Well, on to Chapter #2. It is starting to look more like beer now. We left off with mashing or making mush and draining off the sticky stuff called wort. Sounds like something I had when I was kid that my mother took off with battery acid. Even though we have some sweet stuff that looks like beer, we don't have beer yet. Next we have to boil it. I mean really boil it for at least a full hour at a rolling boil. This must be what makes beer so expensive. In the middle ages beer was drunk by everyone because it was the only thing they had that was not polluted. They couldn't drink plain water for fear of getting something. Once the wort is up and boiling, it is time to dump in the hops. I know you were wondering when I would get around to hops. Well, now is the time. The boiling of the hops in with the wort extracts the flavor and resins from the hops. We only use the little flowers on the hops. That is where the bitter flavor comes from. If you have not seen a real hop flower, they look a little like small pine cones. When I first saw them on the label of a beer bottle, I actually thought they were little pine cones. You will see hops in all kinds of German wood carvings looking like little pine cones. Some amatur brewers sometimes add plain sugar to the wort to produce more alcohol, but true brewers never do that. The big guys like Miller and Bud add corn syrup to their beer to save on malt. When you go by a big brewer, look at the rail cars in back of the brewery and notice they are all full of corn syrup. That is one of the reason that Miller and Bud taste like water. Well, it has been at least an hour so we can go to the next step.
I don't think you thought beer making was this complicated. How did people years ago figure all this out? They were driven by the same thrust that we still have today. The purpose of all the boiling is not only to extract the flavor from the hops and sterilize the wort, but to get rid of protein. It is the protein in beer that can make it cloudy. Wheat beer is cloudy because wheat has a lot more protein than barley. See, now you know why brewers use barley instead of grains like wheat.
If you are into Maple syrup which is just starting to flow here then you must have heard of "sugar sand" in the syrup pan. What is called sand is really small particles of coagulated protein that was in the Maple sap that precipitated due to the boiling. It is the same with making beer. The bottom line is that the wort has been boiled and ready to cool. Depending on the weather this can take a few hours. When the boiled wort is cooled down to about 75 degrees F, it is ready for the yeast. Yeast is not really a germ nor is it a plant, but what ever it is it is what produces the alcohol in the beer. There are a lot of different breeds of yeast just like there are a lot of breeds of dogs and each one creates a little different tasting beer. The yeast used is a guarded secret for big brewers and small, but I don't think it is really that big of a deal. The exception is between top and bottom fermenting yeast. Ale is made form top fermenting years and lager is made from bottom fermenting yeast. Top fermenting is faster and works at a higher temperature and imparts more flavor to the beer. Bottom fermenting needs cooler conditions and is slower and produces a milder tasting beer. Now you are a beer expert. I make Ale and thus use top fermenting yeast. It takes about 5 days for the yeast to do its deal on the wort. During this time you will see a lot of stuff settle to the bottom of the kettle. After 5 or 6 days, the beer is transferred to "conditioning" containers that have caps that prevent air from getting in. During this time the yeast works much slower and eats up all the remaining maltose thus making a "dry" beer. Dry has nothing to do with water. Beer is just like wine. Dry means the absence of sugar or maltose, thus dry means "not sweet". A little reverse logic to mix you up. After about another 5 or 6 days in these simisealed containers the beer is ready to bottle. As I stated in Chapter #1, it takes a lot of 12 oz beer bottles to hold 10 gallons of beer. For that reason, I use 5 gal kegs. I next put the beer into the 5 gal stainless steel kegs and put it into my tapper. Hey, wait a minute, "where do all the bubbles come from?" I use compressed CO2 to carbonate the beer. It takes about 2 or 3 days for the CO2 to dissolve into the beer enough to give it a good head. How about "natural" carbonation. CO2 is CO2, there is not such thing as "natural", it is all the same so give it up if you are a closet Greenie.
We have waited the 2 or 3 days and now it is time for a brew. Sorry that I have to cut this off at this point, but my glass is empty and I need a refill.
