Self-Sufficiency: Home Brewing E-Book

John Parkes

• Herausgeber: IMM Lifestyle Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Serie: Self-Sufficiency
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 147

Beschreibung

What could be better than enjoying a glass of delicious home-brewed organic beer? This book includes everything you'll need to know to brew a variety of beers at home, from the equipment and techniques needed to a few inside secrets from a professional brewer. In this timely book, John Parkes demystifies the brewing process and explains in easy-to-follow terms how anyone can produce delicious beer with the help of just some basic equipment and a few key skills. Those new to home brewing will love the easy-to-follow instructions and the detailed explanations of the brewing process and anyone already adept at home brewing will be delighted by the original recipes. Made without unnecessary chemicals and additives, the beers featured here will appeal to anyone seeking a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Leseprobe

Published 2016—IMM Lifestyle Bookswww.IMMLifestyleBooks.com

IMM Lifestyle Books are distributed in the UK by Grantham Book Service.

In North America, IMM Lifestyle Books are distributed byFox Chapel Publishing 1970 Broad StreetEast Petersburg, PA 17520www.FoxChapelPublishing.com

Copyright © 2009, 2016 text: John ParkesCopyright © 2009, 2016 illustrations: IMM Lifestyle BooksCopyright © 2009, 2016 IMM Lifestyle Books

John Parkes has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

Print ISBN 9781504800396eISBN 9781607659716

CONTENTS

Introduction

ABOUT BEER

Beer beginnings

Beer styles

Lager

INGREDIENTS

Water

Malt

Adjuncts

Hops

MAKING BEER

Cleanliness

Basic equipment

Home brewing methods

Brewing from kits

Brewing from malt extract, hops and adjuncts

Ingredients

Recording the brewing process

Brewing the traditional way

Brewing record sheet template

Hydrometer temperature correction chart

Troubleshooting

Glossary

References

Suppliers

INTRODUCTION

Over a period of thirty years, I have progressed from a home brewer brewing from kits to owning my own microbrewery, and every day I still learn something new about brewing.

My first job after leaving University was working for a large retail chemist in the chemical production department. Other factories on the same site manufactured home brew kits and some of my friends were fortunate enough to work in product development within these departments.

Purely in the cause of science, I would also help out the product development department by testing new recipes for the home brew kits. This involved brewing and then drinking the beer. Difficult as this task was, I carried on manfully and tested many recipes of every imaginable combination: those for bitter, stout and lager made with malt extract, with a combination of malt extract and grain, and using dried and liquid yeasts. I developed a taste for home brewing and a desire to brew beer that was like the stuff I drank in the pub.

I later turned to brewing beer at home using malted grains and hops – a full day’s work that did not always make me a family favourite! I even went as far as culturing yeast from the dregs at the bottom of certain commercial bottle-conditioned beers. True dedication to the art!

No book can, in my opinion, claim to be the complete guide to brewing because it is an enormously complex subject that requires years of study to fully comprehend. I have spoken to several head brewers in large organizations who have left me dazed and confused with their elaborate explanations of the mashing and fermentation processes.

I have tried to offer brewing styles to suit as many people as possible. For those with little time but a keen desire to start home brewing, there is a chapter on brewing from kits. For those with more time, you can try to develop the craft by using either a combination of malt extract, grain and hops, or by really going back to basics and using just malt grains and hops. Some aspects of brewing are common to all of these styles, and these are described in the pages on brewing from kits, which those moving on to more advanced styles of brewing will be guided back to.

The chapter on cleanliness, in particular, should be read carefully before attempting any type of home brewing. Cleanliness is crucial to every form of home brewing, so ensure you always maintain a high standard of cleanliness across your brewing activities. No matter how much time and effort you put into brewing beer, putting it into a container that has not been sterilized correctly will result in it being ruined and all your efforts going to waste. I hope you will find the text easy to read and that this book will help you produce beers that you will enjoy both making and imbibing.

John Parkes

About beer

Beer has been around for thousands of years. Its diverse flavours and thirst-quenching properties make it one of the most popularly enjoyed alcoholic beverages. This chapter looks at the history of beer and the way in which its production has moved from the home to become a worldwide multi-million dollar industry.

Beer beginnings

Origins

Beer is quite possibly the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage, dating back to at least the 6th millennium bc, and recorded in the written history of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Historians believe that beer was discovered by accident by the peoples of these regions. Barley was one of the staple grains of these parts, and it was soon discovered that if grain was allowed to get wet, germinate and then quickly dried off (a process known as malting), it would become sweeter and more suited for making breads and cakes.

It was a short leap from the discovery of malting to the discovery of beer. Probably quite by accident, someone allowed their malted barley to get wet and remain exposed to the elements. Naturally-occurring wild yeasts then contaminated this exposed liquid. Because malted barley contains sugars that are the perfect nutrition for yeast, the yeast took hold and multiplied, creating a bubbly soup of alcohol and malted barley by-products that eventually became the first beer. Once this process was discovered and refined, it became quite easy for the brewer to separate the beer from the spent yeast, which could then be cultured into the next batch of beer.

Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 7000 years ago in what is today Iraq, making it one of the first ever recorded biological engineering tasks using the process of fermentation. In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be in the form of a 4000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl.

Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of Eurasian and North African antiquity, including Egypt. Knowledge of brewing was passed down to the Greeks, who in turn taught the Romans to brew. The Romans called their brew ‘cerevisia’, from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, and Latin for ‘strength’.

Beer was very important to early Romans, but during the Roman Republic wine displaced beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage, and beer became a beverage considered fit only for barbarians. Tacitus, a senator of the Roman Empire, wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day. Thracians were also known to consume beer made from rye, ever since the 5th century bc, as the Greek historian Hellanicus of Lesbos records in his works.

Hops and beer

The use of hops in beer was written about in 822 by a Carolingian abbot and again in 1067 by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote: ‘If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops.’ The custom of flavouring beer with hops was known since the 9th century at least, but was only gradually adopted because of difficulties in establishing the right proportions of ingredients. Before that, a mix of various herbs known as ‘gruit’ had been used, but they did not boast the same conserving properties as hops. Beer flavoured without hops was often spoiled soon after preparation and could not travel very far. The only other alternative way to produce beer that would keep was to increase the alcohol content, but this was expensive.

By the 13th century, hopped beer was perfected in Germany and this longer-lasting beer, combined with standardized barrel sizes, allowed for large-scale export. The Germans also pioneered a new scale of operation and an increased level of professionalism. Previously, beer had been brewed at home, but the production was now successfully replaced by medium-sized operations of about eight to 10 people. This type of production spread to Holland in the 14th century and later to Flanders, Brabant, and finally reached England by the late 15th century.

Europe

Until medieval times, beer largely remained a homemaker’s activity. The oldest operating commercial brewery is the Weihenstephan Abbey in Bavaria, which obtained the brewing rights from the nearby town of Freising in 1040. By the 14th and 15th centuries, beer making was gradually changing from a family-oriented activity to an artisan one, with pubs and monasteries brewing their own beer for mass consumption.

Hopped beer was imported to the English town of Winchester from the Netherlands as early as 1400, and by 1428 hops were being planted all over the country. The popularity of hops was at first mixed; the Brewers’ Company of London went so far as to state:

‘No hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquore wherof ale shall be made but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast.’

In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (the Bavarian Purity Law) which was perhaps the oldest food regulation in use throughout the 20th century. The Reinheitsgebot ordered that the ingredients of beer be restricted to water, barley and hops. Yeast was added to the list in 1857 after Louis Pasteur’s findings on the role of yeast in the fermentation process.The Reinheitsgebot was officially repealed from German law in 1987.

Until recent times, most beers were top-fermented (fermented at relatively warm temperatures of around 20°C/68°F where the yeast rises to the surface). Bottom-fermented beers (beers fermented at cooler temperatures of around 8°C/46°F using a strain of yeast that ferments at the bottom of the beer) were discovered by accident in the 16th century, after beer was stored in cool caverns for long periods of time – a process now termed ‘lagering’. Lagers have since largely outpaced top-fermented beers in terms of commercial production and worldwide consumption.

Asia

In Asia, there is pre-historic evidence that shows brewing began around 5400 bc in Sumer, southern Iraq. Some recent archaeological finds also show that Chinese villagers were brewing alcoholic drinks as far back as 7000 bc. Asia’s first brewery was incorporated in 1855, although it was established in the late 1820s by Englishman Edward Dyer in the town of Kasauli in India under the name Dyer Breweries. The company still exists today and is known as Mohan Meakin, and comprises a large group of companies across many industries.

The Industrial Revolution

Following significant improvements in the efficiency of the steam engine in the mid-18th century, industrialization of beer became a reality. Further innovations in the brewing process came about with the introduction of the thermometer in 1760, closely followed by the hydrometer, a simple but invaluable instrument that allowed brewers to measure attenuation (a measure of how much sugar in the wort has been fermented into alcohol by the yeast).

The hydrometer transformed the brewing process of beer. Before its introduction, beers were brewed from a single malt: brown beers from brown malt, amber beers from amber malt, and pale beers from pale malt. With the help of the hydrometer, brewers were able to compare the yield from equal weights of different malts.

Brewers observed that pale malt, though more expensive, yielded around 50 per cent more fermentable extract per unit of weight than the cheaper brown and amber malts, making it more cost-effective. Once this fact was established, brewers switched to using mostly pale malt for all beer types, supplemented with a small quantity of highly-coloured malt to achieve the desired colour for darker beers.

All malt starts life as pale malt, and it is the kilning process that transforms both its colour and flavour. In general, none of these early malts were sufficiently shielded from the smoke involved in the kilning process, and consequently, early beers had a smoky component to their flavours. Evidence suggests that maltsters and brewers constantly tried to minimize the smokiness of their finished beer.

Writers of the period describe the distinctive taste derived from wood-smoked malts, and the almost universal revulsion it engendered. The smoked beers and ales of the West Country were famous for being undrinkable – locals and the desperate excepted. The following extract from Directions for Brewing Malt Liquors in 1700 goes some way to describing the general feeling:

‘In most parts of the West, their malt is so stenched with the smoak of the wood, with which ’tis dryed, that no stranger can endure it, though the inhabitants, who are familiarized to it, can swallow it as the Hollanders do their thick black beer brewed with buck wheat.’

The invention of the drum roaster in 1817 by Daniel Wheeler allowed for the creation of very dark, roasted malts that were free from the unpleasant smoky taint brought about by roasting over open fires. The externally-heated drum roaster was able to produce a range of dark malts suitable for contributing to the flavour of porters and stouts. The development of the drum roaster was prompted by a British law preventing the use of any ingredients other than malt and hops in beer; prior to this, colouring of beers had been achieved using alternative ingredients. Porter brewers, employing a predominantly pale malt grist, urgently needed a legal colourant, and Wheeler’s patent malt was the solution.

Modern beer production

Prior to Prohibition in the 1920s and early 30s, there were thousands of breweries in the United States, mostly brewing heavier beers than modern US beer drinkers are used to. Most of these breweries went out of business, although some converted to producing soft drinks.

Bootlegged beer was often watered down to increase profits, beginning a trend, still ongoing today, of the American palate’s preference for weaker beers. Consolidation of breweries and the application of industrial quality control standards have led to the mass-production and mass-marketing of light lagers.

The decades after World War II saw a huge consolidation of the American brewing industry: brewing companies would buy out their rivals solely for their customers and distribution systems, shutting down their brewing operations. Smaller breweries, including microbreweries or craft brewers and imports, have become more abundant since the mid 1980s. By 1997 there were more breweries operating in the United States than in all of Germany, historically the most established brewing nation.

Many European nations have unbroken brewing traditions dating back to the earliest historical records. Beer is an especially important drink in countries such as Belgium, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom, with nations such as France, the Scandinavian countries, the Czech Republic and many others having their own methods, history, characteristics and styles.

There is a significant market in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, for ‘live’ beers. These unfiltered, unpasteurized brews contain live yeast, and are awkward to look after because not only do they continue to ferment in the cask but there is also a risk of air getting into the cask, turning the beer sour. ‘Dead’ beers, on the other hand, are easier to look after. These are beers that have had all traces of yeast removed before being pasteurized and transferred into airtight metal casks. Live beer quality can suffer with poor care, but many people prefer the taste of a live beer to a dead one. While beer is usually matured for relatively short periods of times compared to wine – a few weeks to a few months – some of the stronger so-called real ales have been found to develop character and flavour over the course of as much as several decades.

In 1953, New Zealand brewing pioneer, Morton Coutts, successfully developed the technique of continuous fermentation, a process which involves beer flowing through sealed tanks, fermenting under pressure and never coming into contact with the atmosphere, even when bottled, thus eliminating the possibility of the alcohol oxidizing into acetic acid (vinegar) and spoiling the beer. Coutts went on to patent this process which is still in use today by many commercial brewers.

In comparison, Marston’s Brewery in Burton-on-Trent, England, still uses open wooden Burton Union sets for fermentation in order to maintain the quality and flavour of its beers. Belgium’s lambic brewers go so far as to expose their brews to outside air in order to pick up the natural wild yeasts which ferment the wort. Traditional brewing techniques protect the beer from oxidation by maintaining a carbon dioxide blanket over the wort as it ferments into beer.

Traditional brewing techniques are still widely used for the sake of maintaining the quality and uniqueness of the final product, which suffers if brewed using the more efficient industrial processes developed in modern times. Today, the brewing industry is a huge global business, consisting of several multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers, ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.

Advances in refrigeration, international and transcontinental shipping, marketing and commerce have resulted in an international marketplace, where the consumer is presented with hundreds of choices between various styles of local, regional, national and foreign beers.

Beer styles

The evolution of beer styles

The style of a beer is often indicative of the region of the world in which it was originally brewed. The factors affecting the style of beer produced include the quality of the water available, the range of locally-grown ingredients, notably cereal grains and hops, yeast strains and ambient temperature.

Certain towns within a country are well known for their water supply and the fine beers that are produced from this water; Burton on Trent, in England, is one of these places. Cereal crops vary from country to country, although most brewers around the world have used barley as the basis for their beers, giving rise to regional variations from the use of other malted grains and adjuncts.