Tuesday, September 1, 2009

The Four Ingredients

The Four Ingredients

You’ve probably heard this one before. It’s a very common widespread topic at any brewery or sometimes television commercials. There are four ingredients to beer: Water, Malt, Yeast, and Hops. When I first heard this – I cannot remember when – I felt like something had gone over my head. What? How could these four ingredients produce the endless variety and complexity of beer? I found out that this simple statement of fact is both true and misleading. One at a time lets look closer at the four ingredients.

Water

I am willing to admit that this is the ingredient that gives the most distinction between brews. So it could be called the most important. There’s a lot of debate of what water “should” be. I account this to personal taste and any advise I get on water I take with a grain of salt.

In all honesty I know nothing about this ingredient. I used to buy purified water for $.75 a gallon outside Albertsons. With a little experience and some reassurance from others I now used Baton Rouge tap water and boil all 5-6 gallons of it. It’s really good water, so I’m told. Some have complained about the fluoride or chlorine taste of the water (only me) and worry about its effects on my brew (again, only me). Again, I know very little about the chemistry behind water. I’ve heard and read that pH has a lot to do with the water. Some brewers recommend lowering pH with Gypsum, or some basic carbonate. I cannot say what level is optimal.

I can tell you from taste though. For example: have you ever had New Orleans tap water? New Orleans tap water comes from treated Mississippi water. New Orleans is the last stop before the mighty Miss hits the Gulf of Mexico, and eventually the ocean. So when you drink New Orleans tap water your drinking everything that sluttish river has ever been with. Admittedly, Baton Rouge is one of the worst when it comes to polluting the Mississippi, sorry NOLA. Our water here in BR comes from an underground source, much like the water in Abita Springs, LA.

Here’s the comparison, I’m thinking back to a past time so you’ll have to imagine a time before Katrina. Remember Dixie beer? Remember Abita? Both are still around but have made some major changes since 2005. Dixie is now brewed in Wisconsin or something and Abita has become more automated and consistent, at the cost of their craft status. Both of those beers were and still are excellent. Made in the same geographical region with the same other three ingredients, but the water changed the tastes dramatically - a spring vs. a river, when you get down to it.

I believe that most brewers try to adjust their water to most closely match the water in the motherland – Europe. Imagine pure spring in Belgium or babbling brooks in Germany. Imagine this hundreds of years ago. Imagine even before the Industrial Revolution. Before, even, the dark ages. Fermenting sugars to alcohol has been around since before recorded history. Its origins are clouded by antiquity and impossible to pinpoint, much like agriculture. Beer however narrows the playing field by what type of sugar is fermented into alcohol, which brings us to ingredient number 2 – Malt.

Malt

The word Malt itself is very ambiguous. Is it singular? Is it plural? It is both a noun and a verb. Basically Malt = sugar. By fermenting that sugar you make beer, the name of the alcohol produced by fermenting malt. Further distillation can lead to whiskey or other grain alcohols, but it all starts with beer or a beer-like substance.

The malting process is the performed by a maltster on barley, wheat, rye, or any type of cereal grain. We can all picture a barley stalk hanging out of a cowboy’s mouth, a long seedy looking grass. Malting is the process of making that seedy grain into sugar. What happens to that grain is it is set in a moist dark environment and, thinking it is in environment conducive to life, it begins to germinate. With germination, the barley life cycle is continued. New life springs from old seeds as the grain converts its stored tough starches into consumable sugar for the sprout to grow. Malt, the substance, is produced when these seed of new life is extinguished and its sugars are stolen for our consumption.

The maltster takes this lush, green new life and roasts it. Using a oven-like Kiln and vents of hot air these sugars are solidified into crystals of sugar. This sugar is used for more than just beer. It is used in Malted Milk Balls like Whoppers, Malted Milk Shakes, and most cereals, such as Malt-O-Meal (on the bottom shelf).

For brewing purposes this Malt substance can be bought in a thick, syrup substance called Malt Extract, or still attached to the grain to be brewed like a tea and extracted from the grain itself. In either case the malt is added to water, brewed and boiled. The sweetness of the Malt in the brew, even after fermentation, is overwhelming. Like a thick maple syrup unfit for mass consumption. Throughout the centuries different herbs and spices were added to abet the sugary taste of the malt. These spices added local color and flavor and are still used for these purposes today, but Beer found its perfect companion in the hops plant.

Hops

Hops add the right amount of bitterness to counteract the sugary malt and simultaneously acts as a preservative. Its tastes have been described as warmth, tea qualities, and in some cases “it tastes like I’m drinking flowers.” The incredible plant looks like a climbing vine and, like its cousin the cannabis plant, only the female cones produce the oil that is desired. By boiling the cones, leaves, or crushed pellets vigorously, you release the oil that is bitter in flavor and also coat the beer to act as protective armor.

Hops and hop flavoring, hopping, came out of necessity, and necessity also drove the evolution of what hops could add to a beer. In England, the popular Pale Ale underwent a hops metamorphosis as it journeyed on the trade routes to India. Such a long voyage could spoil beer, and so thirsty merchant added excessive amounts of hops for preservation. Out of necessity the style India Pale Ale came about and is prized for its bouquet of hops and hops aroma, and not for its perseverance.

Hops and its oil also provide a defensive barrier against foreign substances so that fermentation does not become tainted. It aids the Yeast.

Yeast

There are more types of yeast than there are types of beer and with its every changing, duplicating cells mutations are quite common. Brewers yeast has been cultivated over the centuries to be the perfect organism to digest malted barley. The way all yeast works is it eats sugar, poos out alcohol and farts CO2. This combination is ideal for brewers. From a natural process our wort (unfermented beer) becomes alcoholic and carbonated, yay nature!

In truth I know little about Yeast cultures. I’m not a microbiologist, and even they don’t fully understand it. What we do know is that it is a single celled organism, that when presented into a sterile environment at the right temperature with a high concentration of sugar, i.e. food, it will start having sex with itself and duplicate. The yeast will only stop, or “fall asleep,” if it runs out of food or the temperature of the environment becomes intolerable. Another way to stop yeast is to make your beer too alcoholic. Brewer’s yeast can survive at most about 7-8% alcohol by volume (ABV). So if your beer has enough sugar to produce that quantity of ABV then the yeast will die in their own excrement. What we can do at that point is to use another type of yeast. Wine yeast, champagne yeast, or mead yeast have all been cultivated to survive at higher ABV, but they are far more caustic than brewer’s yeast.

Brewer’s yeast is digestible and good for you. If you’ve ever had an unfiltered beer you can see specs of dead yeast floating in the liquid. Do not be alarmed; they are digestible and even good for you. Dead yeast is a great source of vitamin B, and if you’ve ever taken vitamin B pills you will see that brewer’s yeast is one of the ingredient. It has been said that vitamin B fights a hangover, I can tell you from personal experience it does. So if you drink unfiltered beer all night, like a Hefe-Weizen, you will not have a hangover the next day.

Imagine again the annals of antiquity and the gradual realization of yeast cultures. Imagine a primitive man boiling fruit or some other sugar source and leaving it out for a time. Imagine him returning and seeing the beer surge and move. If you’ve ever seen yeast in action you know what I mean. He must have thought it was voodoo, or a gift from the gods, when in fact it was wild yeast doing its thing. Perhaps it came from a fruit fly landing for a drink. Only after centuries of observation did anyone suspect it was a natural process. In fact some more traditional breweries, such as those in the Cologne region of Germany will only use wild yeast. They literally fill an attic with a brew and open the windows. Then let nature do its thing. If you’ve ever had a Kolsh beer, it’s probably just Kolsh style. Like Bourbon, real Kolsh beers are only made in the Cologne area of Germany with wild yeast, in a barn, with the windows open, facing the Cologne Cathedral. Those crazy Germans…

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