Basic Brewing Theory | The Beer Pilgrim

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Topics For Today?s Lesson:

• How Beer is Made
• Ways to Brew
• Equipment
• The Number 1 Rule

Prior Reading / Information:

How Beer is Made

Beer has been brewed for roughly as long as civilization has existed. In fact, civilization and beer are intricately linked in that brewing wasn?t really possible without the farming of cereal crops that began with the first settlements in the Fertile Crescent ? and one of the main reasons people decided to stay in settlements was the ability to use cereal grains to make beer (and bread). I?ll let you draw your own conclusions about how important beer has been in history. If you want a really optimistic, beer-favorable view of history, get on Netflix and watch ?How Beer Saved the World?.

Regardless of what archeologists say about the historical importance of beer, it has been made, typically, with 4 ingredients:

1. Cereal Grains
2. Yeast
3. Spices
4. Water

Historically, only water has remained a constant, the types of yeast, grain, and spices have varied. Modern beer, however, is more restricted (although things are becoming much more free-form). In 1517 a law was passed in Germany to establish quality and purity standards in beer. Brewers were only allowed to use 4 ingredients (actually, yeast was not included as it wasn?t really understood or classified yet):

1. Barley
2. Yeast
3. Hops
4. Water

We?ll stick to this formula for the most part during our brewing for this course, although we may add some adjuncts (sources of sugar), or additional ingredients in some recipes. Great beer can be made with only these 4 ingredients, and in fact most commercial beers are made using only these. Let?s take a look at each ingredient and the role in plays.

Barley

Barley is a type of grain that comes in several different varieties. In brewing, we are actually using its seeds, which are small, husked, and contain starch (which would eventually become food for the seed once it reaches the soil so it can grow and be exposed to the sun). The starch in the endosperm of the seed is the source of the calories for our yeast to eat, making alcohol in the process. However, yeast cannot ?eat? these complex starches. Fortunately, the plant?s cells cannot either. When barley begins to sprout, it produces enzymes which can rapidly break down the starches into sugar. Brewers use malted barley, which means it has been ?sprouted? under controlled conditions to activate these enzymes and then roasted to halt the process. The amount of roasting adds various flavors to the malt, and thus, the finished beer.

A brewer takes malted barley and combines with water to make a mash. As the grains rest, the enzymes work to convert the starches to simpler sugars that the yeast can ?eat.? The product of this process is called sweet wort and it is eventually boiled with hops.

The process above is all-grain brewing. Many homebrewers skip the process of extracting sugars from grains. These are extract brewers, and they use malt extract. Malt extract is essentially sweet wort that has been spray-dried into a powder (Dry Malt Extract or DME) or condensed into syrup (Liquid Malt Extract or LME). It is available at any homebrewing store.

There are typically two categories of malted barely when you are shopping for ingredients: base malts and specialty malts. Base malts will compose up to 100% of your grain bill. They have names like Pale 2-Row, Pilsner, Marris Otter, Pale Ale Malt, etc. There are definite differences between the base malts in flavor and characteristics, which we will discuss more later. Specialty malts add strong colors and flavors to your beer and thus are typically used as less than 25% of the grain bill. Most new brewers are surprised to learn that an extremely dark beer like a stout is still composed primarily of PALE malt. The dark black color comes from a smaller percentage of darker roasted barley and black patent malt (depending on recipe, of course).

Barley or extract contributes sugar to the beer. This is measured in (often times) Specific Gravity, and expressed as a number. As the sugars are converted to alcohol, the SG will drop. You should take a SG reading before you pitch your yeast, known as your Original Gravity (OG), and periodically when you think fermentation is complete (known as final gravity ? FG). Using OG and FG you can calculate your alcohol by volume. A typical OG can range from 1.030 to 1.100 or more, with 1.030 corresponding to a very light, low alcohol small beer and 1.100 being for a Barley Wine or Russian Imperial Stout. FG will range from 1.002 for a very dry beer to 1.020 or greater for something like a Milk Stout which has a lot of un-fermentable sugars and thus residual sweetness.

Yeast

Yeast (my favorite organism) are fungi ? they must consume food to make energy to use for biological processes (unlike a plant which can make its own food using photosynthesis.) Brewers yeast is called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and this is the species of yeast most often used in making beer. There are many strains of brewer?s yeast, which produce different flavor profiles and characteristics for your beer.

When yeast cells ?eat? the fermentable sugars from your wort, they are using anaerobic fermentation, meaning they are functioning without oxygen. Your cells can do this as well, if you?ve ever ?felt the burn? in your legs as you peddled up a steep hill on your bicycle, you?ve felt a buildup of lactic acid in your leg muscles. Yeast don?t do that kind of anaerobic metabolism (although some bacteria do, and this is how sour beers are made), instead they produce ethanol. Wouldn?t it be great if our muscles worked like yeast? Maybe?. Anyway, the yeast produce Ethanol (EtOH) and CO₂. This is why beer is bubbly and gets you tipsy.

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Hops

The hop plant, Humulus lupulus is what gives beer its characteristic bitterness. Hops are added to the boiling wort at various times, depending on how much bitterness you want to add. When you brew for the first time, you?re going to be worried about being busted for running a marijuana grow-op, hops can smell very similar to pot ? they are actually in the same family and closely related.

The amount of bitterness added by the hops depends on a few factors, but primarily on two things: Alpha Acids and Time. Different strains of hops have different amounts of alpha acid (as well as other compounds which are less important and will be discussed in depth later). Hops with a higher amount of alpha acid will produce more bitterness than one with a lower amount, assuming they are boiled for the same amount of time. Bitterness in beer is often measured in IBUs, International Bitterness Units. Technically the scale stops at 100, above which there is supposedly no difference in bitterness that humans can perceive. That said, some especially hop-heavy recipes will push over 100 IBUs. There are various formulae to calculate bitterness based on A.A. and boil time, but most people just use an online or computer-based calculator.

The basic way to think about hop additions is this:

Higher AA Hop = Increase IBU

Longer Boil Time = Increase IBU

Many beer styles now rely on so-called ?late additions?, which means adding hops in the last 20 minutes of the boil (or sometimes after the boil). This adds little bitterness, but extracts a lot of hop flavors ? which can range from spicy to piney to citrusy depending on the strain. Hops are definitely something to experiment with?. A subject we will cover more in-depth later in the course.

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Water

Water is extremely important to brewing. However, there isn?t much more than you need to know about it now other than the following: If your water tastes good to drink straight out of the tap, it will be fine for your first brews. If you don?t like the taste of your tap water, I recommend using bottled water of some type (not distilled, as it lacks the nutrients yeast require in small amounts for growth and multiplication). Water will be covered on its on in a future lesson.

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Ways to Brew

There are three basic ways that people brew beer:

-From Extract

-From Extract with Specialty Grains

-All-Grain

Extract-Only

The way most people start making beer is from extract. Malt extract comes in either dry or liquid form and is basically concentrated wort. Some extracts are already hopped, all you have to do to make beer with this is add water, boil, add yeast, and wait.

Most extracts (and some would say the best kinds) are NOT hopped, which means you will need to add water, boil, add hops, and then add yeast. This is what people typically are talking about when they mention extract brewing. A lot of homebrewers look down on this simplistic method, but the fact is that very good homebrew can be made with extract and some commercial breweries actually use extract as well (although not most as it is much cheaper to brew from malted barley at large scales ? not to mention the numerous other advantages)

Extract with Specialty Grains

One of the first steps most people take between extract and all-grain brewing is to add specialty grains. The process is the same as making an extract batch except that you add various specialty grains (special roasts of barley) to add specific flavors. These grains are usually steeped to make a grain-tea before the extract is added. Few, if any, fermentable sugars come from steeping the grains. Admittedly I don?t know a whole lot about this as I only did a few batches this way before moving to all-grain.

All-Grain

All-grain brewing gives you the best control over the taste, mouthfeel, and color of your beer. In this process you mash the grains at between 140-165F for up to 75 minutes (an hour is typical for homebrewers, although conversion of starches to sugars take considerably less time in most cases ? many breweries use 15 or 30 minute mashes). This temperature allows two primary amylase enzymes to break down the starches into sugar that can later be eaten by the yeast. Temperature control is very important, as the two enzymes work better at different temperature ranges, leaving you with different types/amounts of fermentable sugars. We will cover this part of all-grain brewing theory extensive later in the course.

The sweet, sugary water that is drained from the grains is then boiled in a process identical to extract brewing. You can basically think of all-grain brewing as ?making your own [non-concentrated, liquid] extract.?

Equipment

One could have a fair philosophical discussion about what the ?bare minimum? amount of equipment would be to make beer. Some people make extract batches with only one vessel, you?re welcome to try this, but I imagine that sanitation would be a problem unless you have a pretty specialized vessel. For starting out, all you really need is the following:

-A pot

-A stove or burner (or ability to make a campfire or something)

-An implement with which you can stir the wort

-A sealed vessel to use as a fermenter (can be a bucket or a carboy)

-A bottling wand (debate-able, but probably a good idea)

-Pressure-safe bottles and caps (can be PET screw-top bottles, cork and cage bottles, or standard cap bottles ? note that you will need a ?capper? to put the caps on the glass bottles).

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Sanitation is a requirement when making beer. Most people will start with a kit which will contain a small packet of sanitzer. That will work fine, but I recommend getting a spray bottle and filling it with Star-San No Rinse Sanitizer. I?ve been using it for many, many batches and have never had an infection. We will cover sanitation more before we make our first batch.

Moving up from there, I would recommend everyone has a hydrometer, which measures the specific gravity of your beer. It isn?t a requirement to make beer, even good beer, but it is essential for repeatability and for knowing ?what?s going on? with your beer before/during fermentation.

After that the sky is the limit. You can get bottling buckets, kegs, CO2 tanks, kegerators, beer guns, mash-lauter tuns, automated brewing systems, conical fermenters, etc, etc. More equipment will be covered in future lessons. If you?ve read this far I?m assuming you are just getting started. It really is a good idea to start with the minimum, make some pretty-good to excellent beer with it, and when the hobby consumes you ? THEN go spend the money on more stuff. If you jump in too soon you won?t really know what you need most and why. After you?ve made a few basic extract batches you will have a solid idea about what you want next to improve or simplify your brewing process.

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The Number One Rule:

As laid out by Charlie Papazian: ?Relax, Don?t Worry, Have a Homebrew?

In other words, this may seem like a lot of information, and frankly, if this is your first exposure to brewing it make seem like a lot but believe me ? you ain?t seen nothin? yet ? but regardless of all that, just remember this is supposed to be fun, not stressful. Relax and have a beer. Lives are not on the line (no known human pathogens can survive in beer, so even if you make something that tastes horrible, it most likely won?t kill you ? unless you have severe gluten or yeast allergies, in which case I?m guessing you would not be reading this). By the way, you?ll see me use this Papazian quote a lot, it is often abbreviated as RDWHAHB, learn it, love it, live by it.

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