HBK #4, Day One, Part Three: Hops, Sterility, and a Tiny Bit About Yeast

When last we left our Char-Cole Porter, it was sitting in a boiling kettle, 147 °F, and giving off a delicious aroma into the brewing space (i.e. Tim's kitchen).  But that, obviously, is not the end-game of our beerly pursuits:  the beer was still in its wort form, essentially just a flavorful sugar water.  If we were to pour it into bottles and let it sit in Tim's basement for a few months, we would still just have sugar water (note:  not beer) when we opened it in the Spring...except most of the sugar would probably have been converted to toxic and generally unpleasant things by the copious bacteria to which it had been exposed. This is why our next step is to take the wort in the boiling kettle and - wait for it - boil it.

Tim's awesome propane burner can boil this amount of liquid (probably between seven and ten gallons) inside of ten minutes, but it's very important that the wort be monitored carefully.  That's right:  in blatant defiance of the "watched pot" proverb, Tim stood and waited for the wort to boil.  If a wort is allowed to boil out of control, the result is more detrimental than if the water from a pasta pot were to overflow.  The bubbles that form when a wort boils are formed from the surface tension of the water enclosing pockets of air, and these bubbles are especially hearty because they have a high sugar content.  Consequently, if the bubbles exit the kettle, the wort loses sugar disproportionately...and lost sugar means lost potential for alcohol content in the finished beer.  (And while high alcohol content isn't the sole reason we make beer, it certainly doesn't hurt, right?)

So, skipping ahead, the wort has reached a boil (it's not lost on me that both warts and boils are gross skin conditions...but try to pretend this sentence doesn't sound so revolting), and the burner has been adjusted so the boil is under control.  We want the wort to boil for an hour, both to establish sterility and to infuse flavor, which is where the hops come in. 

(A brief side note:  I apologize for the lack of images available from this point on.  See, the fun part about making beer - a generally time-consuming and tedious process - is that you get to enjoy beers that have been previously made while doing so.  Around the time of the boil, I had established a buzz well past sufficient to cause me to forget my duties as a photographer.  I'll try to get some pictures of the post-boil process for future entries.  For now, though, I hope that you have a good imagination, and that you can appreciate that I was having a far better time drinking than I was shooting photos.)

Now that we've gotten the disclaimer out of the way...  Hops are wonderful.  If you enjoy a good, bitter, IPA, then you probably agree with me.  If you've ever handled hops in their pre-beer form, then you definitely know what I mean.  Hops are technically flowers, though they look more like green pine cones while still attached to the plant.  They are then dried, packaged, and sold almost exclusively as a beer ingredient, as they haven't found many other uses in the world.  In their dried state, they're light, fluffy, and uniquely aromatic.  You know the flowery scent of a strong IPA?  Imagine that, but more concentrated, and without any undertones of "beer smell." 

Hops are added at several points during the hour-long wort boiling process.  Hops added earlier are used to infuse flavor and bitterness to the beer, and hops added later are the ones that give that hop aroma I just mentioned.  Chemically (alert!  whenever you see the word "chemically," feel free to skip ahead a few sentences to avoid falling asleep), the reason for this is that hops contain both alpha acids and beta acids, which react differently in the heat of the boiling wort:  alpha acids isomerize (memories of high school chemistry class, anyone?), or convert by rearranging their molecular structure, into bitter-tasting molecules; beta acids do not isomerize, and therefore do not contribute to the flavor but instead accentuate the floral scent of the hops' natural oils.  To maximize isomerization, the "bittering" hops (higher in alpha acids) are added early in the boil; to affect non-bitter hop flavor and aroma, "aromatic" hops (lower in alpha acids, higher in beta) are added in the last half of the boil.

So, an hour goes by and various amounts of various hops are added (sorry, I don't have my notes...but do you really need to know the names, times, and alpha-acid contents of the different hops?  What, are you trying to steal our beer?  ARE YOU?!), and the boiling hot, hops-infused wort is taken off of the burner.  By this point, it has boiled down to roughly the exact amount of liquid we had hoped to end up with...I assume this was just due to Tim and Chris's experience with brewing...and it's filled with nasty, soggy chunks of hops.  Oh, and it's still boiling hot.  Not a good temperature for brewing.  Thankfully, Tim is in possession of a badass copper coil which attaches to a garden hose (did I mention the boil took place on the front porch?  Quaint, right?) and runs cold water through the wort without diluting it at all (I know, a picture would really be nice here, wouldn't it?).  The coil is placed in the pot about ten minutes prior to the end of the boil so as to keep the process as sterile as possible.  Then, when the boil ends, water is run through the wort until it's roughly down to room temperature, and the kettle is brought inside.

Now, before we go any farther, let's talk about MICROBIOLOGY!  (Again, I'll try to do it in three sentences or less; skip ahead if your eyelids just got heavier.)  Bacteria are everywhere all the time, and while air is considered to be more or less sterile (though this is technically not entirely true, it's just something that we assume to be "true enough for our purposes"), NOTHING ELSE IS FREE OF MICROSCOPIC LIFE, and so we must sterilize everything.  If we pour beer through a non-sterile funnel, it will rot; if we store beer in a non-sterile fermenter, it will rot; if we so much as fail to sterilize the caps for our bottles, the stupid beer will rot.  In short, since it's going to be stored at roughly room temperature, we need to kill any bacteria before they even have the chance to thrive in this delicously sugary environment we've just created for them.

As a result of these prokaryotic terrorists' incessant attempts to ruin our brewing party, we have spent part of the boiling time prepping in our battle against them:  our funnels, our carboy (the six-gallon jug we'll use as a fermenter), and even our hands have been soaked in an iodine-based (no bleach here, Tim is all-green) disinfectant.  Once everything is sterile, the kettle is emptied (through a sterile collander to catch the soggy hops, and through a collander-sized funnel to catch the, you know, beer) into a carboy, where it will sit for the next several weeks, bacteria-free and fermenting away.

But wait, how is it supposed to ferment if it's still just glorified sugar water?  That's where the yeast comes in...and, really, that's about all I'll say about yeast, since I plan on writing about it in great detail in the near future (with pictures!).  Basically, the yeast is added, an airlock fermenting cap is put on the carboy, and the beer is put away to ferment.  The long process (and the long-winded, sparsely illustrated blog entry) has finally come to a close...for now, anyway.

HBK #4, Day One, Part Two: Mash, Lauter, Sparge

So, when we left off, we had a big bag full of ground barley freshly milled at Portland's lovely U-Brew Home Brew Supply Store.  We'll skip the part where the three of us stood in line, paid for the grain, and drove out to get a beer and pizza, and instead move straight to the mashing process.

Our ultimate goal with mashing is to turn malt into wort.  Or, rather, we aim to take all of the starch and flavor out of the grain, but leave the fibrous solid matter behind.  We do this by soaking the malt in hot water at a constant temperature for about an hour, then filtering out the rich, sugary deliciousness known as wort in a process called lautering.

The whole thing starts with a well-insulated container, called a mash tun.  It looks a lot like the Gatorade cooler that gets dumped over a football coach's head after a championship win...the key difference, though (besides the fact that dumping these scalding hot contents onto a person would be tantamount to attempted murder), is that a mash tun has a false bottom - essentially a grate - which keeps the milled grain in the tun but allows the wort to run out of a nozzle at the bottom.  During this process, tiny particles of grain are filtered out...though not by the grate itself, but instead by the tightly packed larger chunks that collect in the grate's mesh.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Water which has been heated to about 180°F is poured into the mash tun until it's about half-way full (this, as far as I could tell, was a matter of eyeballing the space needed to fit all 12 pounds of grain in addition to the hot water).  Here, the insulation of the tun will keep the water at a relatively constant temperature for the hour or so of the mashing process...but 180°F is far warmer than we want our grain for the mashing to be successful; in order to get the ideal breakdown of starch-into-sugar (you were paying attention during the last blog post, right?), we want our grain to be right around 150°F (or, according to several homebrewing websites, between 144°F and 163°F).  So why make the water so hot in the beginning?  It's because we've got 12 pounds of room-temperature grain that are about to be mixed into it, which will cool it down significantly.  Tim's goal (and he had extra hot water on hand in order to make sure he could meet it) was to mash in the upper 140s, and we ended up doing just that:  the grain was added, the temperature was adjusted with some extra water, and the whole thing was stirred like crazy with the largest spoon I can recall having ever seen in someone's silverware drawer, resulting in a 147°F mash for one hour.

Now, the smell of a bunch of grain being mixed with water is neither the most pleasant nor the most unpleasant scent in the world...in fact, it's pretty inoffensive; it smells pretty much like a farm, minus the manure and diesel.  But the delicious aroma of grain that's been mashed for an hour is one of the more incredible things I've ever taken in:  imagine a dark, rich beer, except with no alcohol, tons of sugar, and hot.  (Okay, reading that back to myself, it sounds gross, so I'm going to have to ask you to just take my word for it:  it's amazing.)  What we have now is a wort, mixed with a bunch of almost totally spent grain, just waiting to be filtered out.  However, we only have about four gallons of water in there, and a lot of that has been sucked up into the grain...but we have a six-gallon container to fill full of wort.  WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?!

Before we get all bent out of shape, I should mention another new vocabulary word...my favorite that I learned in this initial foray into brewing, in fact: "sparge."  Sparging is the process of running water through the grain after the mash, trying to extract the last of the sugars while simultaneously heating the grain enough so that the starch-to-sugar conversion stops...yet not hot enough that we leech tannins out of the grain (as this would add unwanted bitterness to the final product's flavor).  So, water is heated (again, to about 180° or preferably a little under), the filter at the bottom of the mash tun is opened, and the wort is allowed to slowly trickle through a tube from the tun into a boiling kettle below (again, this part is called lautering).  The water needs to be added slowly so as not to disturb the grain's self-made "filtering system" in the bottom half of the tun, and this was accomplished (with, in my opinion, only partial success) by pouring it through a metal sieve, a small amount at a time. 

This process was continued - slowly - until the color of the wort coming out of the tun was significantly diluted from its original almost opaque black (though this is not always the color of wort...this is just because we're making a porter) to a translucent brown.  We stopped adding water, allowed the wort already in the tun to drain into the kettle, and found that we now had what appeared to be more than six gallons of wort, allowing plenty for our next step...

TO BE CONTINUED