Beer n’ Books: Gardening for the Homebrewer

Title: Gardening for the Homebrewer
Author(s): Wendy Tweten and Debbie Teashon
ISBN: 978-0760345634
Pages: 208
Release date: September 15, 2015
Publisher: Voyageur Press
Genre: Nonfiction/How to
Format: Softcover
Source: Review copy

As I watch my attempt to grow barley wither into brown shrivels of failure, I prepare for next Spring. Winter means reading, research, and learning from my mistakes. I took a ton of notes and wrote quite a lot about my experience growing my own beer ingredients this year, but as much as I’ve learned, I’m still seeking something more comprehensive.

There’s not a lot out there for the intrepid homebrewing soilophile.

There’s a 1998 book, The Homebrewer’s Garden, by Dennis Fisher, which includes solid information, but spreads itself thin, trying to cover too many grains, herbs, and other sundry ingredients. It’s also 17 years old; a lot has changed in beer and brewing (hop and barley varieties, just as a start, never mind technology), making this guide feel a bit sepia tone when read by a member of the internet generation.

Then come the Brewing Elements series from Brewer’s Publications. These four are a must read for any brewer (home or otherwise) who has even the tiniest inkling of interest in the science behind the beverage. But for the wealth of knowledge contained therein, these books are still fundamentally informational; For the Love of Hops contains a brief section on growing your own hops, but is moreso dedicated to the history and scientific workings of the cultivar. The same goes for the other three; excellent books, but lacking practical lessons.

Anyone looking to (successfully) grow any beer ingredient at home likely has to turn to the internet (or, for you AHA members, old copies of Zymurgy Magazine). That’s not the worse thing ever, but correlating loose content from various websites can be as tedious as weeding an overgrown carrot patch.

Fellow blogger Ed from The Dogs of Beer was kind enough to CC me on an offer for a review copy of Gardening for the Homebrewer. I happily wrapped my dirty little hands around the book, hoping for a spiritual update to Fisher’s work.

Physically, the book is gorgeous: full-color macro photographs that look good enough to scratch and sniff, color-coded text boxes with faux-decoupage flair, near-perfect formatting that organizes the content brilliantly. It’s really a pleasure to read, and the visuals don’t detract from the writing itself. While written by two people, it reads in one coherent voice, offering direct explanation and guidance with little pomp or fluff.

It’s broken into distinct sections over seven chapters, starting with a basic primer on gardening that’s simple enough for a total rookie, but also contains just enough for the journeyman. Chapter 2 covers beer, but only spans 25 pages. The malting process is described across two pages, with no images or sundry information to guide the reader. If you are looking for a book on the basics of beer before it’s even near the kettle, this has some good information. If you were looking for a more comprehensive guide to barley, malting, or troubleshooting the latter, keep on searching.

More than half of the book is dedicated to “other” which in this case means grapes, berries, herbs, apples, pears, and more. Much like Fisher’s book, Gardening for the Homebrewer reads an inch deep and a mile long. Trying to cover all these plants and ingredients is an admirable goal, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and readers like me wanting more.

From their bios on the last page and a quick Google, it’s clear that both Tweten and Teashon are very accomplished gardeners. What is unclear is if they are homebrewers (or have ever homebrewed). While all of the information presented is factually correct, there’s a sort of disconnect in the exposition, as if they are more focused on the plants than their role as an ingredient in the brewing process. That could be my beerish romanticism pontificating and not an actual flaw, but it’s worth noting there’s next to no brewing-related content in this book. Suggestions for what beverage the plant might go best in, but not a lot about when or how to include it in a typical brewing/fermentation process.

Regardless of their identity as brewers, the co-authors do a fantastic job of outlining some of the most practical (and sometimes hard to find, even with a black belt in Google-fu) details of growing. Simple but integral details like appropriate USDA growing zone, spacing, and pruning are included for every plant. Most even have a picture of the mature plant, a surprisingly helpful addition for someone who starts with a handful of seeds and isn’t entire sure what elderberry is actually supposed to look like.

Despite not having what I was looking for, I enjoyed this book, and will continue to use it as a reference. The overview of growing conditions are worth the price alone (there are 52 total, ranging from mint to plums), and the rather thorough section of cider apples taught me a lot I though I already knew (but apparently didn’t).

More a book for gardeners who like brewing-related plants than brewers turned gardners, but well written, edited, and presented nonetheless.

The Session #92 – I Made This

(This bout of beery banter comes to us from Jeremy Short of Pintwell. The topic: how homebrewing changes your relationship with beer.)

To be unfairly simplistic, the world can be separated into two kinds of people: consumers and makers. They form a complicated codependency, always needing each other to exist but in different ways, two dancers caught up in so dramatic and intense a tango that they often forget who is leading who. The same way an oak drinks the rain to make an acorn that becomes a squirrel’s winter dinner, there’s a natural beauty in the cycle of creation and consumption, and at some point in life a person will play both roles, possibly at the same time.

In a topical coincidence, blogging and homebrewing fall under the same umbrella of creation. They’re the hobbyist’s logical steps towards the professional; the sentence and syntax practice on the path to publication, the mashing and boiling on the boulevard to the brewhouse. To be done well, both require relatively large time (and sometimes financial) investments, with little to no return outside of personal satisfaction and some loose concept that all this practice might be beneficial at some ill-defined point in the future. They are, as far as hobbies go, poorly calculated risks that would make any actuary worth his spreadsheets cringe and run in mathematical terror.

But they do have one advantage that makes up for the sacrificed time and energy: creative freedom. A blogger is left to his own editorial devices, free to write anything he wants with only his experience and sensibilities to guide the quality. A homebrewer is free to brew whatever she doesn’t see on tap, let her recipes run wild down the weird and winding paths of unusual adjuncts, hybrid styles, and potentially disastrous ingredient additions. Concerns about commercial viability matter little to the spinner of homegrown tales and bottler of homegrown ales; they’re making for the sake of making, which some might argue, is the purest pursuit there is.

All of this is to say that bloggers and homebrewers are simultaneously consumers and makers, existing in a limbo between the two distinctions, giving them unique perspective on their craft. A blogger with bookish dreams will balance writing with prodigious reading, analyzing structures and themes, just as a homebrewer might sniff and swirl a beer at the bar in a search for potential defects. While mastering the making side, a person has to learn what defines “good” in their field, and imitate, emulate, sometimes downright copy, all to find their own style, which has its roots buried deep in knowing the product and process well. To make, one must first consume. To truly appreciate what you’re consuming, it’s important to know how it’s made.

By transitioning from full-fledged consumer to fledgling maker, you get to see, maybe only briefly, that border where the two worlds meet.

There’s a drawback though. By committing yourself to learning the delicate intricacies of how a product is made, you’re fundamentally altering how you view that topic. After learning to revise grammatically and syntactically, I struggle to read books without trying to analyze the sentences, wondering how and why the author wrote them that way. When I drink a beer, I’m often spending more time considering its constituent malty and hoppy parts as the brewer in me takes over, not just letting it slide down my gullet with simple satisfaction. Once you learn you cannot unlearn, which may (if your mind works anything like mine) somewhat ruin the enjoyment of the product you had when you were only a consumer.

But what you lose in enjoyment, you make up for in the satisfaction of creating something that other people enjoy. It’s a fair trade, I think. The life of a maker is not for everyone, and that’s a good thing, because the aforementioned codependency would fall apart if the maker had no one to make for. Blogging and homebrewing have changed how I approach two of my favorite things in this life, to the point where “I read this” and “I drank this” are less important to me than the simple and inclusive “I made this.”

“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

You Don’t Have to Love Brewing to Love Beer

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of teaching a group of close friends how to brew. We gathered in our host’s driveway like a gaggle of birds flocking to a piece of tossed bread, excited to gorge our brains on malty knowledge, to create and learn all in one very efficient swoop. I’ve taught classes at a corporate level before, slinging SharePoint solutions like a pro, but I’d never taught a class on how to brew. I went crazy with it. I even made a 7-page handout!

You forget, once you’ve fully ingrained yourself in a process, how many aspects of the art you take for granted. As I held up a cylinder full of golden wort to explain hydrometers, sugar density, and original gravity like these were concepts the average person should know about, it struck me how involved and complicated brewing must seem to someone who hasn’t been studying and physically doing it for nearly ten years. I did my best to explain (in less scientific terms) how water, sugar, hops, and yeast eventually become the drink we all immediately recognize, which forced me to reanalyze brewing as an activity, and it’s applicability as a hobby.

At some point, when I was explaining how to troubleshoot a stuck fermentation, and how relatively subtle changes in temperature can result in unwanted off flavors, I realized that homebrewing is a high risk, low reward venture. It requires a significant start up cost, large swaths of free time, and until you’ve done it for a while, results in pretty mediocre beer. It requires a lot of study, a lot of patience, and sometimes, a light sprinkling of luck. It’s clearly not a hobby for everyone.

A strange current undulates deep in the aquifers beneath craft beer culture, an ebb that pulls beer drinkers into production breweries, and a flow that pushes them to gaze upon rows of stainless steel tanks in jaw-dropped awe. The phenomena is unique to beer (from what I can tell); writers do not spend their time inside publishing company warehouses, admiring printers and book binding machines, while comparing and rating fonts. Foodies rarely walk into the kitchens of their favorite restaurants to grab a quick bite with the head chef while admiring his oven. In other fields, such behavior would be bizarre, possibly even ridiculed.

Part of the allure of a brewery comes from novelty; prior to the last few years, the only options you really had to see beer-making in action required generic tours through massive Bud and Miller industrial complexes. Many people who have loved beer for a long time now get to peek behind the curtain, see that the great and powerful is actually the organized and practical, demystify the processes and the people that lead to their favorite drink. General brewery openness to invite the libatious public into their work space shows just how welcoming our little community really is, but comes with an oft overlooked side effect that mars all that generous inclusivity with unintended exclusivity.

The obsession with breweries makes it seem like you have to love brewing if you already love beer. Everyone else seems enamored by the creative side, puppy-love smitten by the idea that beer is crafted by people, not just spawned in bottles and distributed to the masses. So why not you? I’ve heard several friends and colleagues announce, with much dejection, that they “just can’t get into brewing,” or “I tried homebrewing, and didn’t enjoy it,” their voices tinted with frustration and failure. There is an implication that the enjoyment of the product is inextricably tied to the enjoyment of the process, and that you cannot possibly be into one without being into the other. A subconscious malignant trend whispers mean words to the dark, suggesting that people who love to drink beer aren’t “real beer people” unless they frequent every brewery in a fifty mile radius, and homebrew every weekend.

I’m here to tell you that’s all nonsense. In a commercial context, there will always exist two subsets of people: creators and consumers. While there will inevitably be some cross over, in nearly every other modern industry, the lines are pretty cleanly drawn between the two groups. You don’t expect every voracious reader to also be a writer, or study sentence structure and grammar, do you? You’d never suggest someone who enjoys delicious food also learn how to cook every dish they enjoy, Iron Chef style, right? We appreciate the creators because without them we wouldn’t have our products to consume, but trying to culturally tie creation and consumption together will lead to a lot of unreasonable expectations, and possibly some alienating let downs when reality deviates from the prescribed popular path.

It’s OK to not want to try your hand at homebrewing, or to find the process tedious and unrewarding.

It’s OK to love beer for it’s mosaic variety and deliciousness without giving a single solitary shit about how it transformed from raw ingredients to decadent ambrosia.

It’s OK to not want to visit breweries, to not have an aesthetic opinion about stainless steel versus copper, to not really care at what temperature the grain for your favorite beer was mashed.

You can love, respect, and enjoy beer without any of that. You should still maintain a healthy respect for those who do spend their time making beer (as long as they do it well), but feel no shame in not wanting to pack up and move yourself to that side of the beerish world. While it would be pretty difficult to love brewing if you didn’t love beer, never let the culture, or any unspoken trend, suggest the opposite is true.

It’s OK, really, to love brew as a noun, but not as a verb.

“If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” ― Leo Tolstoy

 

Journey to the Center of the Beer

Every time I homebrew, I eat a bunch of the ingredients. I scoop big soggy spoonfuls of spent grains from the mashtun and scarf them down like a heaping helping of Frosted Flakes. I nibble on hop cones and pellets, immediately regretting the decision as my mouth is berated by bitter fury. I’ve even sampled the yeast, which I cannot in any way recommend.

All in the name of knowing my ingredients better. I’m still, to this day, amazed that four relatively basic foodstuffs can ultimately turn into something as complex and complete as beer. So today, I’m going to shrink myself down (using my macro lens). Aided by my friend, J. Cousteau (no, that’s too obvious…we’ll go with Jacques C. instead), we’ll journey deep into the heart of the beer, discovering the natural beauty hidden in what some people may regard as simple ingredients.

You ready to go Jacques?

Oui, d’accord. 

20,000 Leagues Under the Beer

We begin our journey as all who inevitably give into their wanderlust do, lost in fields of grain that blow sweet starchy scents across the nostrils of the soul. The endless plains of husks split and broken mimic Grecian ruins, bygones of a time lost to time, myth and legends seeping from their cracked remains. Every story ever told over a pint dwells in the history of this American 2 row. What do you see, Jacques?

Ze grain, she is beautiful and enigmatic, like a mermaid with a fish face and human legs. 

Um, yes. I guess. Well said.

But beer never stays in one state too long; dry becomes wet, sugar becomes alcohol, the beer itself ultimately graces our toilet bowls as blessed urine. Next we move into the sea of mashtun, that veritable Aegean trapped inside a red Igloo™ cooler.

The water swirls together with the simple sugars. Frothy bubbles rise as the near-scalding water sucks the starch from the grain with time honed practice and honored tradition. The mash paddle breaks up doughy balls, setting the saccharides to work.

Ah, ze mashtun, ver ze hopes and dreams of all ze sugars come together. Bath time for ze dirty soul of la bière.

Dirty bath time indeed.

As the grains are baptized by almost boiling, we explore the other ingredients. With Jacques help, I cast a net out across the beery world, hoping to ensnare the most lupulus of the humulus, to pull from the deep hop fields of Yakima Valley.

We find half a pound of pure paradise.

Ze hops, zey look like ze shit of a horse.

What? No. These are decadently aromatic Citra hops pressed into pellets. They burst with fragrance, singing a bitter song to balance out their grapefruit guise. They are the beating heart of the beer, arguably the most distinctive ingredients in the sweet concoction…

Regarde comme de la merde.

Moving on.

The grain is spent now, all its energy taken by the water, two separate spirits now joined as one in wort. It pulled its content and color from the medley of different malts, and after an hour long soak is ready for its long roil.

Ah yes, zis is when we sink deep into the liquid embrace. In ze wort we can return to ze womb, be one, again, with mother ocean. 

Now you’re just being creepy.

To float free in ze stomach of life is all man seeks. Ze bière, she washes over us like crashing waves. She is bottled ocean, twelve ounces of jeux de vie. 

I’m starting to regret bringing you along.

Sulfides soar skyward as the propane feeds an hour long boil. The beer is on the air, in the smells, in the wispy silks of evaporating wort forever disappear into winter’s chill. Some call it the angel’s share, some call it tragic but necessary loss for the cause. I call it the herald of the ale, the vanguard of a two-week war to be waged in white buckets and glass carboys.

Jacques? Oh crap, where did he go?

Nope, not sniffing the yeast. Not with the whirfloc tablets or Irish moss, either. Where can an old French dude wander off to in a beer?

Oh. There he is.

Ze airlock, she bubbles with ze zest of life. Like millions of fishes saying hello from ze ocean floor, ze bubbles show the world below ze surface. It is truly magnificent.

Yea, totally. I was just thinking that exact same thing. Thanks for the insights, I think.

It’s OK to be a Brewbie

In a post a few months back, I made mention of a “brewbie” (brew + newbie); that person new to the craft beer scene, overflowing with enthusiasm like a roughly poured pint. They are usually young, energetic, and raw, leaping on new beers and beer news like a kitten on a stinkbug. They mean well, but have a ways to go from “that person who knows about beer” to “a full-keg of beer expertise.”

I have a confession to make: I am a brewbie.

Sure, I know some things about beer. I’ve put my big white ale pails and heavy-ass glass carboys to near-constant use, dog eared and highlighted many books from Brewers Publications, delved as deep into the mines of malts and hops and yeasts as I’ve been able to in the time between writing, video games, and that place I’m forced to go to 8 plus hours a day. But I can’t deny my relative lack of experience, can’t deny that there are people out in this community who have been tasting, brewing, and studying beer for longer than I’ve been alive. 

This has become more and more apparent as I’ve waded knee-deep into the ocean of beer-related media, started to really interact with the swimmers near me. I’ve noticed others who are much farther out in the water. Some are surfing. Others are playing waterpolo way past the breakers like it’s no big deal. Some even have boats! It suddenly makes my progress, which I was so proud of, seem significantly less impressive. Looking down at the water swirling around my calves, holding up my shorts as to not get the fringes wet, I feel like a failure.

But then I turn back and see that there are still hundreds of thousands of people sitting on the beach. They haven’t even got the energy or desire to stick a toe in the water, never mind wade out to where the other brewbies and I are figuring out how to swim.

So I say to anyone else in my position: it’s OK to be a brewbie. At least you’re out there trying.

We live in a world where social posturing and image crafting are not only accepted, but often encouraged. Because there are few ways to validate the claims people make on social media, we suddenly find ourselves surrounded by self-proclaimed experts who have done purportedly amazing things, who in turn, by comparison, make us feel bad that we haven’t done amazing things. One only needs to look at the “job titles” of a whole slathering of 20-something administrative-types on LinkedIn to understand what I’m talking about. Assistant Contract Proposal Coordinators with one year of experience, I’m looking at you.

As a result of this creeping feeling of inadequacy, a direct side-effect of having infinite information freely available a few clicks away, we try to puff ourselves up in terms of knowledge and perceived worth. We don’t want to suffer the embarrassment of not knowing, even if it would be perfectly acceptable, given our age and experience and education, to legitimately not know. I’ve been guilty of this too many times; hastily, awkwardly Googling answers to not appear dense or way behind the ever upwardly bending curve of knowledge. It’s a crappy feeling to be on the outside of a group you really want to be apart of. But it’s also a reality of trying to learn something new.

Despite the traditional model, learning isn’t a linear journey from A to B where you digest a predetermined set of data points like some kind of academic PacMan. We can try to quantify beer expertise with BJCP and Cicerone certs, but even well developed standards can’t capture everything. When your brain is spilling with beer facts, historical anecdotes, quotes from master brewers, you’ll still have so much more to learn. The end point is constantly moving, hurtling away from you at a speed that you can’t possibly match like a comet through space too distant to ever colonize with your brain settlers.

Good news though! Chasing that comet is the what keeps you growing.

The masters of the craft – the Jim Kochs, the Sam Calagiones, the Ken Grossmans – even with their encyclopedic knowledge and decades of hands-on experience, still have a little brewbie dwelling inside them, an echo of their 20-something self still urging them to try new things, to sip new beers, to write down those OGs and FGs in a never-ending quest for brewing consistency. They are experts by all definable measure, but that je ne sais quoi inside them still drives them forward. They got to where they are as the paragons of brewing because they were at one point total brewbies: guys with an unquenchable thirst to make an impact on American beer.

So accept that you’ll always be learning, about beer and about life and about how beer goes with life. Accept that even if you do eventually stumble backwards into the comfortable armchair of expertise, you still won’t know absolutely everything, because some tricky maltster will come up with a brand new magical malt roasting technique the second you think you do. Accept that you’ll learn your own things, at your own pace, which may not match the pace of others.

And before you know it, you’ll be debating if that piney aroma is simcoe or chinook, or if you are getting hints of vanilla behind the delicious burn of bourbon barrels. You’ll be explaining the difference between lengths of sugar chains and mash temperatures, the curse of Dimethyl Sulfide in homebrew, which yeast strains are your favorite and why. You’ll find yourself giving advice, helping newcomers out, passing your knowledge to that person who is a mirror of who you were just a short time ago.

The more you know, the more you realize what you don’t know. In some way or another, you and I will always be brewbies. But that’s OK, because so will everyone else.

Do you remember the giddy pleasure the first time you saw a row of these?

Craft and Draft: Go Small or Go Home

If I shoved you through the doors of a commercial brewery and said, “make some beer!” would you have any idea where to start? Would you be overwhelmed by the towering shiny metal of the brew kettles? Would the verdant pounds of hops intoxicate you with their heaven-scented mystery? Would you try to make a beer, even if you didn’t really know the process or how to use the equipment? And if you did, how good do you think the beer would be?

Now, imagine I did the same thing, but you’d been homebrewing for a few years. You may not have experience with the tools and ingredients on such a large scale, but you’d at least understand how beer works. You’d know that you needed to crack the grains and get them sparging, as the wort is the soup stock of your new brew. You’d know that you needed to decide what and how many hops to use for bittering, and then which to add later in the boil for aroma. You’d have a much better understanding of what was going on, and there’d be a chance you’d make a beer that people actually wanted to drink.

If I shoved you into a chair in front of a computer and said, “write a novel!” would you have any idea where to start?

Now, imagine I did the same thing but you’d been writing short stories for a few years.

It’s our nature to think big

I think if you’re dreaming at all, you’re dreaming big. You’re thinking of all the wonderful splendor that your potential might manifest as: riveting novels, acclaimed works of nonfiction, successful innovative breweries, a work environment where flip flops are not a faux pas, but a deliberate and encouraged style choice.

And as a direct result of thinking big, we act big. We draft huge plans for ourselves, for our careers, for our lives, even if those drafts are little more than theoretical scribbles on a post-happy hour cocktail napkin. We imagine our lives as they could be, filling in the holes with success shaped ideas. There is a certain pleasure in being wrapped in the warm, down blanket of future-thinking fantasy.

So we try, from the onset, to do big things. Writers try to go from zero to epic SciFi space drama, homebrewers try a Flemish Red for their very first beer. We aim high, probably too high, because the challenge and wonder of something new drives us. We get drunk on our own potential, our own dreams of what we can accomplish.

But when expectation falls short of reality and our dreams run out of gas 10 miles before the next Wawa, we feel disappointment. We’re confused as to why our novel reads like a Jarlsberg hunk of plot holes, why our beer tastes like band aids and dirt.

But our nature is also cumulative

There is a reason we don’t teach children to read by handing them a copy of Anna Karenina and saying, “good luck, kid.” We have to build our skill sets a bit at a time; win a ton of minor educational battles to win the knowledge war. You’d never expect a surgeon to be able to remove a tumor on her first try, with no experience except some stuff she saw on YouTube. So why do we expect to be able to write full length books with little or no training?

I’m certain there are some people out there who are an exception to this rule, who can, almost by magic (or raw talent) drop out a novel on their first try that is of ridiculously high quality. But for most of us (me included) that’s just not how it works. As much as we want to be the exception, the one who finds the genie bottle, the one who wins the lottery, chances are we’re not going to. We’re those unlucky saps who have to do all those labor intensive things like study and practice.

When we practice, we could keep aiming very high, firing that cannon at all those stars, hoping against hope that we might hit one. Or we could be a bit more realistic and aim for something a few thousand light years closer.

Go small or go home

If you want to brew beer that sells, start by homebrewing. Start with simple recipes, so you can learn what makes good, tasty beer, regardless of the ingredients or equipment.

If you want to write books that sell, start writing short stories. Start with single characters and tight narrative arcs with a focus on sentence structure, grammar, and tension.

Why?

Because smaller is easier to digest, break apart, experiment with. A five gallon batch is a good sample size to test what kinds of hops to use (and in what combination) or how a certain temperature during mash can affect a finished beer. A short story is a perfect place to try a new setting or structure or kind of dialogue.

Instead of committing a ton of time and resources to something you’re not sure will work, try it on a smaller scale first. If you nail it, awesome; you’ve learned how it works, and can always scale it up. If it didn’t turn out so well, even more important lesson learned.

Starting small let’s your practice your art on your own time, by your own rules.

Remember: Jim Koch started Sam Adams with a small batch of Boston Lager in his kitchen. George R. R. Martin wrote short stories for years before the Game of Thrones (ASOIAF) series.

They went small so they didn’t have to go home defeated. They went small to teach them how to go big.

“Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.” -Albert Einstein

Craft and Draft: Zen and the Art of Homebrewing

Watching the frothy white wort churn, rising high, almost spilling over the edge of the stainless steel kettle, then dropping back down to a calmer roil, I pretend I’m an alchemist trying to transmute grain into gold, tossing in hops like they are little green cones packed with raw natural magic. I like to sit and watch the science happen, equal parts actively and passively involved in the swirling primordial creation of something great.

There’s something peaceful in the rhythmic dance of that malted water, the smell of wet grain on the summer air, the sticky sugar on the end of a big stirring spoon. When I brew, I’m not concerned with what reports are due at work, who I’m supposed to email, what time I need to be somewhere and if I need to put on nicer pants. Brewing is an activity where my mind can solely focus, find flow, reconnect to some more primal, innate elements of my emotional self that are often lost in a sea of tweets or overgrown fields of HTML.

When we’re out there, it’s just me and the pre-beer – mano-a-malto – with no concerns beyond getting the temperatures right and timings down.

The entire process of making beer demands devoted method and time. Scooping grains into bags, measuring them to match your recipe. Cleaning your buckets and mash tuns in the never ending battle against infection. Mashing at precise heat to make sure those amylase alphas and betas get a well-balanced, nutritious meal.

And then the waiting. The definitely not opening the primary fermentation bucket to check out the krausen. The definitely not sticking an eye dropper in there to taste your progress. The patient weeks of listening to bubbles as the CO2 floats its way to freedom. All necessary. Nothing rushed. In a world where people expect instant responses, the beer in stark, stalwart opposition, demands the opposite. It asks to be kindly left alone, so it can ruminate and flocculate.

This forced slow-down is important for a person like me, the frenetic type who can and will do anything and everything (to the point of it being too much) just because he can. The beer looks me straight in the eye – with little to no bullshit – and says, “No, Oliver, you can’t rush this. Do it right.” And, because I love the beer, appreciate its magic, I listen. Because I rushed a few early batches, and got decidedly meh beer as a result, I fight my instincts and take my time. I slow the hell down. I measure twice and brew once.

And as odd at the connection might seem, this ability to slow down, to take your time, to commit to quality and perfection, is directly applicable to writing. The excited rush to get that presumably delicious beer into a keg so you can drink it is the same as that excited rush to finish a first draft to get a story told. The theoretical beer always tastes delicious on the made up taste-buds of your mind, just like the story always works out perfectly, with no flaws, in your head. You even plan a beer recipe like you outline a story, selecting the correct grains (characters), hops (telling details), and yeast (conflicts), always making sure the water (author’s voice) is of balanced pH and doesn’t contain anything that might give the beer (story) any off flavors (inconsistencies in tone).

In practice, a poorly planned, rushed beer, with the wrong hops or yeast, where fermentation never really finished, just won’t taste very good. A story that wasn’t really thought out, that wasn’t edited objectively, that never really resolved some major plot point, likely won’t be a very enjoyable read. Great literature requires proper fermentation time. No amazing novel was finished, and no whiskey-barrel aged stout is ready to drink, in a week or two or even three. The same amount of slow, purposeful development that goes into creating a world class brew goes into creating an award winning story.

Quality takes time. It takes patience. It takes slowing down from the “I’m definitely going to get hurt if I keep going this fast” pace of our daily lives. It takes knowing when to tell your brain that an investment in the development of a product will yield a vastly superior result. It takes discipline. It takes practice.

But in that slow down, that moment of focus on a single luxurious task, you may find some peace you thought you’d lost. As the wort swirls on its throne of steel and flame, and as a plot forms ranks around a few thousand serifed soldiers, you’ll find a moment of clarity – possibly even of zen – where there is nothing but you and your brain. And in that space, you’ll find your best stuff: the freshest ideas, the tastiest beers.

So take your time. Relish rolling around in the decadence and wonder of your own imagination. Don’t try to push it aside, or run past it. Embrace it, spend time with it. When you’re brewing up a batch of story ideas, give them the time they want. Give them the time they deserve.

“Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.”
–John De Paola

In Defense of the Alternative Beer Review

If you’ve been around for some of my Beer Fiction Fridays it’s not exactly breaking news worthy of auto-tune treatment that I don’t write traditional beer reviews. Sure, I’ve written quite a few nonfiction, more review-ish reviews, but even those tend to fall more on the side of narrative story than they do classic, “here’s what I think and why,” no-frills review.

An article from Focus on the Beer had me doing a Ctrl+F on my soul this weekend, delving deep in my psyche and emotional past for the reasons I write beer reviews at all. I think the obvious reasons are because I like beer and because I like to write. The rest just seems inconsequential, the unimportant details that seem to work themselves out without much extra thought.

But I’ve never been the type to actually read reviews of food and drink with an air of seriousness, never acted like the opinion of the critic or reviewer or dude in his basement somehow matters. I do often find my browser landing on Beer Advocate because, hey, checking out what the collective hive-mind thinks can be fun and a hands-on lesson in collective sociology. But I’m pretty sure I’ve never consciously recalled any of those reviews in the liquor store, saying to myself, “beerstud1991 only gave it a 2.63, no way I’m buying that junk.“ I can say with confidence that I’ve never let a beer’s “score” influence whether I’m going to purchase it or not.

Why?

Because taste is subjective. More so, I’d argue, than any other sense. We can pretty much agree (short of color interpretation) that we all see the same things. Aside from the thickness of different ear drums slightly adjusting incoming MHz, we all hear the same things. We can also agree that week-old cat litter smells bad and a freshly baked apple pie smells good. We can even agree that 300 thread count sheets are soft, 60 grit sand paper is rough, and a baby’s butt is the unequivocal standard unit of smoothness against which all other smoothness should be measured.

But taste has few standards; it is permeable, water soluble, in constant flux. Some people out there legitimately don’t like cupcakes. Others legitimately do like tripe.  Every late-to-work scalding coffee burn, every jalapeno charged capsaicin rush, every chewing-too-fast-bit-the-side-of-your-tongue is part of the formula that always equals how you go about tasting, no matter what variables are added or changed.  Your tongue, like a gross pink snake, sheds its skin and taste buds often, reacting to all kinds of things you put in your mouth, making it so you can’t even trust your own opinions over the course of your life.

And because taste is flawed, the classic beer review is flawed. Just because you liked a sextuple dry-hopped Imperial IPA, doesn’t mean everyone else will. Just because your palette isn’t as open to bitters and coffee malts, doesn’t mean that a coffee stout is bad. Reviews will always be biased and tainted by the reviewer’s in-born, unavoidable subjectivity and thus can’t logically be universally valid. There is no basis against which the goodness of a beer can be measured (although the BJCP is certainly trying to establish one) and as a result, what another person thinks about a beer will remain forever nebulous, floating in a foamy, lacey, off-white head of doubt.

I sound like I’m about to give up on the beer review. Far from it. Actually the opposite. The beer review is still a great thing, still has a place in our writing and beer worlds, but maybe not in the traditional Appearance+Smell+Taste+Mouthfeel form.

When you drink a beer, you’re doing a lot more than just putting some water, malt, hops, and alcohol into your body. You’re doing a lot more than just tasting a drink and reporting your findings. You’re becoming part of an ancient tradition that dates back ~10,000 years. You’re joining a enthusiastic community of like-minded brewers, maltsters, yeast-biologists, and hop-farmers who toil away to bring life to a beverage, a drink that has shaped and supported mankind’s rise to greatness like a pint glass supports an ale. You’re raising a glass to salute the infinite muse of alcohol, and sharing good times with your family and friends. Beer is more than the sum of its ingredients, it’s a glorious gateway, a cultural connection.

When you write a review, you’re telling the story of how you made that connection. You’re filling your reader’s head with the same warm, spinning buzz that filled yours, via a story or anecdote or worded snapshot of life. You’re not just telling them about the beer, you’re taking them with you on the experience you had drinking the beer. Write your reviews to show us the truth that was hard-brewed into the beer, the connection to that timeless tradition that inspired you to take bottle-opener to cap in the first place.

Don’t be so caught up in what people expect from a review. If you want to write about the hop characteristics because that’s just your thing, go for it. If you want to write about a memory that this beer brought surging back to the front of your brain, by all means. If you’re like me, and you want to write a story based on the taste and appearance of the beer, don’t let anyone stop you.

Drink what calls to you. Write what the beer inspires you to write.

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

How to Brew All Grain Noble Hopped Pilsner

I stepped into Maryland Homebrew a few weeks ago with a focused mind. I had a recipe. I had a goal. A singular idea dominated my mind, and my will was committed to pursing it even if it meant my ruin.

I wanted to move from extract brewing to all grain brewing.

To anyone not familiar with homebrewing, this doesn’t sound like such a big deal. It sounds sort of like going from Shake N’ Bake to homemade seasoned breadcrumbs. A little extra preparation work, but similar end product: breaded chicken.

But to a beersmith it’s so much more than that. It’s a right of passage that we must face armed only with a couple of buckets and our wort stirring spoon. It marks the transition from brewboy to brewman. It’s a bubbling, boiling, fermenting, Bar Mitzvah.

When I told the staff at MD:HB I wanted to do my first batch of all grain beer, they all jumped to attention, quick to help me load up heavy bags of grain and answer any questions I had knocking around in my beer-addled brain. One staff member showed me how to best use the mill to crack my grain. Another talked to me about temperatures for strike water and mashing. Yet another guy called to another, across the warehouse area in the back, “hey, this guy is doing his first all grain!”

As I was checking out, I felt like I had joined an exclusive club. Like Skulls and Bones. Or the Masons. Or the Mouseketeers.

I was part of a club of people who did things by scratch, with purpose, with art and flourish and drunken enthusiasm. I was now on the all-grain inside. And it felt good.

I went home all blissfully happy, grinning like a little kid who had just eaten the slice of his birthday cake that had his name written on it in icing. I set to mashing and brewing, a new man in a new world.

Of course, I couldn’t be simple (or practical). I decided not only to do my first all-grain brew, but my first lager as well.

Sometimes a man has to buy 9.5 lbs of pilsner malt. We all have our vices. Don’t judge me.

Things You’ll Need

• 9.50 lbs of pilsner malt (this is the good stuff, it smells like sweet bread)
• .5 lb Cara-Pils (as a supplement to your main malt to add some color)
• 1 oz Tettnang hops (Noble hop 1 of 5)
• .75 oz  of Spalt hops (Noble hop 2 of 5)
• 1 oz Hersbrucker hops (Noble hop 3 of 5)
• 1 oz Hallertau hops (Noble hop 4 of 5)
• 2 oz Saaz hops (Noble hop 5 of 5)
• Czech Budejovice Lager Yeast (I used Whitelabs liquid WLP802, for anyone wanting the specifics)

You’ll also need the full brewer’s regalia and accoutrement (I like to say, “ackoo-tray-mon” all fancy and French-like):

• A mash tun (good job I already showed you guys how to make one, right? guys?)
• A brew kettle (that will hold all of your final volume – 5 gallons for me)
• A big spoon (Yup.)
• Some oven mitts (if you use the nice matching ones your wife has in the kitchen, try not to spill sticky wort all over them)
• Ice bath or wort chiller (I still don’t have a wort chiller, because I’m cheap and cooper is expensive)
• Thermometer (if you don’t have a laser gun thermometer by now, I can’t help you)
• A hydrometer (for measuring the beeryness of your beer)
• Bucket or carboy (unless you want to ferment it in something weird, like 8 two-liter soda bottles)

Step 1: Monster Mash

Malt extract is basically just pre-made (and condensed) grain extract. You’re going backwards one step in the process by doing all grain. It’s up to you and your cleverness to extract all that delicious sugar from that massive pile of grain.

Heat up five gallons of water plus a little bit extra to make up for the volume lost during boiling. Since it takes approximately one epoch to heat up five gallons in one container on an electric stove, I recommend splitting it out into several different containers. If you have a gas oven or a patio stove, feel free to use that, but don’t bring the water to boil.

You want to get your water hot, but not so hot that it scorches the grain. The temperature of the strike water (or the first water you add to the mash tun before the grain takes a nice bath) will vary based on your recipe. For this one, I kept the temperature around 160 degrees. Despite being an efficient holder-o-heat, your mash tun will likely lose a few degrees over the hour you let the grain settle, so heat it up just past your target heat to compensate.

I made some tea afterwards, so this isn’t weird.

Once you’ve added your water to the mash tun, you want to quickly add your grain. This is sort of like adding hot chocolate mix to a mug of hot water: a bunch of grain will sit on top and not get wet. Like a viking manning a long ship, use your big spoon to stir the grain until it has all been thoroughly wetified.

I underestimated my water here. I’m probably the worst estimator in the Great DC Metro area.

Step 2: Wait an hour

You’ll need to wait while the hot water sucks all of the sugar out of the grain like a diabetic vampire. To prevent excessive heat loss, wrap your mash tun in some blankets. No, not that one. Or that one. Go get the ones on the guest room that no one ever uses. Deny knowledge if your wife asks why they smell like a brewery.

This is a good time to chill out and drink a beer that is like the beer you’re making. Notice the flavors, appreciate the craft. Sam Adams Noble Pils or Victory Prima Pils were my models. Now is also a good time to stir the grain, but don’t leave the top of the mash tun open for too long while you’re stirring.

One episode of Law and Order SVU later (dun-dun) your wort should be ready for the primary boil.

Step 3: Drain the mash tun into your mash pot

Hopefully you put your mash tun on a kitchen counter or something at hip-height, otherwise, have fun lifting 40 lbs of really hot water plus ten pounds of soaking mash up onto something high. Remind me to go back in time to remind you to put it on the counter, not the floor. You’ll need gravity’s help to drain all of the wort out o the tun.

Position your mash pot on a chair below the spigot coming out of your mash tun. Before you start filling the pot with the precious brown liquid, you’ll want to collect about a liter of wort in another container. This prevents any loose grain husks from getting into the wort.

I used the same pitcher I use to fill the cat’s water bowls. I hope they don’t notice.

When the pitcher is full, start filling the pot. Pour the contents of the pitcher back into the mash tun as to not lose all of that sugary goodness. If you used exactly 5 gallons, you’ll need to tilt your mash tun slightly to get all of the liquid out.

Ok, so I lied. I didn’t use a chair. I balanced the brew pot on a brew bucket. Terrible idea. Ignore this picture.

(Note: Up until this point, sanitizing your equipment isn’t super important. Everything should be clean and free of anything loose or gross, but since you’re about to boil the stuff for ~60-90 minutes, not everything has to be perfectly sterilized before coming in contact with your wort. After the boil though, make sure everything is clean as bleach. But don’t actually use bleach.)

Step 4: Boil ’em cabbage down

Now you’re back to where you would be with an extract beer. Get the wort to a rolling boil and add your hops as called for by your recipe (for this pilsner, I did Spalter and Tettnang at 60 mins, Hersbrucker and Hallertau at 15 mins, then Saaz at knockout). You don’t have to worry about steeping any grain or anything like you normally would with an extract, as you’ve already done that hard work in the mash tun!

Wasn’t quite boiling yet. Oops. Impatient.

Now you just need to cool and pitch your yeast. If you need help with that part, see my Homebrew 101 post.

Step 5: Make a pizza

There is one slight drawback to moving to all grain brewing. When you’re finished, you still have ~10 lbs of wet, sugarless grain sitting in your mash tun. There are a few options of what you can do with all this perfectly edible grain. Some people like to donate it to local farms (apparently horses and cows quite literally eat this shit up). Others like to make dog treats with it (apparently dogs have similar palettes to horses and cows).

I decided to make a pizza.

These grains are very similar to bread grains, so the crust I formed tasted sort of like multi-grain bread (chunks of grain and hard bits and all). I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just combined flour, water, baking yeast, some olive oil, and the left over beer grain until I had something that was pretty dough-like.

I thought it tasted pretty good. Not sure my wife was a huge fan.

Beer and pizza go so well together that literally mixing the two was a no brainer.

How to build your own Mash Tun

I know you’ve been looking at your prosaic smattering of material goods, wondering why you don’t have a custom made mash tun to brew all grain beer. It’s OK. I was too. It’s a normal and healthy question to ask yourself.

Until very recently, I had done all of my homebrew with malt extract: big cans of thick gloopy brown stuff that is packed with sugar for the young voracious yeast in your beer. This is great for learning the basics of brewing (it is simpler, takes less time, and is less messy), but it’s an established fact that real home brewers make their tinctures from 100% whole ingredients. Making the move to all grain is like a homebrewing right of passage; the malty vision quest that all young brewmasters must go on to realize their beer-soaked destinies.

All grain brewing basically means that you make your own mash from pounds and pounds of grain, instead of using extract. Aside from making you into a total beer brewing badass, using cracked malt leads to better tasting beer and gives you a lot more flexibility in flavor, color, and final ABV.

But how do you get the sugar out of all that delicious grain?

With a mash tun.

(Kudos/credits to the guys at Maryland Homebrew and Don Osborn for giving me the ideas and confidence to build this contraption)

Things you’ll need:

• A large drink cooler (I used an family sized 52 quart Igloo cooler. The key is to find one with the drain spigot on the side, not the bottom.)
• A large stainless steel toilet or sink supply hose (I used a 24″ tube, but you can use whatever best fits your cooler)
• Two to three feet of 3/8″ plastic hosing (you don’t have to spring for the heat resistant kind if you want to save a few cents)
• Two 3/8″ hose clamps (to clamp off the ends of the supply hose)
• Various parts to make an on-off valve (I’ll explain this in detail below; you’ll probably have to order these online or get them from a local brewing store)
• A hacksaw (to hack things)
• Pliers (to ply things)
• An adjustable wrench (to wrench things)
• Beer! (Yuengling Porter for me, as I had it left over in a sampler my neighbors gave me for Xmas)

Tasty porter on a beer man’s chest.

Step 1: Prepare your supply line

A mash tun is just a large receptacle for grain and hot water. You want your grain to sit and steep inside of it so that all of the delicious sugars blend with the water and make tasty wort. The key here is that you don’t want the grains to come with sugar/water concoction, as they can cloud up (and add nasty chunks) to your beer.

The supply line hose you bought is going to be a filter inside the cooler that stops the cracked malt from entering your wort.

First, hack off both ends of the supply line with your hacksaw. This is easier if you have a vice. I don’t have a vice, so I held it with my super manly hands. Be careful that the frayed pieces of steel wire don’t poke and hurt your manly hands. When you get near the end, if a small section of the steel won’t saw, clip it off using some wire clipper to fully separate the ends from the main tube.

Braided stainless steel is surprisingly hard to hacksaw. Who’da thunk it?

Once the steel beast has been (double) beheaded, use your pliers to pull the plastic lining out of the steel part of the tube. This will leave you with a mesh hose with very fine holes all up and down it. A perfect grain filter if I’ve ever seen one.

The tube now functions like a Chinese finger trap. That was me being figurative. Please don’t stick your fingers into it.

The last thing you need to do with the hose is fold it over itself two or three times and clamp it down as tight as it will go with one of your hose clamps. This will keep grains for sneaking into your filter through the end.

Please excuse my cuticles. I need a mani/pedi real bad.

Step 2: Install your on/off valve

This is really important. If you just connect a hose to the spigot of your cooler, chances are pretty high that you’ll have boiling hot wort all over your floor as soon as your start to sparge your grain. I tried a few different variations here, and a ball-lock valve with some nice copper fixtures makes for the most solid, leak-proof seal.

You’ll need parts similar to (or exactly like) the ones pictured below:

3/8″ hose adapter, threaded extension tube, washer, inner cooler o-ring, threaded middle piece, outer cooler o-ring, locking nut, ball valve, 3/8″ adapter (+2 hose clamps for the hose on each side)

You have to build this device in two sections: one on the inside of the cooler, one on the outside of the cooler. The “threaded middle piece” sits in cooler limbo, half in, half out, all ready to receive its respective end of the device.

When you’re ready to install the valve, carefully remove the original drain spigot by undoing the plastic bolts that hold it in place. Save this piece as you could always put it back in a re-convert this into a regular old cooler when you need it for a party.

Assemble your valve, make sure the o-rings are tight against the walls of the cooler, then fill it with a small amount of water and check for leaks. It helps to wrap the “threaded middle piece” in some Teflon tape if you’re getting small drips on the outside of the cooler.

Your finished product should look like this:

Tap on, tap off.

Step 3: Install your grain filter

This part should be pretty easy, just connect your pre-fabbed toilet-hose-filter to a piece of 3/8″ inch tubing that connects to your valve on the inside of the cooler. Secure it with hose clamp if you can’t get a very good fit.

Crude, yet sophisticated.

Step 4: Buy some grain and start brewing!

As long as this bad boy doesn’t leak, you’ll be all grain brewing in no time. When using this, make sure to keep it insulated (with towels or blankets or insulated wrapping) so that all that sugar-sucking heat doesn’t escape. Also elevate it so that you can use and abuse gravity to get all of that sparged wort into your brew pot as quickly as possible!

But more importantly, enjoy. All grain brewing brings a whole new level of dorkiness to your homebrewing activities, and puts you one step closer to owning/running your own brewery. Dream big my friends, dream big.

Looks a lot like oatmeal, huh?