My Beer Year Page 2
HOMEBREWED
You begin with the possibilities of the material.
—ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
INSIDE MY KITCHEN, a long narrow room with a large picture window, dark wood cabinets, and mismatched appliances, the butter yellow walls glowed with the ambient light of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It was a Saturday, the day of the week that was mine to do with whatever I wanted. Usually, Tony spent most of the day with Oscar, riding bikes at an indoor mountain bike park, while I went to a yoga class then worked. Today, we would deviate from the routine: I would devote my work hours to beer.
At the ripe age of four, Oscar didn’t sleep much during the day anymore, but today he succumbed to an afternoon nap. That left me and Tony alone together—a rare occurrence on any afternoon—with some plastic tubing, cloth sacks, buckets, a glass carboy, an airlock, a spiral of copper tubing, scissors, clamps, sanitizer, spoons, a hydrometer, Irish moss, carrageenan, salts, a long metal-handled brush, and a beginners recipe for an American Pale Ale. Tony wore a cotton cycling cap, a bike-related T-shirt, and cutoff shorts—his self-selected summer uniform that shows off his muscular forearms and calves while reminding me that, even when he isn’t riding, bicycles are an integral part of his identity.
Many Christmases ago, I’d unwrapped a homebrew kit, a gift from Tony. I was thrilled. The idea of making my own beer seemed like an appropriate extension of other DIY food and drink projects we’d tried, from making kombucha and dashi to kimchi and mole sauces. The two of us had a history of exploring food and drink together. On one of our first dates, at a tapas restaurant, we spent hours tasting the food on plate after plate, comparing the textures and flavors of fried calamari to glistening beef tartare. I was thrilled to discover that the man who built a motorcycle from parts, and constantly had scrapes and gashes on his legs from mountain biking, was also an intrepid cook and gastronome. When we moved to Portland, beer became an extension of our epicurean explorations.
I loved how the homebrew kit reversed stereotypical gender roles, like a wife buying her husband a Crock-pot—an affirmation that, even though Tony shared my love of beer, I was the one who was professionally connected to the drink. However, even though the homebrew kit was mine, we always brewed together. The last time we had planned to brew a batch of beer was four years earlier, when I was pregnant with Oscar. The homebrew equipment was collecting dust, and since newborns spend most of their time sleeping, we reasoned, we’d have plenty of time to revisit a hobby we kept talking about doing again. Obviously, we were idiots. Tony tells me we did brew that new-baby batch of beer after Oscar was born, but I was so tired, I don’t remember.
I do remember buying the ingredients while I was pregnant. I gingerly moved through the homebrew shop, careful not to bump my belly against shelves of glass hydrometers and carboys. Oddly enough, another pregnant woman was in the store at the same time. She and her husband were buying ingredients for a “lactation beer,” a low-alcohol beer brewed with herbs that boost milk production in nursing women. I considered asking for a copy of the recipe, but I feared the herbs would taste medicinal. Even though it was hard to imagine what it would feel like to be a mother, I was already confident I’d want to drink a beer that just tasted good, something to connect me to my prior life as a person who wasn’t responsible for keeping another human alive.
Today, I was a mother and an aspiring Certified Cicerone, two identifiers that were already making this brew day feel different. For one, I felt the pressing limits of time. Taking three or four hours to brew beer felt indulgent when I could have been doing something more productive like laundry, cleaning, writing, exercising, or some constructive and educational activity with my kid. Except this was productive. Deciding to take the exam meant that brewing beer was studying; what had once been a hobby was filled with new purpose. As a result, every object in the kitchen had become a study aid, a possible key to unlocking my greater understanding of beer. By brewing at home, I hoped to better understand how beer’s basic ingredients come together, which included discovering how just one degree or extra minute on the boil would affect the colors, aromas, and flavors of the final beer.
I tried not to think about my homebrew history, which was disappointing on a few levels. First, there was the beer. My first bottles of homebrew looked amateurish, without labels, a science project that would either explode unexpectedly or fail spectacularly to prove whatever truth it was meant to illustrate. When I popped the caps, a reassuring psssst signaled that the beer was carbonated, as beer should be. Inside pint glasses, the beer didn’t appear to have any blue or green strands of slime, what the homebrewing book said is proof of an infected beer that should be thrown away immediately. The beer was hazy and amberish. It had no head and tasted like the outline of a beer, devoid of any defining characteristics. I searched for a flavor, something I could mark as justification for all those hours near the stove.
“It’s pretty good!” I said to Tony with forced enthusiasm.
“It’s alright,” he replied. “I can drink it.”
Since I drank good beer, I’d assumed I’d make good beer: classic amateur hubris. Does someone who loves listening to Coltrane automatically play great jazz on her first try? Tony and I dutifully drank the bland IPA for weeks, as though it were a triple batch of chili that, for budgetary reasons, had to be eaten. I did reach a saturation point, and refused to drink any more. It would be a long time before we brewed again.
I was also disappointed by the infrequency of our brew sessions. Tony made custom steel bicycle frames by hand in our garage, which he’d converted into a shop. He worked long hours to sustain the business, which he and his business partner had named Breadwinner Cycles. I matched his work ethic and lack of financial stability with my own writerly self-employment. While I worked to meet deadlines and land my next big assignment, he brazed metal and courted customers. We had trouble finding the time to brew beer.
At its essence, beer is a simple thing. Malted grains are steeped in hot water, then the grains are removed. The water is boiled with hops, and the hops are removed. Yeast is added, and fermentation begins. Still, infrequent brewing sessions made every visit to the homebrew store an exercise in reacquainting myself with the basics. To prepare for the solstice brew day, I returned to my neighborhood homebrew shop, a spacious building with big windows and a sweet smell. Inside, a woman with a dark bob and a squeaky, high-pitched voice asked if she could help me. Her name was Miranda Karson.
“This looks like it’s going to be a seriously hoppy beer,” she said, eyeing the recipe. I’d decided to brew a pale ale, because the previous IPA had been so dismal. It would be a hoppy pale ale. Not only did I like hoppy beers, I knew hops could make average to poor beers actually taste good. In an era when craft breweries were popping up quickly, sometimes before they had the chance to dial in their recipes, hops had become a way to mask imperfections in beers. On the exam, I’d need to know how to detect those imperfections, a risky endeavor that might reveal a majority of beers I liked to be on par with my homebrew.
Miranda guided me to the bins filled with malt, which looked like the row of bulk foods at the grocery store. Most malt is barley, and it’s the job of maltsters to turn raw kernels into useful ingredients for brewers, a process that begins by soaking and sprouting the grains, mimicking what happens in nature as the seed begins the cycle to produce a new plant. During that early stage of germination, the kernel produces enzymes capable of breaking starches into sugars. The maltster harnesses those enzymes by halting the sprouting process; he or she dries the kernels and roasts them in a kiln at various temperatures, depending on the desired darkness of the roast. Miranda and I were looking for Crystal malt, which is made by first steeping and germinating barley like other types of malt. But, instead of going straight into the kiln, Crystal malt is stewed along the way, which creates extra sugar inside the grain’s hull. Crystal malts are famous for adding body, caramel flavors, and rich colors to beer.
Near the cash register, Miranda opened a spigot on a giant plastic barrel to release a liquid with the viscosity of honey, which she caught in a small round tub. The goo was liquid malt extract, otherwise known as LME: a sugary syrup that’s essentially concentrated malt. Malt extract, which also comes in a dry form called dry malt extract (DME), is a common building block for beginning homebrewers. Maltsters make it by creating a “reduction” of malt in water, which reactivates the enzymes in the grain, the same thing brewers do during the first step of brewing. By using malt extract, homebrewers can simplify the brewing process, reducing the brew time and creating less mess, but at a cost: by using malt extract, brewers relinquish some control of how the beer tastes. For that reason, malt extract divides the homebrew camp into two distinct groups: those who brew with it (dilettantes, like me) and those who don’t.
Inside a cooler, I recognized the shining paperback-sized foil packages of yeast as well as smaller packets of dry yeast the size of a playing card. The larger packets held yeast suspended in liquid, but Miranda convinced me the dry yeast would work just as well. Either way, once the yeast meets the wort—the unfermented sweet liquid that eventually becomes beer and is pronounced more like “shirt” than “skort”—billions of tiny yeast cells will begin consuming oxygen before they start scarfing up sugars. The ravenous process of consumption, which we call fermentation, creates by-products, most famously ethanol (alcohol) and carbon dioxide (CO2). But yeast also helps to create chemical compounds that greatly affect the flavors in beer. Esters create fruity aromas and flavors most common to ales, while phenols, another type of chemical compound that comes from yeast, create smoky, clove-like, or medicinal flavors. The type of yeast in any given beer determines whether the beer is an ale or a lager, and all beer can be categorized as one or the other. Ale yeasts ferment faster and at higher temperatures than lager yeasts, which prefer cooler temperatures.
Conveniently, packets of hops—the plant that adds aromas, flavors, and bitterness to beer—were stored next to the yeast; cool temperatures preserve their freshness. Some whole hop flowers were vacuum packed in plastic, and others had been turned into pellets. Like many people, I assume that the more a food is processed, the less flavor and nutrition it holds, and I had applied that same logic to hops, which made the whole flowers superior. I would only begin to question that rationale months later, inside a hop-pellet factory in Yakima, Washington.
Before I left the shop, Miranda told me she was forming a ladies’ brew club that would meet once a month to brew a seasonal beer.
“I love men,” she editorialized, “but they have a way of taking over when we brew together.”
I nodded slowly, not sure if I was ready to concur.
“Men can brew with us,” she continued, “but we’re going to be the ones in charge.”
I laughed. Even though the homebrew kit was mine and I was the one who worked with beer professionally, Tony always took charge during our brew sessions. It wasn’t entirely his fault, of course. I let him do most of the work. But now, I wondered, what would it be like to be in charge? I realized, if I wanted to really learn about how beer was made, I’d need to take more ownership of my education. I told Miranda I’d see her at the brew club. Then I went home to brew beer with my man.
There was a moment in human history when the word “homebrewing” needed to exist, because at first, all beer was brewed inside the home; it was more like bread than anything else. Once beer began being made commercially, outside the home, the distinction was articulated.
During the Paleolithic period, hunter-gatherers subsisted by hunting animals and collecting plants. When they began to sow grains, they needed to live nearby to tend to the plants and reap the harvest. Agriculture led to human settlements and the domestication of plants and animals, events that happened independently in different parts of the world at nearly the same time: the beginning of the Neolithic period. Because of limited archaeological evidence from that period, scientists hotly debate what those early humans ate and drank. There’s proof of early plantings: wheat, barley, and lentil seeds in the areas that are now Syria, Jordan, and Israel, plus tools that show these people were harvesting and processing grains. But what matters, at least to me, is whether or not those early humans knew how to ferment the grains.
“Suppose that the consumption of a food produced an altered state of awareness or consciousness that was noticeable, but that did not seem to have serious toxic side effects such as motor impairment,” wrote scientists Solomon H. Katz and Mary M. Voigt in “Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet” (Expedition vol. 28, no. 2, pages 23–34). “Now suppose that this food also had a second, imperceptible effect, a substantial improvement in nutritional value over the unprocessed cereal grains. This is exactly what happens when barley and wheat are fermented into beer.”
The pursuit of an altered but benign state—a beer buzz—would have been motivation enough, the duo argues. It is, after all, those altered states that have consistently created important social bonds and religious rituals throughout human history, but psychotropic plants are a sure way to waste an entire day. Still, beer might have also made those early fermenters feel good after the buzz subsided: B vitamins and lysine—a compound that makes it easier for the body to absorb essential minerals—are by-products of fermentation.
There’s no conclusive evidence about which came first, beer or bread. Both are made by removing husks from grains, grinding them into flour or soaking them in water, then heating the mixture, which invites yeast and bacteria to join the party. There is evidence that Sumerians made bread from barley or emmer wheat, otherwise known as farro, for the sole purpose of turning it into beer. They’d partially bake the bread then mix it with water. Enzymes converted the starches into sugars, then the liquid would be strained and set aside in vessels, where yeast became responsible for the characteristics of a good beer: alcohol, CO2, and B vitamins.
Scientists agree that mead, the fermented honey drink, probably existed before beer, but one of the first known written recipes for any food or drink was for beer. Written in Sumerian during the third millennium B.C.E., the recipe describes the brewing process in detail. Then there was the famous Code of Hammurabi from ancient Mesopotamia, a record of punishments and crimes carved into a basalt obelisk in 1780 B.C.E. One crime listed is the unfair pricing of beer, a transaction handled by women: “If a tavern-keeper [feminine] does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water,” the stone read.
Drawings and inscriptions show the Sumerians brewing in clay vessels with pointed bottoms and narrow necks. Frequently, people are shown drinking from straws inserted into these vessels, which archeologists guess was a way of filtering beer that was thick with grains and yeast sediment.
The Hymn to Ninkasi, a love poem from 1800 B.C.E. to the Sumerian goddess of beer, includes words like “sweetwort,” “fermenting vat,” “dough,” and “beer bread.”
It is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. Ninkasi, it is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall.
It is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes… . Ninkasi, it is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes… .
&nb
sp; It is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine. Ninkasi, it is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine.
Since Ninkasi had her hands in every part of the brewing process, I decided to follow her lead.
On our brew day, I chose to worship Ninkasi, not only by brewing her a beer on the solstice, but by drinking a saison at the same time. Just like you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, you shouldn’t judge a beer by its label, but I couldn’t help liking the look of the delicate, hot pink flowers on the label of the saison, Widmer Brothers Saison À Fleurs, a collaboration with Breakside Brewery. The beer had been brewed with jasmine, chrysanthemum, and Szechuan peppercorns. Drinking while brewing is a dicey activity that can lead to all sorts of missteps, from boilovers to missed hop additions, but I couldn’t help myself. Since I was studying, as opposed to simply wasting my time drinking beer on a Saturday afternoon, I promptly looked up the saison beer style and wrote down its characteristics, which it turns out have nothing to do with exotic Asian ingredients. (Historically, saisons were brewed at the end of winter in the French-speaking region of Belgium, to be consumed throughout the summer.)
The recipe for the beer called for steeping a mesh hop bag filled with specialty grains in hot water for twenty minutes before slowly raising the temperature of the water. As I fished the bag out of the kettle, I had a flash of understanding. If beer was so simple, what would I possibly spend an entire year studying? In response to my hubris, something immediately went wrong. After I’d poured the liquid malt extract into the pot, I’d forgotten to turn off the stove’s burner. Even though I had stirred it in aggressively, the extract seared to the bottom of the kettle.