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INTRODUCTION to BREWING Marie-Annick Scott

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INTRODUCTION to BREWING Marie-Annick Scott INTRODUCTION TO BREWING Marie-Annick Scott 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS History pg 2 Malt varieties pg 8 Other fermentables pg 9 Hops pg 11 Bittering compounds pg 12 Flavour compounds pg 12 Hop products pg 12 Water pg 14 Yeast pg 18 Equipment pg 20 Mash profiles pg 22 Detailed brew day steps pg 26 After brew day pg 34 Designing your own recipes pg 39 Glossary pg 43 © 2019 Marie-Annick Scott 2 INTRODUCTION TO BREWING Welcome to a one-day course on brewing. During this course you will learn how to transform grains and hops into drinkable beer. Throughout the day, we will be demonstrating how to make beer using your own equipment and guide you through the process to design your very own recipes. Brewing is an extremely old practice, even predating civilisation. Historians like to argue whether beer or bread came first, but we do know that it’s the reason humans started living together, moving from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming and eventually, cities. AN EXTREMELY BRIEF HISTORY OF BEER While we have evidence of beer and brewing going back over 10 000 years, the oldest written reference to beer is the “Hymn to Ninkasi” Given birth by the flowing water, tenderly cared for by Ninhursaja! Ninkasi, given birth by the flowing water, tenderly cared for by Ninhursaja! Having founded your town upon wax, she completed its great walls for you. Ninkasi, having founded your town upon wax, she completed its great walls for you. Your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, and your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu. Ninkasi, your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, and your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu. It is you who handle the dough with a big shovel, mixing, in a pit, the beerbread with sweet aromatics. Ninkasi, it is you who handle the dough with a big shovel, mixing, in a pit, the beerbread with sweet aromatics. It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain. Ninkasi, it is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain. It is you who water the earth-covered malt; the noble dogs guard it even from the potentates. Ninkasi, it is you who water the earth-covered malt; the noble dogs guard it even from the potentates. It is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. Ninkasi, it is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. It is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes Ninkasi, it is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes It is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine. Ninkasi, it is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine. © 2019 Marie-Annick Scott 3 You the sweetwort to the vessel. Ninkasi, You the sweetwort to the vessel. You place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat. Ninkasi, you place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat. It is you who pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Ninkasi, it is you who pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Ninkasi is the Sumerian goddess of both beer and bread and they were related, both requiring the “magical” process of fermentation to transform into something you might want to put in your mouth. Of course, none of the science was understood at the time and it’s entirely reasonable to assume a deity was responsible. Beer was a staple food for humans from the beginning of civilization all the way to the industrial age. It’s nutritious and calorie dense and, unlike wine, can be made from ingredients that store well, as long as you keep them dry. (Of course, fresher is always better and we’ll be teaching you how to make quality beer, not just nutritious beer.) In addition, beer was usually much safer to drink than the local water source. Contrary to popular belief, this wasn’t because of the alcohol content, which was usually quite low, but more due to the fact that water needs to be boiled to make beer. Once the initial microorganisms were killed off, the pH of beer is much too low for the really harmful stuff to infect it. In general, if it can survive in beer, it can’t harm you. As farming evolved, it became the job of the female head of the household to ensure the entire farm had enough beer to drink. In Scandinavian countries, it became law that if you were unable to brew sufficient beer, your farm would be confiscated and given to someone else. As communities began to spring up, brewing was still the job of the homemaker, but it was scheduled so that the beer would be ready on different days in different houses. If the beer was ready at your house, everyone would come over after the day’s work was done and your place would be the “public house” or pub. While there is a resurgence of sour or wild beers, somewhere around the early middle ages, brewers started looking for new ways to prevent their brews from becoming infected. They were still safe to drink, but drinkers preferred the taste of uninfected beer. The first attempts were combinations of herbs and spices, known as “gruits”. These mixtures contained everything from ginger to mugwort and often contained herbs that (we now know) probably shouldn’t be consumed by humans and are very difficult to procure because of it. Gruit mixtures were very jealously guarded and, at some point, became the sole property of monasteries. All beer would have to be made using the special gruit mixture provided by the monastery, which included a hefty markup. It was partially because of this markup that the switch from gruit spices to hops was made. The other reason was that hops simply grew everywhere. They’re almost impossible to kill. What’s more is that they work far better than any gruit mixture at preserving beer. Here, we see our first distinction between “beer” and “ale”. “Beer” referred to any drink made with hops, whereas “ale” continued to use gruit. In Bavaria, another revolution was taking place. Brewers (and drinkers) had figured out that beer made during the summer months was, frankly, terrible. This is because the summer temperatures would make the yeast produce all sorts of terrible flavours as well as accelerate beer spoilage. Of course, they didn’t know what yeast was at the time, but it soon became law that you couldn’t brew between Michaelmass and Georgi, or the Feast of St Michael (in March) and the Feast of St. George (in late September). Brewers would fill stone cellars and caves with barrels of beer brewed in March, which regularly stayed around 10°-15°C, and hence, “lagering” was discovered. “Lager” simply means “to store” in German. The long aging period and low temperatures allowed for a very slow © 2019 Marie-Annick Scott 4 and very clean fermentation and drinkers preferred the new, clean tasting beers. Horse-drawn carts were wheeled out full of lager barrels for the wedding feast of Ludwig the 1st, which became an annual event known as Oktoberfest. Across the border in Bavaria, now the Czech Republic, riots broke out in Plzeň because the beer was so terrible. They threw out the town brewers and invited German brewer, Josef Groll to show the people how to brew properly. Plzeň had a particular resource found nowhere else – naturally soft water. Because the water was almost entirely free of minerals, Groll could brew using an experimental malt. This malt, very lightly kilned with a bready, grainy flavor paired with the spicy, floral hops grown in Saaz and lagered the German way became known as Pilsner, now the most popular style in the world. Up north in Belgium, brewers were being taxed to death, based on the size of their mash tuns. Their answer was to use smaller tuns and add sugar as a fermentable. Rather than fully abandon gruit, the Belgians combined spices and orange peels to make their signature styles. Even today, ordering “white” beers generally means that fruit has been added to it. At the turn of the century, Louis Pasteur had identified yeast as the magic ingredient in beer that caused fermentation. Further experiments showed that heating the beer to 60°C for 20 minutes would stop all further fermentation and became widely adopted, greatly extending the shelf life of beer from a matter of weeks to a matter of months. With the discovery of yeast as an organism, Emil Christian Hansen at the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark managed to isolate a single cell and propagate enough to brew with. This led to other breweries isolating a single cell and the development of characteristic strains. Today, there are two dominant species of brewing yeast, saccharomyces cerevisae (ale) and saccharomyces uvarum (lager), each with hundreds of subspecies carefully selected for characteristic that suit the style and brewing method each brewery uses. Lastly, over in North America, our beer history is largely shaped by German immigrants and Prohibition.
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