Well, it is starting to look a lot like spring and what happens in spring? Brewing, that's right, it is time to brew some homebrew. I would not call myself the Brewmaster if I did not really brew beer once in a while. To keep this whole process in perspective, I have to admit that I did not brew my first batch of beer until 1954. That is not as old as some famous breweries, but it makes me older than any Microbrewery in the USA by about 25 or 30 years, so I do know a little about the sudsey stuff. In the old days, you could go down to Safeway and buy those big cans of malt extract right off the shelf. The popular brand in those days was Blue Ribbon Malt. It is still around and now made in Canada, but it is no longer carried by your grocery stores. The problem that I ran into with my first batch is still with us today and that is, what to put it in. I way underestimated how many 12oz beer bottles that I would need to bottle 10 gallons of homebrew. I had to round up every pop bottle for 5 miles around to bottle all the stuff. I was lucky in that my parents did not think that I knew what I was doing and that there was no way that I could really make beer that had any alcohol in it so they let me go. When it was all bottled, it was a different story. My mother kept after me to get it out of the house before it blew up. She claimed that her father used to make rootbeer and it was always blowing up, so she wanted it out of the house. As a kid, what are you going to do? I took it out to the barn, but on the way a bottle did blow up after being shaken on a warm day and I got a little cut on my neck that I still have. "See, see", she said, I told you it would blow up. That is how it all started.
I just about got into the microbrewery business back in 1979 with an option on the building in Hopeland that is now the Mendicino Brewing Company. As I analysed the business, it started to look more and more like milking cows than anything I had been involved in since leaving the farm and as a result of an earlier promise to myself not to ever do anything that looked or smelled like milking cows, I rejected the whole idea. In hind sight, good thinking. Homebrewing should be fun, not a business and that is what its been since 1954.
To keep brewing fun, you have to put more effort into it than if you were actually in business. That's the way fun is. I grow my own hops just to make things a little more difficult and complex. I malt my own barley for the same reason. If you have ever questioned exactly what malt is, you are not alone. For most people malt is some kind of mystery. If you have ever been to a Chinese restaurant, you know a little about malt. The bean sprouts are really malted beans. That's right. Malted beans. Plants are really strange things. They store starch in their seeds and roots, but actually live on sugar. So how does starch figure into all this? In the case of barley, it has one of the highest percentages of starch vs protein of any common grain and for that reason is favored for making beer. Mother nature is very smart. Starch does not dissolve in water, but sugar does. If you are a cook and make gravy, great stuff, you will notice that when you mix corn starch in cold water the corn starch all sinks to the bottom leaving the water clear. This proves that starch does not want to dissolve in water. This allows nature to thus store the starch in a plant and not risk having it all dissolve away before it is needed. Smart. So where does the sugar come from? Back to the bean sprout. When a seed, in this case barley, is soaked in water it starts to germinate. That means it starts to grow and sprout. When this happens there is an awakening within the seed in the germ that releases enzymes that start to convert the stored starch in the seed into sugar. I forgot to mention that yeast doesn't eat starch either. It only eats sugar. Mother nature is smart again since if yeast could eat starch the stored starch in the seed would be subject to spoilage before it was ready to sprout. Smart again. So to convert regular barley to malt, we soak the seeds in water and make them sprout, but us smart humans who really like beer stop the sprouting process very soon after it starts. By this time much of the enzymes have been released and ready to convert the starch to sugar for the future growing plant. The sprouting process can be stopped by a little heat or by fast drying the seeds. Now that the malt is dry, it can be stored for later use in making beer. All we will have to do is to restart the process and get the enzymes to work on the starch to convert it to sugar-----and beer.
We are not thru yet. We still have to convert the starch in the seeds to sugar. From here on we will call this stuff maltose. You probably used to eat Maltomeal cereal as a kid. It was made in Northfield, Min, same place where Jesse James met his Waterloo. Remember how it did not need sugar because it was already a little sweet? As it turns out when the crushed seeds are mixed with warm water at about 150degrees F, the enzymes convert the starch to a sweet sticky syrup. This is the stuff that yeast likes. We are talking about beer here. This whole process is call "mashing" by us homebrewers. It looks like a mess and it is. You are talking about a big kettle full of hot mush or "mash". We next drain off this sweet liquid call "wort". I don't have any idea where brewers came up with some of these names. They must have some kind of special meaning, but I don't know what it is. Once we have this sweet sticky liquid wort, we are still a long way from beer. At this point we are just where I was back in 1954 after I opened the big can of Blue Ribbon Malt syrup and dumped it into the crock.
We'll call this chapter #1 on homebrewing. It gets better.
