Makin’ Beer - Part One

This week’s craft is: Beer!

In the last week I’ve been discussing the craft and process of beer-making with my dad. What started out as a few questions ended up with making a batch of beer just to demonstrate the process. So, every couple of days for the next two weeks until the beer batch is done, I’ll give some of his answers about beer-making, throw in some trivia, and actually go through the beer process as it unfolded. (The image to the left is a glass of my dad’s homemade wheat beer.)

The Interview:

Q: How long have you been making beer, and how did you get started? (the image to the right is my dad “cooking” a batch of beer wort in his kitchen.)

A: I’ve been making beer about 4-5 years since I came upon a Mr. Beer kit in a shop in Kemah, Texas. I like beer, so I thought I would get it and try it.

Q: Why did making beer appeal to you - why did you start?

A: It was an opportunity to make something with grain and with yeast. I also like making bread, but the process of making beer is more interesting, and it takes longer. In addition, I was interested in learning about beer because it is one of the most ancient foods.

Q: What has turned out to be the most interesting aspect of beer-making? (Barley grains pictured to the left.)

A: I like it because it is a process. There are a number of steps in making beer, and it is interesting to prepare and watch each step in the process. Sometimes you have to do something, but a lot of it is watching as it prepares itself. That’s interesting.

In addition to the process, it is more fun than other things you can make because it creates a food product in the end. It’s not something you just throw away or can’t use.

Making Beer, Day One:

(Follow the link to see the ingredients and the directions for the first day of beermaking.)

I would like to note before I begin that I’ve made beer ONCE. I am NOT AN EXPERT. This is definitely a quick summary of what I saw and remembered! There are some great explicit guides out there, and this is an introduction to something I though was really interesting. I’m encouraged enough I’ll probably do it again myself, though! I think it’s fascinating to see what goes into what I consume.

Ingredients in picture: Glass bottle of barley (left), bag of white corn sugar, bag of off-white pre-hopped dry malt extract, small bottle of dry yeast (middle, front) and hops.
Ingredients for making beer include the following:

1. Malt, Malt Extract or Dry Malt Extract (DME) - Malt is the roasted, sprouted grains that form the grain base of beer. Common examples are barley and wheat. Malt is a type of sugar.

2. Hops - there are a wide variety of hops for flavoring, finishing and bittering. They add flavor and character to beer. They are very potent-smelling! (Hops are pictured to the right. The pellets are compressed hops for brewing. The “bags” are cloth wrapped around hops for flavoring in beer wort when cooking it.)

3. Yeast - this is the active agent (yeast is a microscopic animal) that eats the sugar and creates the alcohol and CO2 in beer. There are many types, but only some will work - bread yeast doesn’t! Some will only make vinegar. Some make more toxic products.

4. Sugar - brewers seem to use special types of sugar, but table sugar can be used. This is in addition to the sugar of the malt and is used in the bottling process. An example is dry corn syrup.

5. Additives - these are optional, and can be added for flavoring purposes. Examples include bitter orange, orange peel, coriander, fruit syrups, Irish moss, etc.

Steps to making beer - making the “wort”:

1. The first step in making beer is to make the wort - that is, the raw beer liquid that’s boiled, flavored and fermented. This liquid is mostly water and sugar.

So first of all you must make a liquid by dissolving some grain sugars in water! We used for our grain sugar base a malt syrup extract made from barley and wheat. I’ll speak more to malt types tomorrow.

Slowly dissolve about half a quart of malt syrup (or whatever type of malt you have) in a dutch oven full of water. If you dissolve the malt tea too quickly, it will burn just like any other sugar. My dad wasn’t entirely sure which tea he was using, but he thinks it was a pale ale malt extract - a wheat beer. Sorry, but no exact measurements in this kitchen!

2. Once the malt was entirely dissolved, we brought the mixture to a boil. Then we added a little bag of the “flavoring hops” - these give the beer its primary flavor. In this case, we used Styrian Golding Hops, which have a sweet, spicy scent. They are used in many Belgian ales.

Hops, as shown in the picture to the left, will make the mixture foam, so make sure it doesn’t (a) burn or (b) boil over. Turn the heat down some if you need to.

You can use “bittering hops” as well at this step, but my dad decided nay on the bitter. Bittering hops do exactly what it sounds like. This mix boiled for 45 minutes.

3. Finally we added a little bag of finishing hops and boiled them for 10 minutes. We used U.K. Northdown hops, which smelled to me like wet earth. This adds another element to the complexity of the flavor.

4. Remove the hops bags carefully with tongs. Turn off the heat, take the pot off the burner, and put on the lid to the pot. Leave it to cool overnight in a safe place. Right now the mixture is too hot to really be put into most wort vats without warping them, although you could put the pan into a cool bath and speed up the cooling if you’d like.

That was it for day one! Check back tomorrow for another installment of the beer-making enterprise.

Cheers! Miriam