Beer and Beermaking

Beer is to thirst as fillet steak is to hunger.  In both cases, you could have something lighter to sate your desire, but nothing more complex, nothing richer, nothing more sturdy and satisfying.  It's true that if you were merely thirsty, you could have water, but let us set aside that trivial example and assume you seek a material of substance.  By the same token, if you were merely hungry, you could have bread.  You could even make toast, but that isn't even remotely the point because this is about beer.

Back in the old days when beer was very expensive, I started making it and my motives were simple.  Cheap beer.  It had nothing to do with quality but everything to do with drunkenness, because those were the days when we had not yet accepted that we were no longer students.

You know the feeling yourself.  Need I elaborate?  Endless rented houses full of over-educated wasters, playing Scrabble because they're too broke to go out.  Sitting around the house, not tidying up, eating other peoples food out of the fridge and annoying each other.  You know that feeling?   It starts with mild annoyance about some habit your housemate has, and it grows into a deep, abiding hatred.

I found myself in such a place and decided that, since Jesus clearly had no answers, the solution must lie in beer.

Let's make liquor, I declared, and so it was ordained.

Our first efforts were not pretty, though they did get us very drunk and therefore I suppose you could call them a success, provided you measure them by how well they met our needs.  In truth, they met our needs very well indeed since they got us arse-festeringly drunk.  We had no idea how to make beer, so we bought a kit, and then we added a load of sugar because someone told us that the more sugar we put in, the more alcohol we'd end up with.

It was true.  Those little yeast-fellas would keep on working with whatever they had available until they'd turned the whole lot into alcohol and carbon dioxide, bless their yeasty little souls, but we didn't know that when we started.  We just wanted to get drunk for nothing, or almost nothing, being recently-post-studented.  Of course, we also knew nothing about food hygiene, and so we made our ten gallons of beer in a dustbin, but in the interests of balance I have to point out that we bought it new.  It wasn't food grade, but at least it wasn't discarded-baby-wear-grade either.

Free beer is easy, as we discovered.  All you have to do is buy a cheap beer kit, toss in a load of starch or sugar and a pinch of yeast.   Within a few weeks, you'll end up with a great big bin full of alcoholic beverage which will taste vile but which will get you very drunk.  There are people who consider this the absolute zenith of brewing, and who am I to judge them?  Enjoy, is all I can tell them.  Enjoy, and try not to drive fast cars while you do it.

For myself, it wasn't enough.  I needed a better standard of beer than gets-you-out-of-your-face-in-twenty-minutes.  One pint of our brew was the same as a bottle of strong wine, and that's all very well, but it's not what a discerning beer drinker is looking for.  I discovered that a substance called DMS, or diastatic malt syrup, was readily available.  I also found that you could buy various kinds of grain –malted, roasted, crystal — to add to the mix, imparting the character of the various beers, whether your preference was lager, ale or stout.

Wonderful.

Not only that: I learned about the various hop flowers one could use in beer to give it varying degrees of bitterness and fragrance.  Goldings,  Fuggles.  Hallertauer.

Oh, I'm telling you, I was no ordinary home-brew maker.  I had my large pot for the cooker, and into that pot I poured large amounts of malt extract, grain and hop flowers, but never sugar, because sugar makes for bad beer, which is why the Germans have their purity law.  Long may it last.

Now, when you mix your wort (as they call it)  into the pot, you should never let it boil, but instead let it assume a rolling motion until it drops clear.  That's your signal that the whole thing is ready for the next stage — sparging.

What's sparging?

Simple, it's an old Anglo-Saxon word for spraying, which is why those pipes in gentlemen's urinals are known as sparge-bars.

If you don't happen to own a gentlemen's public toilet, a shower spray head will do fine for sparging and this is how you do it.  Get hold of a container such as your non-food-safe bin, and stretch a mesh across the top of it.  I found net curtain very useful for this.  Toss the contents of your pot into the mesh and begin spraying it lightly.  This is sparging, and its light trickle is thought to rinse all useable traces of starch into the wash.  You can check if any starch remains by adding the occasional drop of iodine.  If it goes blue, you should continue sparging.

Then you add your choice of yeast and let it get to work.  Seal the container and add a thistle-valve with a water seal.  The constant glub-glub will tell you when the fermentation has finished, although if you have any idea what you're doing, the same thing can be achieved with a hydrometer.

Now, let me tell you about the technique of krausening.  When your yeast is still young and vigorous, say after two or three days, you could remove a half pint of brew and put it in the fridge.  Later, when the beer is made and you're about to bottle it, toss this reserved portion back into the tub.  Then you can add a half spoon of sugar to each bottle and the active yeast will instantly turn it to a tiny amount of alcohol and extra carbon dioxide, thus providing gas for your newly-bottled beer.

At the end of our active fermentation period,  you have two choices.  If your beer is of the stout or ale style, you should bottle it immediately.  If it happens to be of the lager variety, you should store it in a coolish place (Dutch : laager) for a couple of weeks first.

There are many other things I can tell you about beer-making, but I thought this might make a reasonable start.

Any questions?