilise it, and left in a second clean fermenter bucket while everything else was going on. So to mix the two, and to aerate everything as much as possible, all you do is combine wort and water and then start pouring them back and forth between buckets, as splashily as possible. It's a pretty satisfying thing to do, pouring twenty litres of stuff to and fro in great arcs, and the wort quickly builds up a big foamy head. After all the careful handling and the time restrictions of the stage before, this bit by comparison feels like playing around. You can leave it that stage for hours, then, if you want to, not that I know why you'd want to, unless perhaps you had a problem with your yeast.
Yeast is the last thing to go in; there are all sorts of specific types, because exactly which sugars and alcohols the yeast consumes and puts out have a large effect on the style of the beer, but it's always a good idea to check the yeast is working. For the first two beers we used dried and rehydrated yeast, and for these two some fancier vacuum-packed wet yeast, but even with the wet ones, there's a little internal nutrient package that you break (like a glowstick, except without glowing) and so the yeast starts working and the pack swells up in a distressing and hard-to-open manner. So far we have not had a yeast problem, though, so the yeast goes in, the lid goes on and then you settle down to wait.
It's supposed to take anything up to twenty four hours for the yeast to start working properly. After all, you've just woken it up from a nice sleep and put it in a completely different environment and told it to get to work, and it likes to have its metaphorical cup of coffee first. Waiting to see whether the yeast is really working is curiously stressful, but so far it's come up every time. Usually it starts overnight, and since the fermenter's in the room next to our bedroom, if I wake up in the night and it's being quite loud, I can hear it. It sounds like this:
Fermenter by shermarama
And that's where beer number four is now, twenty four hours in, bobbling merrily away through its airlock, fermenting like a good'un. In two weeks it'll get bottled, and in two more weeks we'll be able to drink it. I hope this one turns out as well as it looked, tasted and smelled like it might. The two we've made already have both been definitely beer, and definitely drinkable, just not really very interesting. And if this one does work out, then I think I'm going to try a stout next, and try something in the line of extra additions in the fermenting stage. Coffee? Dandelion and burdock? Brussels sprouts? The possibilities are, as they say, endless.
Taking up home brewing was basically Chris's idea, but something I'd thought about trying before too. I've been subjected to some right dodgy stuff in the past, but three or four years ago I remember being at a party where someone had brought along a home-brewed stout that was not just good considering, but genuinely good. Ever since then the idea's been around, but it was Chris who took action on it, going and doing the research and buying a load of books, as he tends to do, while I, er, offered to contribute my vital experience with things like handling large volumes of liquid, thinking through disinfection, and mixing up big batches of chemical stuff. Which is to say, Chris found out what to do and I've helped him do it, more or less. Okay, definitely less, because I've also read some of the books too, but that's generally where it feels like our responsibilities lie. But I like to know why I'm doing what I'm doing, and this how that all works, as I understand it.
There are a lot of ways to do home brew, starting from buying a tin full of sachets and doing everything it says on it right through to taking a heap of barley and some yeast and customising every step yourself, and we decided right from the start that we'd go in as far along the progression as we felt comfortable with, and keep on pushing forward from there, trying to add in extra value every time. Or every other time, because the other thing we decided was that we should brew beers in pairs, one light, one dark, to match our tastes. The fact that the beers I prefer, the dark ones, are always going second and therefore already benefiting from the lessons learnt from the light ones, I attribute entirely to my natural cunning. Also somewhat to Chris's excitement to make his long-planned beer first.
So. You have a pile of barley, and you want to make beer with it, right? The barley needs to be sprouted, enough for the seeds to start converting starches to sugars, and then you dry the seedlings to stop the process going any further, and then you bake them in a variety of ways to darken those sugars, from lightly toasted right through to you wouldn't even bother trying scraping it. This task is, from everything I've seen, a right faff and a job for an expert. Fortunately, you can go to a brew shop and buy the barley pre-roasted to various grades, and use those and that's already a lot simpler. But to get the sugars out of the barley, you need to grind it and soak it in hot water in quite a narrow temperature range, and the extraction starts to really depend on the exact chemistry of your water supply, and handling that much hot water and grain, having to drain and filter and rinse and all sorts, is also a faff. People build impressive contraptions in their garages to do it with, involving barrels and stainless steel piping and insulated picnic tubs and PID heater controllers and whatnot. We are not yet at the impressive contraption stage.
The next level down is to use dried malt extract, or DME. This is where someone else has already done the business of extracting the sugars from the malted barley, taken the resulting sugar solution and spray-dried it into a fine powder. This is not a faff at all. This is well handy. Our first pair of beers were brewed using only DME for the barley part, and apart from the minor problems involved in handling fine powders and getting them mixed with water, that worked pretty well.
Predictably, though, that level of processing and convenience comes at a price. Some of the volatiles, some of the flavouring compounds, are lost in the drying process, and those can be the things that really make a beer. So for this pair we've moved half a stage up, to steeping speciality grain. It's tricky to properly extract the required sugars from malts, but it's relatively easy to get the flavouring compounds out. The darkest, roastiest malts don't really add any sugars anyway, so what we're doing now is using dried extract for the main body of the sugar, the light stuff whose main purpose is being fermented into alcohol, and adding colour and flavour via this steeping process. It requires quite a bit of work, crushing grain in a mortar and pestle, or with a rolling pin on a baking sheet if it's dark and therefore brittle enough, but the operation itself is pretty straightforward; crush the stuff, stick it in a grain bag, and dangle it in heated brewing water for half an hour before the DME goes in. It feels a bit ridiculous, brewing beer with something that manages to simultaneously resemble a tea bag, a sock and a bollock, but the benefit in terms of colour is instantly obvious.
The teabag-sock-bollocks were dunked in about one-fifth of the total brewing volume, and the brew coming out of them had the colour and the colour intensity of soy sauce. A few drops of it, when cleaning up afterwards, were enough to turn a sink full of washing-up water a noticeable brown. That was going to have to be enough to colour the entire brew, but looked like it was up to the job. Of course, I'd like to be more precise about what colour it was, but while there are scales for the colour of beer, and there's a number in the recipe that indicates what colour it should be, as well as colour numbers that identify all the malts, I can't actually measure any of them. Brewing has lots of units in it, and some of them are arbitrary, and some of them, like colour, just might as well be. This isn't the future and we don't all have home spectrophotometers to tell us the light absorbance of our beer at 430 nm, and failing that, the only alternative is comparing it to a printed colour chart. Bit of a discrepancy in accuracy levels there, yes? At which point, we may as well call it 'soy sauce' and have done with.
While passing the subject of units, though, let me whinge for a minute. Because home-brewing is big in America, many of the useful user-produced things like recipes, calculation guides and sanity-checking rules of thumb are infested with imperial units; ounces and gallons and bloody Fahrenheit all over the place. Imperial units make me bristle at the best of times (all the more so when they're called English units) and trying to do something relatively accurate in them is a right pain. Our main reference book for this process, Palmer's How To Brew, has conversion tables for just about everything, which is handy, but even then managed to miss out the vital information that a quart is a quarter of a gallon. That's obvious, you could say, but when you see so many other ridiculous imperial factorisations in there, it's hardly paranoia to expect to have to check. So when I say about one-fifth of the brewing volume, Palmer thinks that should have been a gallon but I know it was four litres, and the steeping rate was not, therefore, a bit over a pound per gallon, but a bit over 100g per litre. Yeah, that's how I stick it the Yanks and their stupid units, man.
Also while on the subject of units, beer number two was meant to be the same recipe as the one we've just done, but it's the colour of a light best, a sort of brownish gold. Because the recipe was assuming a particular brand of malt extract, and while every manufacturer names these similarly, as pale, amber, dark, chocolate, that kind of thing, the labels don't necessarily stand for exactly the same colours. But they all have numbers to specify more closely, so it should be trivial to check the numbers, right? Right. Yeah. Somewhere in the book there's a table for what the author is expecting those labels to mean, with numbers, but they're on the Lovibond colour scale, an old-fashioned system basically equivalent to comparing things to a colour chart, while the local brew shop round here sells their malts with numbers on the EBC scale, which makes sense because EBC stands for European Beer Convention and is also based on a real actual measurement, with the aforementioned spectrophotometer. We had to make a spreadsheet converting the numbers back and forth to work out what was the nearest equivalent to what, and looking at the results, it's no wonder we got nothing like what we expected. Still, we know this now.
So anyway, with the colour (and hopefully some more flavour) sorted out, we added some more water, up to about half of the final volume, and half of the DME. The whole lot was brought to the boil, at which point the proteins in the malts do something odd and cause a spectacular but brief foaming-up known as the hot break. Once that settled down, the first lot of hops went in, which in this case was Northern Brewer. The first addition is usually high potency but lower flavour hops, added for the bitterness, and they get boiled in the wort for an hour. Other hops get added over the hour, depending on what you want to do, and in this case we did two more additions of a lower-strength but more flavoury hop, Williamette. More hops can be added later in the fermentation to keep on upping the bitterness, and we did that earlier in the day for beer number three, transferring it from the first fermenter to a second one after the first week and adding a bunch more hops in the process, but that's an IPA and four is a porter so that was its hops tally complete. At the end of the hour, the other half of the DME went in, so that it got heated and effectively pasteurised, without having been affecting the concentration and therefore the hop oil extraction in the preceding hour.
But why were we only boiling half of the liquid? Why give ourselves problems with concentration at all? The problem is, once wort has been boiled, it needs to be cooled quickly, for three reasons. One is that it does something else complicated to the proteins which prevents the beer going hazy when it's chilled, known as the cold break. Chilling twenty litres of water from one-hundred-ish degrees C to 25 inside inside half an hour (the recommended time limit) is tricky without veering into the impressive contraptions department again, and boiling only ten litres is an easy way to cut the problem in half. The second reason to cool it quickly is that what you're essentially doing in brewing is making a nice hospitable solution of sugars for some microbial life, in the form of yeast, to thrive in, and if you're not careful, you're going to get all sorts of other microbial life having a party in there too; infection control has to inform everything you do. Unless the vessel is sealed, leaving it sitting around waiting for it to cool is only going to increase the chances of infection, and left in a sealed vessel in a warm room, it takes hours and hours for ten litres of water to get down to room temperature. And the third issue is that wort that's no longer boiling but not yet cold oxidises into off-flavours very easily, so you also need to be careful how you handle it while it's cooling. That means the requirements for the cooling method are that it must a) work fast, b) avoid infection and c) not mix in any unnecessary air. There are devices you can get, counterflow coolers made of sheets of steel, all enclosed and with layers of water and wort flowing against each other, but they're expensive, fiddly and right bastards to clean. Our answer to these requirements, in our current set-up, is putting the whole pan in a bath full of iced water. Dead high tech. To get it to cool in half an hour still takes effort, tending to it carefully, stirring the water in the bath so as to keep the cold water in contact with the pan, stirring the stuff in the pan to keep the hot parts circulating to the cool edges, and all with as little splashing as possible, and without getting any of the bathwater into the pan. It's a bit precarious, but so far it seems to be working.
Once the wort is cooled, things get easier. Then splashing becomes your friend, because you need to oxygenate it as much as possible to give the yeast something to start on. You pour the wort into a fermenter bucket, filtering out the hops if you can, and then the other ten litres of water gets to join in. That got boiled earlier, to sterilise it, and left in a second clean fermenter bucket while everything else was going on. So to mix the two, and to aerate everything as much as possible, all you do is combine wort and water and then start pouring them back and forth between buckets, as splashily as possible. It's a pretty satisfying thing to do, pouring twenty litres of stuff to and fro in great arcs, and the wort quickly builds up a big foamy head. After all the careful handling and the time restrictions of the stage before, this bit by comparison feels like playing around. You can leave it that stage for hours, then, if you want to, not that I know why you'd want to, unless perhaps you had a problem with your yeast.
Yeast is the last thing to go in; there are all sorts of specific types, because exactly which sugars and alcohols the yeast consumes and puts out have a large effect on the style of the beer, but it's always a good idea to check the yeast is working. For the first two beers we used dried and rehydrated yeast, and for these two some fancier vacuum-packed wet yeast, but even with the wet ones, there's a little internal nutrient package that you break (like a glowstick, except without glowing) and so the yeast starts working and the pack swells up in a distressing and hard-to-open manner. So far we have not had a yeast problem, though, so the yeast goes in, the lid goes on and then you settle down to wait.
It's supposed to take anything up to twenty four hours for the yeast to start working properly. After all, you've just woken it up from a nice sleep and put it in a completely different environment and told it to get to work, and it likes to have its metaphorical cup of coffee first. Waiting to see whether the yeast is really working is curiously stressful, but so far it's come up every time. Usually it starts overnight, and since the fermenter's in the room next to our bedroom, if I wake up in the night and it's being quite loud, I can hear it. It sounds like this:
Fermenter by shermarama
And that's where beer number four is now, twenty four hours in, bobbling merrily away through its airlock, fermenting like a good'un. In two weeks it'll get bottled, and in two more weeks we'll be able to drink it. I hope this one turns out as well as it looked, tasted and smelled like it might. The two we've made already have both been definitely beer, and definitely drinkable, just not really very interesting. And if this one does work out, then I think I'm going to try a stout next, and try something in the line of extra additions in the fermenting stage. Coffee? Dandelion and burdock? Brussels sprouts? The possibilities are, as they say, endless.