HBK #4, Day One, Part One: The Grain

First thing's first:  the beer that I selected for brewing (and for the blogging inaugural) was a smoked porter.  Beermaster Tim and his Yoda Chris discussed how best to accomplish this in terms of different malt styles to blend.  This discussion drew from their shared base of knowledge regarding malt varieties, the styles of beer that each is generally used to produce, and the flavors that might result from combining them.  This, of course, is all knowledge that they've gathered after having each brewed dozens of beers in the past, and I therefore can't report too heavily on all the ins and outs of their ultimate decision...but I sure can try to sum up the process and experience of selecting and preparing grain, plus share a few pretty pictures along the way.  First, though, some basics...and some science, if you can stand it:

Beer is, quite basically, made from water, yeast, flavorings (like hops), and grain.  Lots of grains can be used in brewing (and I fully intend to request something weird for my next pick--millet beer, anyone?), but barley is the most common by far.  Wheat, rye, and oat are common secondary grains, as they add flavor and color, but barley is the most common base grain because its husk contains high levels of amylase, an enzyme that converts starches in the germ (i.e., the non-husk portion) into sugars.  Most of that sugar, in turn, becomes "yeast food" in the fermentation process, which creates alcohol.

In order to maximize the amount of potential sugar that can be extracted from the barley, it's first subjected to a process called malting.  Basically, the barley is soaked in water and allowed to germinate - to begin the very first steps of growing into a plant - then dried in a large and relatively low-temperature kiln before the sprouted grains are allowed to mature into full plants.  Without malting, barley grains don't contain the correct proportions of starches (complex sugars) to enzymes (to break down the starches), and therefore wouldn't produce enough sugar during extraction to ferment a good beer.

Different malting processes produce different malts, and we therefore end up with a wide variety of colors and flavors of malted barley, each of which can be used to produce different kinds of beers.   A light malt results in a light color; a dark malt results in a darker beer.  Likewise, malts have different enzymatic contents, and therefore require different lengths of time for their starch content to fully convert to sugars.  There are numeric scales that rate each malt by its color and enzymatic content (called its "diastatic power") respectively, and while getting into those scales in depth is probably beyond the scope of this blog, suffice it to say that a good brewer is familiar with each rating system and knows how a malt's number on each scale will effect his or her beer.

Enough Already, How About Some Pictures?

So, for this particular beer, we used:

 1.  A base malt - a requirement for every beer...this is a malt with a balanced enzyme-to-starch ratio which breaks almost entirely down into sugar and therefore makes easily fermentable malt extract, or "wort."  Tim's standard base is a pilsner malt, light in color and easily overwhelmed in terms of flavor by other secondary grains.

2.  A smoked malt - this Rauch malt is kilned over an open flame rather than on a heated surface (which is how most malts are made), which gives it a strong smokey character.  Since Tim wanted to beat people over the head with its smokiness, our porter is roughly equal in proportion between the base malt and this Rauch.

3.  A roasted wheat - even though it's only a minor ingredient compared to the first two, a relatively small amount this intense grain (which tastes burned when sampled in its solid form) lends the beer its dark color, as well as a bit of acidity and bitterness.

The grain is weighed out in proportion (a sum total of about 12 pounds of grain went into our six gallons of beer), mixed together, and ground in a mill.

...okay, admittedly the picture on the left is of a different mix of grain post-milling.  (You're not crazy; the roasted wheat didn't suddenly disappear).  But the other pictures didn't turn out, and I wanted to share a shot of the texture:  grinding the grain, obviously, turns it into a bunch of tiny pieces easily permeable by water, thus shortening the amount of time it takes to extract the sugar in a process called "mashing," which will be the subject of the next blog.  'Til then, I hope everyone is excited about the soon-to-be-bottled "Char-Cole Porter".