Digging around for medieval sources on brewing lore, I found this nugget of wisdom in a Danish cookbook published in 1616:
Hvorledis oc i huad maade Malt skal giøris/oc siden bryggis/kand icke lætteligen skriffuis/eller ved Bogstaffuene læris: Mand skal selff være hoss/oc selff holde en Haand der hoss. Thi huer Landskab haffuer her vdi sin besynderlig art oc maade.
Translated, it runs:
How and in what manner Malt should be made, and then brewed, cannot easily be written or be learned by letters: one should be there and have a hand in it. For each land has in this its peculiar art and manner.
So true (and not just of brewing, either).
Posted by Chris at 04:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I spent an inordinate amount of time over the weekend working up a comprehensive spreadsheet for calculating parti-gyle recipes. Parti-gyle is the ancient technique -- used by the Trappist monks of Belgium, among others -- of making two beers from a single mash. It's the process that resulted in Belgium's classic division of tripel, dubbel, and singel (or simple): the tripel is the first and strongest runnings, the dubbel in between, and the singel the weakest beer. I've revived the practice in the homebrew context, both because it's simpler and because it gives me a kick to brew in the medieval tradition. The spreadsheet just applies modern mathematical methods to the recipe formulation, making everything much easier on me.
Posted by Chris at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
There's a fascinating piece in the NYT today about how beer and geology are intimately intertwined -- and not just by the fact that geologists like to kick back with a cold one after a day of rockhounding. Because beer is 90% water, the mineral profile of the water makes a huge difference to the taste. The geology has a profound effect on the water, for example:
Burton-on-Trent sits on sandstone rich in minerals like gypsum from water that had percolated through the rocks long ago. The waters had a pH of 5 to 5.5, ideal for extracting sugars from malted barley steeped in warm water, an important step known as mashing."This is why the Burton waters were so good for brewing," Dr. Maltman said. "It turned out they had a very high mineral content, but just in the right balance to get the right acidity for good leeching, good mashing. The balance of fermentable sugars has everything to do with the flavors and the kind of beer that results. The mashing stage is crucial." ...
Pilsen, in what is now the Czech Republic, became a noted practitioneer of lagers, and geology again had a central role in defining the taste. The well water of Pilsen is drawn from a formation of metamorphic rocks, transformed underground by high pressure and heat so that they are almost impermeable. The water slides through cracks, but it draws almost no minerals from the rocks. This mineral-light water enhanced the clean, light taste of the beer, which became known as Pilsener.
Burton-on-Trent had a fortunate local happenstance that helped make its beers great, but it also benefited from a global change that took off during India Pale Ale's nascent years. Before the late 18th century, malt had to be roasted on wood fires, which made it dark and pungent. The Industrial Revolution brought coke-fired furnaces, which burned cleaner, resulting in a cleaner, paler malt than wood fires could manage.
The India Pale Ales that Burton made famous depended on this pale malt, which luckily went well with the high-sulfate water they had at their disposal. The high sulfate content also made it easier to use large quantities of hops (because sulfate buffers the perception of bitterness, which otherwise would be intolerably harsh in a highly-hopped beer). With the preservative effects of massive quantities of hops, the early IPAs were perfectly set up to survive the long trip to India.
As always, it seems, modern life has no use for local variations. Faced with seasonal and regional variations, brewers attempt to surmount them:
Technology has allowed brewers to overcome the traditional limits of geology, and brewers know how to compensate for year-to-year variations in barley and hops to produce a consistent taste.
A "consistent taste" is the hallmark of the modern industrial megabrewers (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, etc). But the very processes and ingredients they use to achieve that consistency result in a muted, lifeless beer. The idiosyncrasies and delights of a living beer are destroyed by pasteurization and filtering, which remove all the yeast, making the beer a stable, static product.
Craft brewers, for the most part, abhor this: they want to keep the beer alive, the better to savor the local and temporal oddities that make each beer different from the next. In this way the craft beer market preserves a little slice of an ancient method of production from the inexorable "improvements" offered by modern society.
Posted by Chris at 09:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Yesterday Dylan asked me what unfermented beer is called. "Wort", said I, automatically; it's pronounced to rhyme with "Bert". I said I thought it came from Old English, and possibly had a connection with the German Wort ("word"). But, not so! It's in fact from the Old English wyrt ("root"). So wort is the root of beer. This makes intuitive sense to me, as do the other words that spring from the same (ahem) root: "radical", "radix", "ramify", "rhizome".
"Ramify" is particularly resonant with the process of brewing, which is successive levels of purification and extraction. From raw grain, you produce malt by sprouting. Toasting that malt, you mash by adding hot water and letting the grain's natural enzymes convert the starches (complex) to sugars (simple). You then run hot water through the mash, which rinses out the sugars and makes a purified extract. An abstraction of malt, if you will. Boiling clarifies the wort and precipitates proteins and husk material, further purifying the solution. This is then chilled and yeast is added; the yeast, with their biochemical magic, renders sugars into alcohol: the simplest molecule, the root and reason for the whole process. Early brewers were keenly aware of the magical nature of yeast; even though they didn't understand the microbiology involved, they knew a special substance was at work, and they called it godisgood.
Purification doesn't stop there, of course; the canny brewer needs to separate the yeast from the beer by filtration, addition of precipitating chemicals, or just settling. The godisgood, having done its work, needs to disappear so that the humans can do their work -- or, in this case, their drinking.
And with that little lesson, it's time for me to brew.
Posted by Chris at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)