My Beer Year Page 3

  “Look,” I said to Tony with a note of defeat, when he came inside from the shop. “I screwed up.” A storm of white particles followed in the wake of my moving spoon.

  “It’s fine,” Tony said, squeezing my shoulder as he peered into the kettle. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But it didn’t look fine. I’d created a brown snow globe.

  “That will teach you to put me in charge,” I said sarcastically. Earlier, I’d told Tony what Miranda said about men taking charge during brewing, but I had a sense we were still falling into our stereotypical roles.

  As the afternoon advanced—and miraculously, Oscar stayed asleep—I became convinced we’d screwed up the beer in multiple ways. I wasn’t sure we’d properly sterilized everything that touched the beer after the boil, and I didn’t know if we’d added the hops at precisely the right time. Even after we’d added the yeast to the cooled wort and transferred the mixture to a glass carboy using a siphon, there was still time to do something else wrong. Historically, the carboy always stayed in our kitchen, in the same spot along one wall across from the table, while the beer inside fermented. But this time, it didn’t seem like a good idea.

  “It’s going to get really hot this week,” I announced. Tony was bent over the carboy, slipping a bicycle T-shirt over its narrow neck, as though he were dressing Oscar for school. “Really hot,” I said, firmly. “Let’s put it in the basement.”

  “I like to have it up here so we can see it,” Tony replied.

  He had a point. If the carboy was in the basement, we would never remember to lift the T-shirt to watch fermentation in action. So the carboy stayed put. For the next few mornings, as birds chirped and garbage trucks grunted, the beer belched and bubbled furiously. Oscar would wake up and head straight to the carboy.

  “Look mama!” he’d yell, excited. “It’s moving!”

  The floaties from the burn swirled through the beer as though they were magnetized or possessed, activity I’d assumed was yeast moving. But I looked it up, and it wasn’t yeast we were watching move, but particles stirred by the heat the yeast generated as it consumed sugars. When the house was quiet at night, I could hear the beer belching and bubbling in the kitchen as it released CO2, which traveled through a plastic tube and into a glass champagne bottle filled halfway with water, a system that kept the beer sterile, our homemade version of a tool called an airlock. After two days, the belching subsided and it was so hot we weren’t sleeping. I convinced Tony to move the carboy downstairs.

  We decided to bottle the beer one night after Oscar went to bed. It had been two-and-a-half weeks since fermentation stopped, and we probably should have bottled the beer back then, to get it off the trub, the cake of sediment at the bottom of the carboy. But we’d been going to work and school events, plus barbecues at friends’ houses. Summer was in full swing. We simply hadn’t made the time. My friend Rik, a longtime homebrewer who’d just opened a commercial brewery, said he’d recently left a batch of brew on the trub for three weeks. But without the T-shirt and the 70-plus-degree air temperatures, his beer was probably going to taste good. He also said that because we’d left the beer on the yeast for so long, we’d probably created some off-flavors. So much for drinkability.

  I embraced the big, slippery grenade of a carboy and carried it upstairs.

  “Careful,” Tony warned. “Don’t shake it too much.” If the beer was exposed to too much oxygen at this point, it might develop a new array of off-flavors. But every time I stepped up onto the next step, the beer sloshed back and forth in my arms.

  When it came time to drink the pale ale, I had low expectations. But making homebrew is like buying a lottery ticket. There’s always the chance of hitting the jackpot. Despite the floaties and temperature fluctuations, maybe we’d made something that tasted like a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the iconic, beautifully balanced beer invented in 1980 by the now-famous brewer Ken Grossman. Alas. Even though our beer was surprisingly clear (the floaties had dropped to the bottom with the yeast, it tasted too sweet and had an unpleasant note of bitterness that one would be hard pressed to describe as “hoppy.” With each sip, I thought about the nuances that produced this beer: the day, the weather, the Asian-fusion saison, the burner’s blue flame, and a near boilover. Every detail mattered. It all matters.

  I realized I’d just dipped my toe into a big pool. I needed to understand how each nuance became a perceptible element of the beer, and that would mean getting this homebrewing thing down.

  When I arrived at the inaugural meeting of Lady Brew Portland, seven women were gathered under a large shade tent in the parking lot of my neighborhood homebrew shop. Already, they were in classic brewing form, a state of forward progress disguised by doing nothing. Not that certain things weren’t getting done. One woman was cutting a watermelon into slices. Another was adjusting the heat on a stand burner underneath a kettle filled with water. Someone else was arranging packets of yeast and hops next to pints of fresh blackberries.

  I saw Miranda, who announced that we’d be brewing a clone of Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA. She’d created the recipe.

  “It kind of tastes like orange juice,” she said breathlessly. “It’s so good!”

  “Maybe we should try some?” said a woman in sporty sunglasses and cutoff jeans.

  It was a little past ten in the morning on a Saturday, and temperatures were supposed to rocket into the upper nineties, the kind of heat that’s considered a weather event in Portland. We would get thirsty. So Miranda left on foot to find her muse at the grocery store in the next block.

  I was thrilled to discover the recipe was all-grain, the next step for me as a novice homebrewer. Instead of using malt extract, we’d take additional steps to extract sugars from the malt, which a brewer named John Harris once told me was the difference between making a cake from a box and making one from scratch.

  “You’re at the mercy of whatever the extract maker was doing that day,” he said. John, who has a full and graying beard and always wears a ponytail and wire-rimmed glasses, was the brewmaster at Ecliptic Brewing, which happened to be a few miles from my house in North Portland. Since I’d committed to taking the Cicerone exam, I’d started stopping by Ecliptic during their brew sessions in the hopes that I’d learn something valuable about the brewing process while I was there. Instead, I started noticing insignificant things, like how John wrote his brewing recipes on sticky notes. I also learned how the muscles in my arms burned when I was tasked with pulling the wet, spent grains out of the mash tun with a metal rake. The other brewer at Ecliptic was Phil Roche, a guy with a huge grin who’d worked with John for about four years at Full Sail Brewing Co.

  “People have been doing all-grain brewing for five thousand years,” Phil told me one day as I watched him fill bourbon barrels with imperial stout that was being forced through a hose. “I don’t know why books make it seem so hard.”

  Phil told me that, the first time he brewed a batch of all-grain beer, he had sterilized every pot and ladle in the kitchen and set them out on the countertop so they were ready, just in case. Because he didn’t have a kettle large enough to make the entire batch of wort at once, Phil used his oven to keep half of the wort warm while he made the other half. The thought of his kitchen filled with sterilized measuring cups, spoons, and possibly a lemon zester reminded me that there’s no one right way to do things.

  For mashing in, the term for combining the grains with hot water, the Lady Brewers needed to decide on the ideal temperature for the mixture, a choice that affects the final flavor of the beer. That’s because the temperature activates enzymes inside the grains, and those enzymes turn starches into sugars. A lower temperature produces more fermentable sugars, which produces a drier beer, while a higher temp makes more nonfermentable sugars and, therefore, a beer with more body. Miranda had written “155°F” on the recipe, but a woman who’d introduced herself as Sheila argued for 152 or 153 degrees instead.

  “But I like drier beers in gener
al,” she demurred.

  Something about the parking lot, kettle, and burner made it difficult to imagine we could control the temperature with such specificity. But being around these women gave me a Rosie the Riveter sense of can-do. If this job demanded temperature precision, we’d roll up our sleeves and figure out how to make it work. As brewing got underway, we talked about rules for the club. We’d brew once a month and share recipes online. Men could come to brew days, but a zero-mansplaining policy would be enforced. We were off to a good start. Men coming in and out of the homebrew shop paused to ask us what we were brewing, but they never offered additional suggestions, as though they’d overheard our conversation.

  Miranda returned from the store with some bad news: she hadn’t found any Fresh Squeezed. Instead, she filled that hoppy hole with a local IPA brewed with seven kinds of hops (a gimmicky overuse of hops, as one of our Lady Brew crew appraised it) and a Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA, a beer named after a special piece of equipment called a “torpedo” that allows cold beer in the fermenter to circulate through dry hops for extra hop aroma. Sheila pulled out a SMaSH, which stands for “single malt and single hop.” She’d brewed it herself using Maris Otter malt, a barley that was invented in the 1960s in England on Maris Lane. During the 1990s, the malt almost faded into obscurity, but it’s been experiencing a resurgence, especially with homebrewers. (In Portland, if you ever want to find a homebrewer, head to a performance by Maris Otter, an old-time string band.) Her single hop was Meridian, a hop with a lemony aroma that was developed in Oregon. The beer tasted crisp, clean, and straightforward. I felt honored to be brewing alongside the person who made it.

  For the Fresh Squeezed clone, we added doses of Nugget, Mosaic, and Citra hops. After each hop addition, the kettle of roiling brown wort smelled intoxicating. Before we could add the yeast, we had to cool the wort to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that wouldn’t kill the organisms. How hard could it be? I thought, as Miranda held the thermometer in the wort like a nurse gauging the severity of a fever. It registered 160 degrees. She attached a garden hose to a wort chiller: copper tubing shaped in a spiral, a key tool for cooling the wort as quickly as possible. After she lowered the spiral into the kettle, we waited. And waited. Heat rose from the softening asphalt, seeped through the soles of my sneakers, and basically spit in the face of the shade tent.

  We ate watermelon and blackberries. We drank more beer. I was surprised when someone mentioned that in ancient Norse cultures women brewed all the beer.

  “From what I’ve read, as soon as commercialization happened, the men took over,” Miranda added.

  Even though I knew she was right, I did an internal eye roll. Having this conversation at a women’s brew club seemed so predictable. Catching myself before I made a snide remark, I realized I’d never actually talked about these historical facts with other women: I had only brewed beer with my husband, and I spent most of my beer-conversation currency on men. From that perspective, what was happening under the shade tent felt slightly subversive.

  I kept pulling the thermometer out of the wort to check the temp, but I was learning that a watched pot never cools. 130 degrees. 125 degrees.

  “The last few degrees take the longest,” Miranda said. Sweat rolled from my bra to my bellybutton. We weren’t even close to the last few degrees. As the sun traveled west, we moved the tent to keep the kettle shaded. We reminded each other that everything that touched the wort needed to be sterilized. I wished we were all wearing hair nets. At least we don’t have beards, I thought, as I leaned over the kettle to look at thermometer—again.

  Finally, the red line hit 75 degrees, which we decided was close enough. If the beer tasted off, we could call it Heatwave Haste. Miranda poured the wort into a plastic carboy, where the yeast would spend the next few days being gluttons at an all-you-can-eat sugar buffet. I stayed to clean up, but all I really did was help take down the shade tent. I didn’t want to be the person who left a mess, a role I’d already explored at home. A few weeks earlier, when we brewed the pale ale, Tony ended up scrubbing the kettle and wiping the floor and countertops while I took a shower. When I got out, he yelled from the basement, where he was putting away the brewing equipment, “Hey, beer master, where did you go?” Even though it seemed cliché, brewing with women felt different than brewing with Tony. Instead of being someone who does not take well to being told what to clean, I felt more like a team member.

  Sadly, I never had a chance to taste our teamwork. I was out of town for the next brew day, and even though Miranda and I tried to connect so I could sample the beer, we failed to make it happen. The next time we saw each other, I asked her about the beer. “It was OK,” she said. I paused, hoping for more. “Yeah, pretty good,” she added. I realized, if I want to understand the outcome of my labor, I’ll need to do the tasting myself.

  PALATE PUSHING

  The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

  —W.B. YEATS

  IN A ROOM WITH A VIEW of a train yard and the sweeping span of one of Portland’s twelve bridges, I sat down around an oval table with eight men, one of whom I recognized as Rob Widmer. I tended to confuse Rob with his brother Kurt, not because they looked alike or wore matching clothes, but because I usually saw them together. They are joined in my mind, and the minds of many beer lovers, as the Widmer brothers, two men who were part of the early U.S. craft beer movement. The brothers founded their brewery in 1984. Kurt had spent two years living in Germany, and when he returned home, he craved German beers but couldn’t find any that came close to what he’d been drinking in Deutschland. So he took up homebrewing. Five years later, his recipes were good enough to inspire a business plan for a commercial brewery. Those were the days when Americans had very few choices when it came to beer.

  I was at Widmer Brothers Brewing for their taste panel, a meeting that happens every weekday morning at eleven o’clock. I’d heard about these meetings from a brewer at Widmer, who told me they were an important part of the brewery’s quality control procedures. Not only was I curious about the ritual of the tasting panel, I hoped that by observing what happened in the meeting I’d learn a few tricks about how to evaluate a beer like a professional.

  Every brewery has its own ways of making sure the beer leaving the brewery looks and tastes the way it was intended, but so far I’d only seen the methods of brewers at smaller places. They usually tasted some of the beer straight from the fermenters and made mental notes. Because Widmer is so large (the brewery shipped more than 200,000 barrels in 2014), it makes sense that the brewery has a more codified way of evaluating beer. In addition to the taste panel, the brewery has its own laboratory, which is run by a technician who monitors the productivity of yeast strains and tests beer for unwanted bacteria. The lab looks like the corner of a chemistry department at a university, complete with vials and a computer that produces chromatograms of mass spectrometric data. Only larger breweries have quality-control labs like this. In an act of brewing industry goodwill, the Widmer lab also tests beer samples for any small brewery that brings one in.

  Before I got to the tasting panel, Widmer Brothers Brewing’s director of brewery operations, Doug Rehberg, told me that every beer that leaves the brewery has been approved by the panel. He also said that Rob Widmer is usually in attendance, a level of owner participation I imagined was unique for such a large brewery. In 2008 Widmer merged with Redhook Brewery to form the Craft Brew Alliance, which eventually picked up Kona Brewing. The resulting brewing group is a giant by craft beer standards, in part because Anheuser-Busch InBev has a 32 percent minority stake in the company. That partial ownership exiled Widmer Brothers from the craft beer trade organization called the Brewers Association, which mandates that a craft brewery have less than 25 percent nonindependent ownership. I wasn’t sure if having Rob Widmer at the table made Widmer more or less “craft,” but there was something comforting about seeing him there. It was like catching a glimp
se of Mario Batali in the kitchen of one of his dozens of restaurants, tasting a dish when he could be doing something else, like drinking a daiquiri on a yacht in the Bahamas.

  In addition to a regular cast of taste panel attendees—the taste panel administrator, director of brewery operations, quality assurance manager, director of brewing, director of quality assurance, and a few members of the team that have been trained to taste beer—one special guest always gets a spot: a Widmer employee who won a drawing. Today, the honor went to a guy from accounting. I imagined his colleagues giving him fist bumps as he switched off a screen filled with spreadsheets so he could go drink beer with Rob Widmer. Suddenly, I felt honored to be at the tasting panel.

  In front of each of us were three small glasses, two empty and one filled with water, and a tablet computer. Today, the tablets weren’t working, so we each received a piece of paper titled “Sensory Validation Ballot.” The sheet listed nineteen flavors in alphabetical order, starting with “acetaldehyde” and “acetic” and ending with “myrcene” and “papery.” Each “flavor” represented a chemical compound or quality that can appear in beer, along with descriptions of how humans perceive each one. For example, a compound called dimethyl trisulfide, or DMTS, is a standard compound in beer that is produced when the wort is boiling. The sheet described DMTS as “garlic, onion, rubbery.” Caprylic, a fatty acid found in mammals’ milk and coconut oil, was “goaty, waxy, crayons, roller rink.”

  I sat two people to the left of the taste panel administrator, who walked around the room filling everyone’s glasses with predetermined beers. The panel tastes six to twelve beers during every meeting. I waited for someone to make a joke about drinking on a Wednesday morning, but nothing funny seemed to be happening here. The room went quiet as everyone peered at the samples, then swirled, sniffed, sipped, and jotted down notes. Beer number one was a Kona Longboard Island Lager, a pale beer I’d had in the past, but not for at least a couple of years because I had considered it unremarkable. Before I had too much time to think about why I didn’t like this beer, the taste panel administrator blurted out “pass.” Doug Rehberg, who sat to my left, whispered, “This is when we say if the beer is good enough to be sold.” The panel wasn’t judging beers for their deliciousness or drinkability, but for flaws. If a beer was flawed, for whatever reason, the panelists were helping ensure it wouldn’t be sold. The guy to my right said, “Pass.” I was next, but since I was just observing, I looked to Doug. He stared back at me. So did everyone else at the table. Feeling desperate, I put my nose in the glass, again, and inhaled loudly before taking a gulp of the beer, hoping to find something in the lager that would help me convert aromas and flavors into a greater understanding about the rightness of this sample. I fought my instinct to say it tasted like beer.