Special Anniversary Edition Vol. 26 No. 6 November/Decembero b D 20030 The Journalur of thet e AmericanAm Homebrewers Association FOR THE HOMEBREWER AND BEER LOVER AHA Celebrates 25 Years!Yea Zymurgy Vol. 1,1 No.N 1 Early Covers and Articlesrticles The Best of Zymurgyy gy TM A Publication of the Association of Brewers www.beertown.org overnight. Keep the temperature around 80° F (26° to 27° C) by setting the whole mess behind the kitchen stove. The next day it foamed furiously. When Twenty-five the foam receded a day or two later (form- ing bubble circles on the surface), one could siphon the mess into clean 1-quart beer bot- Years of tles, capping them after adding a single tea- spoon of corn sugar to each. It helped if one used a hydrometer with a “red line” to indi- cate the bottling gravity. Zymurgistic With luck, bottles prepared this way would not explode and the beer would be the cheap swill it was meant to be. My step- father made just that recipe for many years, Nonsense having started during Prohibition. Initially by Fred Eckhardt Never mind that anyone would start a magazine about such a wretched remember when homebrew really was art, and never mind that I“swill”—in every sense of the word. Never mind that anyone would start a mag- azine about such a wretched art, and never the people who started mind that the people who started that mag- azine would think that they were accom- that magazine would plishing something worthwhile. Oh, and never mind that the magazine, and Ameri- think that they were can homebrewers, would be instrumental in changing the very nature of world brewing! accomplishing something Until the late 1970s, almost all home- brew was formulated from just four elements worthwhile. (I hesitate to call them ingredients): 1. A 3.5-pound tin of hop-flavored Blue Rib- it cost him about a half cent a quart; by the bon Malt Extract Syrup. time he was liquefying me and my friends in 2. 10 pounds of corn sugar. college in the late 1940s, it was costing him 3. 10 gallons of ordinary cold tap water. about two cents. That beer could ripple the 4. A cube of Fleischmann’s bread yeast, roof of your mouth and curl your tongue softened and broken up in a glass of luke- until you were too soused to notice. It’s a warm tap water. beer taste I never forgot after my first sam- Production was equally simple. First, pling in 1932 at age 6. No one of my age warm the malt extract in its can by heating would ever forget that taste. But it did give it in a kettle of warm water on the stove; the name “homebrew” a bad taste to at least when warm, combine it in a pot with about two generations of Americans. a gallon of hot water. Next, add the sugar and stir to dissolve, then pour this mixture My Own Experience in a 12-gallon porcelain crock. Cool with I came to homebrewing after the Cuban cold water as necessary to the 10-gallon Missile Crisis in 1962, when I was forced level. Stir the whole lot thoroughly, add the to examine my lifestyle in the shadow of yeast from the water glass and stir again. nuclear war. I realized that in a post-nuclear Cover with a piece of cloth and let stand war era, jobs would be at a premium. How would I earn a living? Then I remembered Not long after that I my time on Okinawa during the war. The started making my own one guy everyone loved was our Mess wine, but the idea of Sergeant. This was definitely not out of “good” homebrew was still respect for his great culinary expertise, but very intriguing. Eventually rather for his skill with his still, which had I found a recipe centered been in full operation since only a few days around the “all malt” con- after the invasion. That guy could have cept, which eliminated the probably made alcohol out of dog doo. It use of sugar and actually made me realize that anyone who could included boiling the extract- produce palatable alcohol would be a based malt with real hop beloved icon in any post-nuclear war peri- cones to produce the fer- od. Thus, I resolved to enlighten myself in mentable beer wort. Using those matters at my earliest opportunity. that as a basis I wrote a small It was during a visit to San Francisco in book, A Treatise on Lager 1967, at the height of the hippie revolution, Beer, published in April 1970. that I was dining at the Old Spaghetti Fac- People enjoyed making good beer at home, azine. Right from the start he had called his tory with a former swimmer I had coached but I was afraid to call this product “home- product “homebrew.” Obviously, he’d in high school. We were drinking Anchor brew” because that name left a bad taste in never tasted my father’s homebrew. Steam beer. He made a dumb remark about my mouth. I called it “amateur brewing.” Papazian continues to homebrew, and is how it tasted just like “homebrew.” Since I In Boulder, Colo., after reading my book, a major figure in small (micro- and home-) knew his parents, I also knew he’d proba- a young fellow named Charlie Papazian brewing across the country with the Associa- bly never tasted real homebrew, so why began brewing and teaching classes in home- tion of Brewers, a collection of his organiza- would he have said that? I never found the brewing in the early 1970s. In 1976 he pro- tions including the AHA and Zymurgy. answer to that question, but I certainly did duced his first book, The Joy of Brewing, fea- There’d be damn little good homebrewing start wondering if one really could brew turing the amazing recipe for “Goat Scrotum and very few craft brewers in the world if beer like that at home. I knew it couldn’t be Ale.” But it wasn’t until 1984 that Avon Books Charlie Papazian had not taken up the cause. done, but still.... published his seminal tome on the subject, Indeed, it was Charlie who made the word The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and, in “homebrew” honorable again. 1991, the sequel The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing. This book is still the definitive A New Breed text on homebrewing In 1970, our American beer was itself for beginners and excessively ordinary. Taste seemed to be intermediate brewers gradually falling out of favor with national as well. brewers. They were going “light.” Light in In 1978 he formed flavor, color, alcohol content, calories and the American Home- sensibility. Some of us wondered why they brewers Association didn’t just add alcohol to carbonated water (AHA) and began pub- and go on to the better things in life. lishing Zymurgy mag- In that same era, Jack McAuliffe opened the first of the new breed “microbreweries” with the New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, Calif. in 1976. Others soon followed suit, many of them homebrewers. There were some 68 start-ups by the end of 1985. In 1981, the AHA held its second nation- al judging (actually the first truly national judging) with some 97 entries in nine cate- gories. Michael Jackson and I, among oth- ers, were invited to Boulder to judge this first national homebrew competition ever. The Boulder Symphony Orchestra was there to welcome us! There were also seminars on brewing, and a (continued on page 41) Braumeister’sby Fred Quiz Eckhardt Editor’s Note: This quiz appeared in 5. The element which gives finished Zymurgy Vol. 4, No. 4 in the fall of beer its body or fullness: 1981. Here, we run the questions and a) potatoes answers completely unchanged and b) hops unedited from the original version. c) sugar d) alcohol ee how you stack up: score 60 or less: e) dextrin SJunior Brewer (you need help); 61-75: 6. A hydrometer measures: Apprentice Brewer; 76-85: Journeyman a) the length of time your ferment is Brewer; 86-94: Private Brewer, first class; 95 expected to take or over, Master Brewer. b) the saline content of your beer c) the ratio between the density of water and 1. (10 points). Arrange in correct order for the density of your beer the production of beer (deduct 1 point d) the expediency of krausen for each item out of order). List by num- e) the ratio between the temperature of your d) sorghum ber. 1. Aging. 2. Krausening. 3. Hop Break. beer and the number of days in ferment e) rice 4. Sparging. 5. Disgorgement. 6. Acid Rest. 7. The Rheinheitsgebot is: 11. Which of the following hops are 7. Racking. 8. Protein Break. 9. Yeast Starter a) an instrument to measure sugar content in grown in Germany? Culture. 10. Krausen Stage. beer wort a) Goldings b) the first indication of ferment b) Northern Brewer Sixteen multiple-guess questions, 4 points c) a method of removing yeast from the bottle c) Cascades each, 64 total. Deduct 4 points each wrong d) a method of carbonating beer d) Hallertauer answer. e) the 1516 Bavarian Purity law limiting beer e) Clusters 2. The protein rest in the upward-step content to malted barley, hops and water 12. If lager beer is produced using bot- infusion mash is in the temperature 8. The priming method which involves tom yeast, and ale beer with top yeast, range: adding newly fermenting beer to the what beer is made with baker’s yeast? a) 95-106˚ F finished product at bottling time is: a) Liehfraumulchbier b) 113-125˚ F a) destrining b) Grossenwurstenbier c) 133-140˚ F b) beer priming c) Apple Pie Dowdy d) 153-160˚ F c) worting d) Cock beer e) 167-176˚ F d) mashing e) Bad beer 3.