If You Can Bake Bread, You Can Make Beer

"Brewers enjoy working to make beer as much as drinking beer instead of working."
- Harold Rudolph

"Fermentation may have been a greater discovery than fire."
- David Rains Wallace

"God made yeast, as well as dough, and he loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beer does not make itself properly by itself. It takes an element of mystery and of things that no one can understand."
- Fritz Maytag, American brewer

So I made some beer.

I used the easy method, a can of pre-hopped malt extract specially blended to produce an English Mild ale, though I did add a few touches of my own. Instead of the recommended corn brewing sugar, I added 3 pounds of dried medium malt, and primed it (to create fermentation and conditioning in the bottles) with a cup of honey.

But let’s start at the beginning.

I’ve been brewing beer for over 25 years, off and on, starting off with a kit that I bought in, of all places, a British drugstore (or chemist’s, to use the British term), called Boots. It came complete with the malt extract syrup, packet of yeast, sufficient 20-ounce bottles to hold the finished product and plastic caps to seal them with, and a plastic siphoning hose to transfer the beer to the bottles. The kit traveled to America in a large crate, along with all the worldly goods of my new bride and myself, and sat in a closet for several months until we moved into a house with a basement, which I thought was probably a good place to experiment with brewing.

Being a complete novice, I followed the directions on the can’s label, which said to mix the contents (which included not only the malt but also hops extract) with hot water in a food-grade bucket. I had a 5-gallon bucket which had previously held pickle chips that I had gotten from a Subway restaurant where I had worked part-time while going to college, so I washed it out numerous times until the vinegar scent was no longer detectable, boiled up some water, and mixed up the contents of the can with the hot water and the recommended amount of sugar. Not knowing any better at the time, I just used regular old table sugar.

Once this concoction (I did not at that time know that it was called “wort”, pronounced wert) had cooled down to room temperature, I sprinkled the packet of yeast into the bucket, and placed the lid on the bucket. Tyro though I was, I was smart enough not to put the lid on tight, as I knew the build up of fermentation gases might blow it right off, with a resulting mess. I peeked at the brew several times over the next few days, observing the bubbles rising to the top. After about a week, the bubbles ceased rising, so I washed out the bottles, added a teaspoon of sugar (table sugar again) to each bottle, and used the siphon hose to fill the bottles, then capped each with one of the plastic caps included in the kit. I set all the now-filled bottles on a workbench in the basement, and waited for it to be ready to sample (the kit instructions said 10 to 14 days).

A few days later, I found out what happens when you add too much priming sugar to your beer bottles, when several of the bottles popped their plastic caps and erupted beer all over the workbench. I cleaned up the mess and hoped that the rest wouldn’t follow suit, but took the precaution of surrounding the remaining bottles with rags and towels, just in case. Luckily, no more bottles went off of their own accord, and after nearly two weeks, I was ready to sample my homebrew.

It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t taste like any beer I was familiar with. It was good enough to drink, however, and I finished it off, wondering where the heck I was going to get another kit.

Fast forward several years. Through trial and error, reading up on the subject, and asking many questions of other homebrewers and people who worked in the brewing supply shops, I learned the proper techniques of brewing beer, and started turning out ales that I wasn’t ashamed to offer to other people to drink.

Among other things, I learned that whether you brew using malt extracts, grains, or a combination of the two, you need to boil the wort. If you use grain, then you have to strain it out of the wort and rinse it with hot water (“sparging”) to get the maximum amount of malt from it. Different types of hops impart different flavors and bittering qualities to the brew, and can be added at different points in the boil or even afterward for the exact effect you want. Different sugars give different flavors, and malt, corn brewing sugar, honey, maple syrup, and other sweetening agents can be used. A half-cup to a cup of priming sugar can be added to the wort just before it is bottled, rather than adding a teaspoon of it to each bottle. Pouring the hot wort over ice in the fermenting bucket brings it down to a manageable temperature much sooner. The wort should be transferred to a second fermenting bucket (“racking”) at least once to leave behind the sludge and residue that settles out, to leave your final product much more clear. An airlock should be fitted to your fermenting bucket’s lid, to let fermentation gasses escape, and to keep out stray wild yeasts, bacteria and other contaminants.

I’ve gotten to the point where I wonder seriously if I could make a living doing this, by opening a brewpub in Fort Worth. I know that brewpubs can be wildly successful, but that they can just as easily tank, and I could lose my shirt. I’ve gone as far as writing up preliminary business plans and investigating the costs involved. I figure it will take a minimum of $250,000 to get started, and that $500,000 would be a lot better cushion to operate on until the business got running well. (Pssst. Hey, buddy, wanna invest in a brewpub? Only $500,000, and all the beer you can drink.)

So back at last to the honey-primed Mild ale I started writing about, which I brewed using the techniques I listed two paragraphs above. I took most of it along with me to Gulf Wars XVI, the 16th iteration of the annual Society for Creative Anachronism gathering in central Mississippi, where it received rave reviews from all who sampled it. Well, there was the one incident where a bottle didn’t get chilled down, and did get shaken up, and acted a lot like a bottle of champagne… But everyone forgave me for the beer shower.

The ale itself turned out rich, dark and sweet, with a fine cream-colored head that leaves a delicate lace pattern on the glass as you drink it. With approximately 5.5 percent alcohol, it can also be deceptive, as it doesn’t taste that strong. If I make this particular brew again, I think I’ll add extra hops at the end of the boil for added crispness, and cut back to 2/3 of a cup of honey, as this batch tends to foam up a bit when pouring.

Next up, however, I’m thinking of using something produced in my native New England in the late winter/early spring, maple syrup. A Maple Oatmeal Stout, to be specific, incorporating the rich heartiness of oatmeal and the sweetness of maple syrup into one of my favorite styles of ale. I’m making myself thirsty; I can hardly wait to taste it.


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