BREWING BEER

BACKGROUND

MY BACKGROUND IN HOME BREWING

My very first experience of brewing beer was when I was 5 years old. We lived in the county of Kent in South Eastern England, and one Sunday while walking through a hop field, we picked a few to take home. At home we popped the hops with some sugar, water and bakers yeast, into an old milk bottle which then had some cotton wool pushed into the neck. It certainly bubbled for a few days, then one Sunday morning we noticed that the hops and yeast had miraculously disappeared and the milk bottle now contained a light fizzy amber liquid. This liquid looked remarkably like the pale ale that my father used to drink. We tried it and it tasted just like real beer ....... it wasn't until nearly 20 years later, when I was paying for my first beer kit, that I recalled the incident, and laughed at what I then realised my father must have done. In 1976 the largest high street pharmaceuticals retailer in the UK was a chain called Boots. As well as the types of things you would expect to find in Guardian or Watsons in Singapore, they also sold beer & wine making kits and associated equipment.

First I tried a couple of their beer kits. Unlike in Singapore, in the UK you generally have to take steps to keep the wort warm enough for the yeast to work. Most houses there have cupboards, in the vicinity of the bathroom, where the boiler for the domestic hot water supply is housed. These cupboards are often used to take advantage of excess boiler heat, for drying damp clothing and are referred to as "airing cupboards". They are also the ideal place to keep fermenting beer warm.

I didn't enjoy the taste of the beer that resulted from these Boots kits. Although the styles of the two beers I tried to make were different, they both had the same strange flavour, which I can only describe as reminiscent of old socks (not surprising since they came from Boots), mixed with a dollop of iron rust. These days I refer to this flavour as "beer kit tang". It was sufficient to put me off brewing beer at home, so I had a go at making wine instead. The resulting wine was much more acceptable, and I got heavily into making an English country wine from plums (I did not use kits, just fresh fruit, caster sugar and water). I tried other fruit wines, but plums became my staple, due to a friend who sold plums, and who regularly gave me all his overstock, that had softened beyond being sellable.

Boots sold 1 gallon glass demijohns, airlocks, corks and wine yeast. Wine yeast has a higher alcohol tolerance than beer yeast, so instead of producing alcohol of typical strength 4% - 6%, wine yeast will normally go to 11% -13%. Of course microbiologists are always looking to produce yeasts that will produce higher levels of alcohol, since in most countries the restrictions on distillation are much tighter than on brewing.

Really the only challenge with making plum wine, was that plums contain a lot of pectin, which tends to make the wine cloudy. Pouring boiling water on the plums, rather than actually boiling the plums in water, reduced the effect of pectin haze, but didn't eliminate it. I prefered to boil the plums anyway since it seemed to me this was more effective at extracting the flavour of the fruit. It usually took two or more years of aging to get the plum wine to fully clear.

One day in 1978 a colleague at work, Martin, announced that he had made some English bitter, using grain and hops. He said the results were great, and would a couple of us like to go round to his house to try some. Despite being dubious about his claims, three of us were soon standing in his garage, drinking beer, which he had dispensed from a 5 gallon polypin (a thick but collapsible 5 gallon polythene bag with a tap). There was no sign of any beer kit tang, and everything had a lovely fresh aroma, which to me tasted better than I'd ever drank from a bottle or draft in a pub. It only took me one sip to decide that I was going to start home brewing beer again.

In the 1970s the trend towards appreciating "real" ales had grown strongly in the UK, due to the activities of CAMRA (CAMpaign for Real Ale). A few years previously in the south western part of the UK where I then lived, we had been mainly limited to drinking commercial keg brews (some brands included bitters such as Worthington E, Double Diamond, Watneys Red Barrel and lagers such as Skol and Harp). To make keg beer, after brewing, the yeast was killed. The beer was then filtered and put into kegs. It was later dispensed using bottled CO2, which also provided the fizz. Real Ale on the other hand, kept the yeast alive. This produced the fizz through secondary fermentation and dispensing was done through hand pumps, where the publican pulling the bar top beer handle, caused the beer to be forced from the barrel into the glass. Typically real ales were less gassy and hence tasted smoother to drink. In addition the flavours of real ales just tended to be better, probably due to less use of the adjuncts and chemicals, that the large commercial brewers were using, to control consistency, prolong shelf life and to keep the price down. This move toward real ales also caused various independent homebrew shops to set up in larger towns. These started to stock the grains, malts, and equipment required for all grain beer brewing. They also offered a crushing service to prepare the grains for mashing. Generally I only bought crushed grains on the day I was going to brew, since crushed grain deteriorates much more quickly than uncrushed grain. At that time they supplied fresh dried hops, rather than hop pellets. Fuggles and Goldings were the most widely available varieties.

My first step was to buy two books recommended by my all grain brewing friend, Martin. The first was "The Big Book of Brewing". First published in 1974 it covered the science of brewing and the equipment required to do it at home. For it's day it was a very advanced book, covering the importance of salts in water, strains of yeast, effect of temperature on hydrometer readings, etc. The second book was "Brewing Beers Like Those You Buy". This was first published in 1978 and was primarily a book of recipes which imitated popular beers of the time. Both these books were written by Dave Line and together provided everything required to get the home brewer going, whether that be using malt extracts and hops or grain and hops. Unfortunately Dave Line died in 1979 at the age of 37. May be he accidentally discovered a lethal recipe. Based on experience so far, it did not make it into his books.

Many of today's books on the subject add little that Dave Line did not already cover. Probably the main difference I notice is that in addition to grain, hops and malt extracts, Dave often added sugars to achieve subtle differences in colour and taste. He did not use white sugar (except for priming), but unrefined sugars like demarera sugar, molasses sugar and honey. He pointed out that these types of sugar, as well as containing sucrose, also contained complex compounds, which were not fermentable and which impacted taste and colour.

Having got my books, I now set about getting the equipment. Since I had previously been brewing from kits, I already had a fermenting bin, thermometer, hydrometer and bottle capper. The main new item I needed was a boiler. My timing was perfect. People were just starting to use disposable nappies for their babies. As a result you could find boilers going for a song, at just about any car boot sale you visited. Previously people had used these to boil their babies cotton nappies in. Now with the advent of the disposable nappy age, they were redundant. Home brewers all over the country were snapping them up. My model was a 5 gallon Burco. It cost me £2. Of course I applied all kinds of cleaning agents and boiled tap water in it a few times, before using it for brewing, paying special attention to cleaning the inside of the tap.

One of the first things I discovered is that if you want to boil 5 gallons of all grain wort, it is best to have a much bigger than 5 gallon boiler. There is a large amount of foaming goes on and a too small boiler will cause a lot of your wort to end up on the floor. Apart from wasting wort, it makes a sticky mess, which ants and various other insects love.

A Polypin

In the UK I never used to to bottle my all grain beer. Instead, like Martin, I used polypins. Polypins could be obtained for free, or for a small sum, from off-licenses, who used to import sherry in them. Once they were empty they had no further use for them, so were glad to have them taken away. One of the advantages of dispensing from polypins over bottles, was less effort. Another one which I considered more important was the ability to "dry hop" (dry hopping will be discussed later in this ebook), which enhanced the aromatic flavour of the beer. The downside of a polypin is that the life of the beer is shorter than that of bottled beer. In my case, I had so many friends who enjoyed drinking my home brew, that beer getting old was never an issue. Many of the commercial real ale brewers also started offering their beers in polypins, which people mainly ordered for parties. Of course these could also be re-used for home brewing. Because inside the cardboard box there is a collapsible polythene container, as beer is drawn off, air does not enter the container. External air pressure simply squeezes it from the outside, taking up the space vacated by the beer dispensed from the inside.

I moved to Singapore in 1994. For nearly a decade the law prohibited my former hobby. Then in 2004 the government announced a new home brewing license @ S$100 for 2 years. This license allowed for the brewing of Beer, Ale, Stout and Porter. I obtained my license on 22nd March 2004. At that time only kits were available, and I figured that nearly 30 years of kit technology improvement would have eliminated the beer kit tang, that had nearly killed the hobby for me originally.

I bought 2 kits, a pilsner and an amber ale. I soon discovered that beer kit tang was still evident in the kits I used, albeit much milder than the tangs of 1976. I resolved to start all grain brewing again..............

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INDEX