Microbrewers' Handbook

• Publisher: Paragraph Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780992639952
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Food Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A guide on the practicalities of starting your own microbrewery; from how to brew right through to finding a place of your own

Chapter One

How to Brew

The Basic of Brewing

Tasting Beer

Brewing at Home

Formal Training

Brewlab

The Institute of Brewing & Distilling

CASE STUDIES

Hoggley’s Brewery

Potbelly Brewery

Brewing beer, as I mentioned in the introduction, is not actually all that complicated. Not in theory, at any rate. You simply steep malt in hot water until its starch content turns into sugar and dissolves; you strain off the resulting thin syrup and boil it up with hops; you add yeast and when it all stops bubbling and foaming, you drink it. (Or, in your case, sell it for someone else to drink.) How hard can it be? But as with any craft, success depends on absolute mastery of materials and processes; and within the simple framework outlined above the possible variations are almost infinite. So before you can present the public with a product of consistently good quality (and achieving consistency will be one of your key skills), you’re going to need a lot of training, both theoretical and practical.

You can learn the brewing skills you will need on courses run by formal training providers such as Brewlab (www.brewlab.co.uk). You can learn the basic engineering skills you will need to keep your plant running (if you don’t already possess them) from the fabricator who installs it. But before you take either of those risky and expensive steps, you can teach yourself most of what you will need to know about beer by reading, tasting widely and intelligently, visiting working breweries and by brewing at home. And you can start the reading part of your home-learning course right here.

In nearly 40 years of pub-going, I have never got over my surprise at how little the public actually knows about its beer. Many regular drinkers don’t even know what it’s made of; and public ideas about alcoholic strength are hopelessly confused. So let’s start with a potted description of what beer is and how it’s made.

The Basics of Brewing

Most alcoholic beverages have three components. The first is a liquid medium. The second is the sugar that the yeast will digest, alcohol and carbon dioxide being its waste products. Finally, there are the aromatic or flavour components. If you’re making wine, all three come in one handy little package – the grape (or the strawberry or blackberry or whatever soft fruit you’re using). All you have to do is crush your fruit, strain off the juice, add yeast – or let naturally occurring wild yeasts do the job for you – and let it ferment. Hard fruits such as apples and pears are harder to crush – you have to pulp them in a mill before you can press the juice out of them – but the principle is the same. Everything you need is in the fruit. With beer, things aren’t so simple. In fact, cereal grains are so hard to ferment it’s a wonder that beer was ever invented. For in their natural state, grains contain almost none of the required components: no liquid, no sugar and not much in the way of flavour. All three have to be painstakingly brought together before you can even think about introducing yeast.

Malt

Malt is usually made from barley, but brewers also use other grains, both malted and unmalted. Wheat you will probably already be familiar with as a brewing grain, but oats, rye and even rice are also added for particular purposes. In essence, malt is cereal grain that has been tricked into germinating by being steeped in warm water to mimic spring weather. During germination, enzymes in the grain start to convert its insoluble starch into sugar, which the plant needs in order to fuel its growth. This sugar, maltose, is soluble, and is what you want as your fermentable material. So, soon after the grain has started to germinate, it’s dried in a kiln to halt the process before it goes too far. Different kilning times and temperatures produce pale, amber, chocolate, crystal, roast and other types of malt, each with its own properties. You will almost certainly be using blends of malts, so you will need to be familiar with all their characteristics. You may also want to use brewing sugars in some brews: these have flavour characteristics of their own and are perfectly respectable adjuncts in many brewing traditions.

Liquor

Once the little sprouts have been shaken off, the malt is ground into a coarse flour (‘grist’) ready to be ‘mashed’ in hot water (always referred to as liquor – water, in a brewery, is for washing and cooling). Mashing both completes the conversion of starch into sugar (‘saccharification’) and dissolves the sugar to produce a thin malt syrup or wort. The mineral content of the water is critical: gypsum-rich water from the artesian wells beneath Burton-upon-Trent produced the classic pale ales that succeeded the darker stouts and porters brewed with London water (well-water, not Thames water!) in popular favour in the 19th century. British ales require hard water while continental lagers require soft water, for reasons that will be explained later on. Some breweries are lucky enough to have their own wells or boreholes; you will probably have to settle for mains water, but you will want to analyse it and alter its mineral content first.

Hops

Next, the boil and the addition of hops. Hops contain acids that kill bacteria and protect the beer from infection, and were introduced to British brewing in the 14th or 15th Century chiefly as a preservative. But they are vital for flavour, too: their acid may give beer its bitterness, but they also contain oils and resins that produce much of its taste and aroma. Some hops are more acid than others; some more aromatic. And the aroma characteristics vary hugely from strain to strain: Goldings, for example, produce a citric tang, while Bramling Cross are said to give an aroma of blackcurrants. Again, you will need a thorough knowledge of hop varieties if you are to become a master of your craft.

Yeast

A microscopic fungus, yeast digests the maltose in the wort and excretes alcohol and the CO² that puts the fizz into the beer. Every brewery has its own strain, and every strain is different both in its handling characteristics and in the flavours it produces. Yeast is tricky stuff to handle and is very prone to infection; at the University of East Anglia in Norwich is the National Yeast Bank, where brewers send samples of their yeast from which to propagate fresh supplies if problems occur at the brewery. Brewers are very proud of their yeast strains, saying they give their beers their house character so the strain you choose at the outset will define your brews for years to come.

Other Ingredients

More and more these days, you will come across other ingredients, especially fruit. Fruit has been used for centuries by brewers, especially in Belgium, where some beers are fermented by naturally occurring wild yeasts rather than cultured brewing strains. Wild yeasts and the other microfauna and flora that accompany them often produce sour flavours that are not to everyone’s taste: adding pulped cherries or blackcurrants to the mash of sour brown ales and lambic beers is a traditional method of tempering their sourness. In the last 20 years or so these Belgian fruit beers have become more widely available in Britain, and many British brewers have been inspired to experiment with fruit as well. Grapefruit beer from the St Peter’s Brewery of Suffolk is one unlikely but surprisingly palatable example.

Almost as important as the raw materials to the character of the beer are the processes by which it is made. The grist must be mashed at a specific temperature for the starch to be fully converted and the sugars to be fully dissolved. The boil can be long or short – a long boil caramelises some of the sugars in the wort and produces a richer, darker beer – and hops are added in different quantities and at different points in the process. The hopped wort has to be cooled before the yeast is pitched, and there are various methods of fermentation which each produce different results. All of this you must learn thoroughly.

Vessels

The vessels can be critical, too, especially the shape and size of your fermenters and conditioning tanks. We’ll come to the number and type of vessels you’ll need in a later chapter. But as an example, take fermentation. It’s a biochemical process which, like all biochemical processes, generates a certain amount of heat. This can dictate the speed of fermentation and help or hinder the creation of by-products such as phenols and esters, all of which will affect the finished product; and the thermodynamics of different-shaped fermenters will give different results. Modern cylindro-conical lager fermenters produce more heat and work more quickly than old-fashioned horizontal ones, so a lager conditioned in a cylindro-conical will be detectably sweeter and less clean than one aged in a horizontal. There are plenty of other similar examples so even before you build your brewery, you will have to have made critical decisions about what sort of beers you want to brew. And it’s important to make these decisions from a position of knowledge, which you can get right now – assuming, that is, that your local is open. Because the best way to learn about beer is to drink it, but to drink it intelligently. That means sampling as many different examples of as many different styles as you can get hold of. And sampling is not the same as swigging!

Tasting Beer

The first time I was invited to an organised beer tasting, on a press trip to Bruges nearly 30 years ago, I thought someone was taking the mickey. Arriving at a bar called ‘t Brugs Beertje,’ the party was shown into the function room in which was a huge table garnished with an astonishing array of glasses (you shouldn’t use the same one too often), and bottles of mineral water and dishes of dry crackers to cleanse our palates between samples. Once seated, we first held up each sample to the light to check its colour, clarity and head. There followed a thorough swirling and nosing à la Jilly Goolden, with tasters detecting aromas of leather, tobacco, new-mown hay et al. A meagre mouthful was then ritualistically swilled; air was sucked; and mouthfeel (i.e. residual sugars, if any, coating the tongue) and flavours were pronounced upon. Finally, we swallowed (you don’t spit out beer as you do wine, since the bitterness receptors are at the very back of the tongue). A long hush ensued, with expressions of intense concentration while the length and bitterness of the finish (or aftertaste) were thoroughly cogitated. Finally, there followed a brief but intense discussion of each sample – was it true to style? Were there any off-flavours? How complex was it? – and each beer was marked.

Well, it seemed daft to me at the time. But after many years of attending such tastings, I have discovered the value of really concentrating on what you’re drinking; and at tastings you have to strain your tastebuds in exactly the same way you have to strain your ears to hear a distant melody. Conveying your experiences is difficult, because you have to describe the flavours you detect in terms of others that are commonly recognisable; hence the descent into vocabulary such as ‘green fruit,’ ‘treacle toffee,’ ‘marmalade’ and other comparables. It all sounds incredibly pretentious, yet the language of tastings is expressly not intended to exclude the uninitiated. In fact the very opposite is true: it’s meant to allow a group of individuals (normally brewery staff) to describe their personal experiences of a range of sensations in a format that can be shared. But the difficulty of translating tastes and smells into words even affects skilled and experienced brewers. You might expect, perhaps, that professionals who live and breathe diacetyls, esters, phenols and sulphites would describe their beers in those terms. They do, but only to a limited extent. The flavour wheel used by brewers all around the world since the 1970s to delineate the aromas and tastes of their products includes those terms, but also uses expressions such as liquorice, chocolate, butterscotch, toffee, pineapple, catty, papery, leathery, grassy – even Horlicks!

It struck me quite early on in my b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreward
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: How to Brew
• Chapter Two: Where to Brew
• Chapter Three: Planning Your Finances
• Chapter Four: Brewing Equipment
• Chapter Five: What to Brew
• Chapter Six: How to get to Market: Draught Sales
• Chapter Seven: How to Get to Market: Bottled Sales
• Chapter Eight: A Place of Your Own
• Appendix: Customs and Duty
• Directory of Services and Supplies
• Index