In my first post here on Nerdsburgh, I talked about brewing beer at home, and the equipment necessary to do it. The second part of the equation is ingredients.
Beer is mostly water. My tap water tastes fine, so I brew my beer with water from the tap. If you don’t like your tap water, buy some spring water at the store. You’ll need about 6.5 gallons to start, when producing a five-gallon batch of beer.
The next part is malt. This is fermentable sugar that has been derived from barley, wheat, rice or a few other products. It affects the color, flavor and fermentability of the beer. More experienced brewers do their own malting, a complicated process which I haven’t personally explored yet. I skip that step and use malt extract, which comes in dry form as powder or in liquid form as a gooey substance with a honey-like consistency. But beyond providing sugar to the brew, malted barley grains are also used at the beginning of the brew process; brewers have the option of steeping cracked grains in a teabag-like fashion to affect the color and flavor of their beer.
The third ingredient is hops, the spice of beer. The hop plant is a close relative of the cannabis plant, and provides bitterness and preservative qualities to beer. These are available in whole leaf form, condensed as plug hops, or even more condensed as pellets, which are reminiscent of rabbit food. They’re grown all over the world, and there are dozens of varieties from which to choose at any homebrew store.
Last is the most interesting, the yeast. Yeast is what makes beer happen; it’s a living, microscopic organism which feeds off of the fermentable sugars in the mixture, producing carbon dioxide (to make your beer bubbly) and alcohol (to make your beer more fun!) as by-products. More than 1,500 species are on the books, and each species acts differently from the next – some being ideal for breadmaking, others for wine, cider and other delicious beverages, and dozens left over as options for brewing beer. It makes me feel a little closer to each batch I brew, knowing that billions (literally) of these little warriors are living the life fantastic inside my beer, eating and reproducing at a fervent rate.
Those are the essentials. Under the Reinheitsgebot, a German law passed in 1516 and maintained until the late 20th century, German breweries were forbidden from using anything other than these ingredients for making beer*. But the United States has no such law. Rejoice in your freedoms and consider some of the other ingredients I’ve personally used so far.
-Fruits and vegetables. Some styles of beer, usually lighter styles, are ideal matches for the addition of fruit and even vegetable flavoring. It’s fairly common these days to find beers flavored with raspberries, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, peaches, apricots, pears, pumpkins, peppers, and plenty more. Depending on the amount added, fruit-flavored beer can end up with mild fruity tones on one end, or bear a resemblance to a full-bodied wine cooler on the other.
-Spices. The right spice flavoring, when very carefully and conservatively utilized in some types of beer, can add deliciously pleasant flavor and aroma to the finished product. Darker, maltier brews like brown ales, stouts and porters will gladly accept seasonings including, but not limited to, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, ginger, and even cocoa. There’s nothing like a good chocolate stout on a cold winter night.
-Adjunct sugars. Malted barley, wheat and rice are not the only sources of fermentable sugar available to the brewer. Other possibilities include corn sugar, brown sugar, turbinado sugar, lactose, honey, sorghum, and more – but you generally want to limit the proportion of these to the proportion of malt in your beer, because after a certain point it starts to taste less like beer and more like something else.
-Clarifying agents. To many, a cloudy, hazy beer is an untrustworthy one. I personally do not subscribe to this belief, but people are people. An interesting variety of products called clarifying agents exist that are used to help your beer end up looking and tasting clearer and cleaner, ranging from the very benevolent Irish moss (dried red algae), to the eyebrow-raising Isinglass (made from fish bladders).** I use Irish moss and I’ve been happy with my results.
This does not even begin to exhaust the possibilities. One of the most unique beers I’ve ever enjoyed, made by Jason McAdam of Burnside Brewing Company in Portland, Ore., included the addition of several gallons of oyster juice from a local oyster farm. The extent to which a brewer wants to experiment with brewing additives is, and should be, a world of virtually infinite possibilities. Anyone with a sense of adventure can boldly go where no brewer has gone before.
And now that we’ve talked about our ingredients and our equipment, we’re ready to jump in and brew our first batch of beer. Check back for my next post, in which we’ll be doing exactly that.
* The original law didn’t say anything about yeast, because they didn’t understand yeast the way we do today. It was added into the text later down the road. Also, this law wasn’t 100% intended as a means of guaranteeing so-called “pure” beer – it was intended to provide more wheat and rye for bakers, and did so by specifying that brewer’s malt came from barley only.
**For you vegetarians and vegans out there, a surprising amount of very common beers contain Isinglass, and if you drink them, you’re cheating. There’s a good list of what’s safe and what’s not at Barnivore.
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