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From: 500 Beers: the only beer compendium you'll ever need
back to beverages
back to food is art |
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by Zak Avery
Looking at the ingredients list, you might think that beer isn't a complicated foodstuff, and in some ways, you'd be right. The four basic ingredients are water, malted barley, hops, and yeast—surely it can't be that fiddly?
Well, as with all cooking, it's straightforward as long as you follow the recipe, but there are a surprising number of variables.
Water—how variable can that be? As it turns out, it’s very variable, largely due to the geology of the location of the brewery. Water filters through rock, picking up mineral deposits on the way, and these minerals make their presence known in various ways.
Just as washing your hands with soap feels different in hard and soft water areas (soap foams more easily in softer water), brewing with hard or soft water affects how the beer feels in the mouth.
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Barley is a crop, and like all agricultural products, it can vary from year to year. However, the variation in harvest quality is small when compared to how radically the grain changes after the processing necessary to prepare it for brewing. It can come in as many shades as ordinary breakfast toast, from pale and barely cooked to blackened and burned. Hops are an agricultural product that can vary hugely from year to year, not only in quality but also in quantity. At the time of writing, the brewing world is sighing with relief after a good harvest—the previous two years were disastrous in terms of quantity, if not quality. For something that contributes such a significant and robust flavor, hops are surprisingly delicate plant blossoms. And yeast—well, as we shall see, yeast can make or ruin a beer, and surprisingly, a spoiled beer isn't always bad news....
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The Main Beer Ingredient: Water
It seems odd, but most beer is around 95% water. If a beer is 5% alcohol by volume (abv), then clearly the rest of the liquid is nothing but what goes into the brew kettle at the start of the process. Even if you allow a small amount of volume for the compounds that make beer look, smell, and taste the way it does (and there is a large range of color, aroma, and flavor across all the different styles of beer), then most of what you pay for is what comes out of the tap. Although it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that beer is just processed tap water, the majority of breweries do use the local main water supply for making beer.
This water will be filtered, stripped of all its component minerals, making it completely pure, and then have certain mineral salts put back in. There are a number of breweries that do use water from underground lakes, drawing from their own wells, but these are relatively unusual, and most of them correct the mineral content of their water. I’m afraid that the myth of beer brewed from untreated natural spring water is, in almost every case, just a myth. That’s not to say that water isn’t an important element.
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There are certain styles of beer that are closely linked to the composition of the water where they originate. The rounded softness of classic Czech pilsners is related to the relatively low quantity of mineral salts in the water. The high sulfate content of hard Burton water emphasizes hop bitterness and dryness—qualities both prevalent in the classic pale ales of Burton. The soft water in London—the home of porter and stout brewing—is high in chlorides, which gives beer a fuller mouthfeel.
Clean water is essential to life, but it’s only relatively recently that we have been lucky enough to have a constant potable supply. Before clean water was a fact of life, beer had the advantage of having been boiled during production, sterilizing it and killing any water-borne bacteria. Beer for breakfast was a way of life, rather than a fantasy. Admittedly it was a weak beer, brewed with partly used malt, and known as “small beer” (that’s the origin of the term). While we’re talking trivia, it’s worth noting that brewers refer to water in the brewery as “liquor.” I’ve asked a lot of brewers why this is, and the reply has always been “we just do.” Water, despite being the main ingredient by volume in beer, is perhaps the least important. As long as it is clean and drinkable, it can be changed to suit the style of beer being brewed, or altered to a composition that corresponds with the brewery’s “house style.” The other ingredients, as we shall see, are rather more complex.
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Beer Ingredients: Malt
Malt, or more strictly speaking, malted barley, will be something most of us have seen in its raw form, perhaps without realizing it, and often without making the connection to beer. Whenever you see fields of barley waving serenely in the summer breeze, you are looking at an important ingredient of beer. But quite a complicated process is involved to get the grain from the field to the glass, and many of the steps are crucial to the quality of the finished product. Also crucial to quality is the variety of barley. Every brewer has his own preferences, and the choice may be influenced by the style of beer that is being brewed. There are a couple of classic English varieties that are prized for their depth of flavor (if you see Maris Otter or Golden Promise listed as an ingredient, you’re onto a good thing). Or rather, at least the brewer has bought the best grain; it’s up to him to finish the job properly.
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We’ll leave out the harvesting process—there isn’t a lot of romance in describing a field of barley being cut and processed by a vehicle the size of a house. It’s impressive, sure, but what’s important is to know that what is harvested is just the ears of grain at the very top of the plant. What is left at the end of the process is a big pile of grain—usually barley (but wheat, oats, and rye can also be used) complete with its tough outer husk. This is basically a seed—plant it, and more barley will grow.
This basic natural process, a seed sprouting when it’s planted, is what forms the next step of the production process. Raw barley grains are as hard as little stones, but they contain the starch and enzymes that are needed to turn the body of the grain into fermentable sugar. Yeast needs this sugar to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide, but we’ll come to yeast a little later. It is the specialized job of the maltster to oversee this process, from the germination of the malt through to cooking it, to stabilize and (sometimes) color it.
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At the maltings, the grain is soaked with water, starting the process of germination and sprouting. If the little barleycorn was a sentient being, it would be thinking, “The rains have come! Now’s my big chance to become a big strong barley plant.” At this point, it releases enzymes that break down its reserves of starch into sugar that it thinks it will need to grow into a plant. A few days into this process, after lovingly turning and raking the grains to ensure that their sprouts don’t get too tangled, and that the grains have enough air to stop them from going moldy, the maltster plays his cruelest trick. Rather than allowing the grains to carry on their natural process of growth, he scoops them up, tosses them into a hot rotating oven, and cooks them until they are effectively nothing more than little nuggets of fermentable sugar. Perhaps it’s better that the little barleycorn isn’t a sentient being after all—I wouldn’t like to imagine its thoughts at this ignominious end. Happily, the little barleycorn hasn’t died in vain. He’s been converted into pale malt, which is the basic ingredient for most beers. |
This isn’t quite the end of the story. In the roasting process, the maltster has the option to continue cooking the malt beyond its pale stage, at a higher temperature, so that it starts to color, exactly as bread does when it is toasted. A little more time, and the malt picks up a browner hue, with a nuttier taste. More still, and it becomes dark brown, tasting of coffee and bitter chocolate. Sometimes, the barley is left slightly damp before the kilning process, and so the sugar in the grain caramelizes slightly as it dries, producing toffeeish grain with a red-brown color—Vienna malt, used to produce Vienna-style lagers.
There is also the option of using something other than a neutral heat source to cook the grain. It’s a much more unusual, artisanal process to kiln malt over a natural heat source, usually peat or wood. With this heat, there is, of course, smoke; malt dried in this way takes on a deep, smoky aroma that is passed on to the finished beer. Although unusual, these smoked malts are still used in beer production, most notably the smoked beers (“Rauchbiere,” in their native tongue) of Franconia in central Germany. They are also sometimes used in small quantities to fill out and add complexity to stouts and porters.
Each of these malts has its own character that influences how the finished beer will turn out. Looking at the color of a stout, you might think that it is brewed only from very heavily roasted malt, but surprisingly the malt bill (as the combination of malts in any given brew is known) is predominantly pale malt—perhaps around 70%, with the rest being darker roast malt (and perhaps some dark roasted unmalted barley). The key thing to remember is that pale malt is used for fermentable sugar and without a large proportion of it, you’re not going to get beer at the end, but unfermented barley tea. I’ve never tried this, but my hunch is that it isn’t as interesting as beer.
One final thing happens to malt before it is ready for brewing. The grains are passed through a mill—a pair of heavy steel rollers with a very small gap between them. This cracks the hard outer husk of the grain and releases the floury starch inside. Some breweries choose to do this themselves, but it is often done at the maltings. The grist (as the combination of husk and center is known) is what is mixed with water in the brew kettle. That’s part of the brewing process, which we’ll come to in a little while, but not before we talk about the two other important ingredients in brewing—hops and yeast.
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Beer Ingredients: Hops
There’s a cruel trick I like to play whenever I hold a beer tasting. I get a tulip glass of beer, swirl it around, hold it under someone’s nose, and ask what they smell. For most people, it’s very hard to pick out more than one or two aromas in a beer, and harder still to put a name to them. The most common word that people say when put under the spotlight is “hoppy?” The question mark is very important—everyone knows that beer has hops in and that most beers taste and smell hoppy to some degree. But what does a hop really smell like? And now you come to mention, what actually is a hop?
The answer to the first question is that hops smell like lots of things, and they also only smell like hops. The element that smells like hops is a bit pungent, a bit musty, and somehow almost a bit dirty—this is an underlying hop quality that is common to all hops. The element that smells like lots of different things differs according to the hop variety. Hops can smell of lemon, grapefruit, pine needles, black currant, jasmine—you can see why people look hopeful when they stab at hops being what they can smell. On the plus side, of course, they are usually right.
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To answer the second question, hops are the flower of the climbing plant Humulus lupulus. As a farmed plant, they grow up wires and poles, and in the wild, they climb anything that gets in their way. And how they climb—they can easily grow from tiny shoots up to twenty feet tall in a season, and are harvested in late summer. Fresh hops are an intense olfactory experience—they are sticky with their natural resins, almost overpoweringly pungent, and smell unlike anything else. The dominant aroma at this stage is usually a resinous, pine sap-like note. When hops are dried, and then boiled in beer (or rubbed in the palm of the hand), their secondary character comes out—the notes of citrus, blossom, and fruit that were mentioned earlier. When used in beer, they principally add bitterness and aroma, dependent on what point they are added in the brewing process. They also have an antibacterial quality that once helped preserve beer; in times past, this used to be a great help at keeping beer free from bacterial infection, but it is less of an issue in the hygienic world of twenty-first-century brewing.
There used to be something of a schism about hops in the world of brewing. There were the four classic European varieties (Saaz, Tettnang, Spalt, and Hallertau, the so-called noble hops), understated British varieties (East Kent Golding, Fuggles, and the like), and exuberantly pungent American hops (Cascade, Chinook, et al.). Each was viewed with suspicion by the others, and never the twain shall meet. Happily, those days of hop apartheid are over, and brewers all over the world merrily use hops from wherever best suits the style of beer that they want to make. I’ve had outstanding British bitter in St. Louis, Missouri, resinous American-style pale ale in Cornwall, and the best tasting pilsner ever from a brewery in northern Italy. Hops are the spice of beer. They add zest and excitement to the stolid, sweet backbone that the malt provides. They are the chutney in a cheese sandwich, the jalapeños on a pile of cheesy nachos. The interplay between hops and malt is what makes beer interesting—in fact, it’s what makes beer beer. But there is one further ingredient that adds its own unique influence, that magically transmutes sugar into alcohol—yeast.
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Beer Ingredients: Yeast
OK, so it’s a bit of a reach to suggest that yeast does its job magically. It’s actually a simple biological process whereby the yeast eats the sugar and excretes carbon dioxide (CO2), alcohol, and esters (aroma compounds), the process known as fermentation. But even if they are not magical little creatures, yeasts are pretty incredible. Yeasts are single-celled organisms, and they are all around us—floating in the air, sitting on the skins of fruit, hanging around between your toes, waiting for something to do. There are lots of different types of yeast, but as far as brewing goes, there are only three types that matter—Saccharomyces cerevisae (ale yeast), S. uvarum (lager yeast), and wild yeast (principally Brettanomyces bruxellensis). Of these two, S. cerevisae and S. uvarum are cultivated, cultured yeasts, whereas B. bruxellensis is a sort of rogue yeast that floats around looking for something nice to spoil. It’s the two yeasts of the genus Saccharomyces that are the important ones, but we’ll talk a bit about naughty old Brett in a while too.
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Both ale and lager yeasts do pretty much the same thing—they eat sugar, and leave behind carbon dioxide, alcohol, and flavor compounds. But it’s the way they do it that makes the difference. Lager yeasts like to ferment at lower temperatures, lounging around at the bottom of the fermenting vessel, and they tend toward longer, slower fermentations. This process produces much cleaner, crisper-tasting beers.
This long, slow fermentation, referred to as lagering (from the German “lagern”, meaning “to store”), is how the classic golden beer got its name. Ale yeast likes to get itself all worked up into a lather at the top of the fermenting vessel, producing big pillowing heads of foam, working at warmer temperatures and fermenting much faster. This style of fermentation produces much fruitier, more complex flavors. This is the principal difference between lagers and ales; even in beers made only with pale malt, the difference that the yeast makes is profound. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. One interesting hybrid still in production today, Anchor Steam beer, is an example of the style known as California Common. This is a beer fermented with a lager yeast, but at warmer temperatures. It predates the widespread affordability of refrigeration and produces a medium-bodied beer with the fruity attributes of an ale. It’s not a lagerbier, as it doesn’t have the long period of cold fermentation (sometimes referred to as cold conditioning) that a true lager has. Other exceptions are the German regional specialties kölsch and altbier. These are beers fermented with an ale yeast, but which receive a period of cold conditioning. They are lagerbiers, and yet are neither ales nor lagers.
You see how complex yeast is?
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Talking of complex, wild yeasts take this to another level. I singled out Brettanomyces earlier, as it’s a relatively well-known wild yeast, notable for leaving rather unpleasant barnyard aromas behind after completing its work. I’m being a little unfair, because this is just one of many wild yeasts that work their magic in the spontaneously fermenting lambic beers of Belgium.
Lambic is a style that challenges the very definition of what beer is, producing as it does tart, dry, acidic beers that need many months and years of aging and blending before they are drinkable. It’s also unfair to point the finger solely at yeasts, as there are a host of micro-organisms that live in the wooden maturation barrels and give the beer a hard time. But all this talk of wild yeasts isn’t making anything simpler, and neither is the fact that both ale and lager yeasts have many hundreds of different strains to them, each subtly affecting the final taste of the beer.
One brewery may use its own house strain, another might be happy to buy a known cultured strain of yeast from a yeast bank. The key is that the brewer has to provide conditions in which the yeast will thrive and do what it’s meant to do, in a predictable manner. There is a joke that a brewer’s job is just to keep the yeast happy—happy yeasts make good beer. And with that uplifting thought in our minds, let’s turn to how beer is made.
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Brewing Beer
Water, malt, hops, and yeast—just four ingredients. How hard can brewing be? Well, the answer is that brewing itself is actually a pretty straightforward process; the trick is correctly manipulating all the variables to get the desired effect. When you add in all the different types of water that can be added, the many shades and quantities of malt that can be used, the combination of hops, and the choice of yeast strains that all do slightly different things, you can see that pretty quickly the choices mount up to a dazzling number of outcomes.
No wonder that every beer tastes different and we all have our favorites. The first step is to create a sort of coarse porridge from the grain and the hot water. This is called the mash, and its purpose is to release the fermentable sugar from the cracked grain, or grist. The vessel in which it is done is called the mash tun. The mash sits at around 150ºF for about an hour to allow the enzymes in the malt to get to work and release all the fermentable sugar from the grist. This sweet liquid is called wort (pronounced “wurt”). Once all the fermentable sugar has been extracted, the wort needs to be clarified.
This is done by a process known as lautering—recirculating the wort out of the bottom of the mash tun, and spraying it back on the top of the mashed grain (the spraying is known as sparging—brewers love to have a special term for everything). In the lautering process, the mashed grain, which is now basically a floating plug of grain husks, acts as a filter. The wort goes into the top, filters down through the spent grain, and comes out clear at the bottom. This second pass also ensures that all of the sugar is extracted from the mash.
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That’s the fiddly bit over with. Then comes the boil, where it starts to feel like brewing as you might imagine it. The wort is heated to boiling point in a new vessel (it will boil for about an hour), and the hop additions start. There are certain varieties of hops that are better suited to being added early (after about ten minutes). These early additions are known as bittering hops, as they contribute the background bitterness of the beer. The later in the boil you add hops, the more they contribute to the aroma rather than the bitterness. Certain hop varieties are more suited to being added later in the boil, and these are called (yes, you’ve guessed it) aroma hops. At the end of the boil, you can try the wort (careful, it’s hot). It will be pretty sweet, as there is all that sugar the yeast is dying to get to work on, but it should be starting to taste a bit like beer.
The end of the boil is also the point where things have to move a bit more quickly. You remember what I said about wild yeasts being all around us? Well, it’s not quite an emergency, but from the end of the boil, everything that comes into contact with the wort needs to be sterile. The faster you remove the hops and cool the wort, the sooner you can add the yeast and get the fermenting vessel airtight (with one-way airlock), keeping out all those naughty wild yeasts that want to ruin your beer. Once the wort is cooled to around 75ºF, the yeast can be added (or pitched, as the experts like to say). Fermentation begins quickly after pitching. Primary fermentation is a surprisingly vigorous process—it will throw up a big head of foam. After a couple of days, this will die back, and a slower second fermentation begins, which might last as long as four weeks (or more with a stronger beer). At the end of the primary fermentation, there will be a lot of dead yeast (known as trub) and goodness knows what else at the bottom of the fermenter. It’s usually a good idea to move the beer (yes, it’s beer by this point) into a clean vessel to complete its fermentation, as the trub can cause unpleasant flavors and odors to form. A couple more weeks of gentle fermentation, and it’s ready to be bottled or kegged, and drunk a few weeks after that. This isn’t a complete “how to” guide for brewing—I’ve left out a lot of details for simplicity’s sake—but that’s basically how you brew beer. Four ingredients, some cooking, and a long wait—that’s all there is to it. From that basic process, the whole world of beer is created.
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Brewery Tours & Visits
The English phrase “he couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery” is often used to describe incompetence. Happily, I’ve never known this literally to be the case. It might not surprise you too much to hear that visiting a brewery should be an interesting and enjoyable way to pass a few hours. It might not always end in a party, but what you do come away with is a sense of what makes one brewery different from another, and why beers vary between breweries, within a brewery’s output, and indeed, sometimes from batch to batch. Having toured many breweries, I’m always amazed at the enormous number of variables that are available to a brewer. Multiply the number of malt styles by the number of hop varieties by the number of yeast strains, and you have a very large number indeed—and that’s before you start to combine malts and hops in different proportions.
Given this, you would imagine a brewer to be a cross between a philosopher and a mad scientist, but the range of people you’re likely to meet standing over a steaming copper is as broad as anywhere. Each will have his own way of doing things, their own little twist to the brewing process, and that is what makes a brewery visit worthwhile—you’ll get an insight that you will never get from just drinking their products, and this insight will enrich your enjoyment of their beer.
Most breweries are surprisingly happy to show people around, although it’s rare for them to drop everything to show one person the brewery. It might help to get a group together and call yourselves a local beer appreciation society. At one end of the scale, you might get a private tour of the brewery, with a tasting thrown in. If this happens, make sure that you are gracious enough to buy some beer at the end of it—they aren’t just giving up their time for fun, you know. At the other extreme, you might be told to join the monthly tour, or (a very few cases) just get a flat “No.” Don’t take it personally—although the end product is usually enjoyed in a sociable setting, it is born of hard work, and the work needs to come first. Actually, in the course of compiling this book, I had a few breweries tell me they were too busy to send me beer. That, of course, is another thing altogether...
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