We’ve all heard Knowledge is Power, so ready yourself to get
juiced like Bane with a shot of learnin' to your thinkpiece!
.....everyone still on board?
It
occurred to me, (and every other brewer ever since civilization,) that our
respected public basically knows shit about suds, and the black magic that is
fermentation. Well fear not good
people of Earth! Stevie B is here
to set the record straight with a brief biography of beer, in
currently-hoisting-a-pint-friendly idiot prose to satisfy the most laydrunk
amongst you.
So what the hell is beer made of, you collectively
moan? I’ll shoot straight with
you, there aint a lot behind the curtain here, cuz beer is thus: malt, hops,
water, yeast. Now let’s get malty!
(Before I dig into this bucket o barley, let me disclaim:
for those of you lookin’ and a hopin’ for an engineering-meets-biochem
intensive, look elsewhere with that snotty ivy-league sweatervest you’re
wearing! If you want to talk Alpha
acid and Beta-amylase, visit the brewery and we’ll get literate over a
pint.) So malt. Malt is just cereal grain that’s been
allowed to sprout in water, and then kilned so it won’t grow. Easy right? We brewfolk prefer barley, but you can add adjuncts to your
heart’s content (DANGER! DANGER! More on adjuncts later…) Grind up some malt, add water and heat,
and you wind up converting its starch to sugar. Or MAGIC as I prefer it. You can cook up your mash to make simple sugars or complex
sugars, and this means dry beer or sweet beer. Now you’ve got a bigass pot of sugary porridge; the hard
part is getting the sugar water out of the grain. Again skipping crucial information for the sake of fun, your
sugar water, ‘wort’, is now boiling away in the kettle, released from its cereal shackles and it’s time to add the hops!
Hops are flowers that grow on a perennial bine (not a
spelling error, hops are not a vine).
They’re green, and when ripe, loaded with a sticky, yellow, resinous
powder: lupulin. Hops are added to
the boil in relatively small amounts at key, strategic, clandestine times. Wort is usually boiled for at least an
hour, so if you add hops early, they’ll add bitterness to your brew, and later
additions add flavor and aroma.
You see, that hussy lupulin won’t bitter your beer unless it’s allowed
to get busy for close to an hour, so you need to kick back, excuse the chaperones and let
them work it out. When you only
boil em for just a few minutes, they give up their aromatic and flavanoid
traits, so you don’t get bitter, just flowery. You’ll be bitter to know that people have segregated hops in
this day and age. For good reason
actually. Some hops are more
floral (think grassy, piney, citrusy) and some are more herbal (earthy,
spicy). Some lend themselves to
bittering better or aroma better.
Some like to have too many at the bar and then ask your girl to dance. Hops are fickle.
Yeast!?!
Exactly. Yeast is to beer
what geography is to speech. If
you travel somewhere else, they’ll have an accent. Or talk French.
Once your hopped-up wort has cooled down, you can add a couple o hundred
million yeast cells to start fermentation. Yeast gets the party started by eating the sugar in the wort
and crapping out CO2 and lovely, lovely alcohol! There’s a little more to it than that. While the yeast is chowing down, it’s
also releasing all manner of nonsense along with the good stuff. Esters, phenols, acetyldehyde and giant squid are just a few.
It’s these organic compounds that make hefeweizen taste like bananas, or
German lagers to taste like a skunk sphincter.
They all prefer different temperatures, different sugar contents, and
different astrological signs. It’s
all quite complicated, you should probably leave it to the experts (glug glug
glug!)
Water. Are we
really having this conversation?
You know it, I know it, we all love it.
Adjuncts look like the end of the line. A grim fate for any beer. But wait! It’s not just rice and corn? There are other options? Options like maple syrup, honey, rye, wheat, oats, and
vegetables? But of course, you old
fool! In this here day n age, we
brewing with all manner of fun schtuff that doesn’t dumb down flavor, body, or
philosophical integrity. Adjuncts
are taking their rightful place in the sun. Hell, I just brewed a batch of IPA with wildflower honey
and oats. The rye’s the
limit! (Too much… too much).
And there you have it, ladies and germs! Unfiltered beer knowledge, fresh on
tap! As usual, drop a line at TwoTunBrewery@gmail.com, get friendly at facebook.com/TwoTunBrewery, or hit up our little brewery with big flavor in JP for a pint on draught!
