The Wykehamist
it lasts longer in storage, as a result of the antiseptic properties of the sage, rosemary or bog myrtle in the gruit. The advantage of your beer, is that it is far cheaper.
The year is now 1978, and you find yourself in a modest home in the northeastern United States. In a similar way as all those years ago, the smell of boiling wort with its malted grains and floral hops fill your kitchen. The beer you make is a labour of love done quietly, condemned to be done away from the eye of the law. Today, however, history changes. President Jimmy Carter has just signed a bill ending the prohibition of homebrewing in the United States, opening the door to the craft beer revolution. While your state hasn’ t yet loosened its own restrictions, the tide is turning. You can now experiment more openly, tweaking recipes and sharing your creations with friends.
* Beer is simple. Since ancient times it has been used as a liquid equivalent of bread; it is made from grains, produced by fermentation, and high in calories. The grains in beer, however, differ from those in most breads, both by type and by how they are prepared. The most common cereal grain used in beer is barley implemented for the fact that its structure and enzyme( amylase) availability lets it break down starch very easily into sugar. Once harvested, the barley needs to be malted. Malting is the process of steeping grain in water to let it start its germination process, releasing starch and amylase, before drying it in a hot kiln. Most malts are then also kilnroasted to varying degrees, depending on the colour and texture the brewer is going for. Dark stouts, like Guinness, for instance have grain that is roasted much more intensely than a light pilsner.
Nowadays, in contrast to the majority of its history, beer is made with the help of controlled, lab grown yeast strains. The Reinhietsgebot( the Bavarian beer purity law introduced in 1516 by King Wilhelm IV) does not even list yeast as one of its allowed ingredients for the simple reason that it had not been discovered. Of course it was being used – for fermentation to occur, yeast or bacteria needs to break down sugar into ethanol – they just did not know what was doing the magic. The careful production of modern yeast, free from foreign strains means that when brewing beer with modern resources, sanitisation is a necessity. For a controlled fermentation and a beer that does not spoil before a bottle has even been opened everything that comes into contact with the cooled sugar solution( called wort) needs to be sanitised.
With everything sanitised, the fun part of the brew day can commence. I made my beer with the Brew In A Bag process as opposed to traditional all grain brewing, which requires more equipment, time and space. With BIAB, making beer is almost equivalent to making tea. Around four kilograms of grain( though this number changes depending on the intended alcohol content of the beer) are steeped in 60-70 litres of water, in order that the enzymes in the malt can break down the starch to sugar. After between about 60-90 minutes, the wort is ready for a boil. Some of the hops are added, and the wort is boiled for another 60-90 minutes, with more hops added at specified times.
Once the final hop-infused, ultra sugary wort is cooled, it is transferred to the fermenter, the yeast is pitched and the fermentation can commence. Ales are fermented at room temperature for about 1 or 2 weeks, lager is fermented at around 12 degrees. For certain beers, like some IPAs a process of dry-hopping is also necessary where extra hops are added during the fermentation. This prevents some of the more sensitive oils in the hops from being boiled off and lends the final product a more fruity, floral character.
The final step before your product is ready to drink is the bottling and the tense wait for carbonation. Using a siphon, you pump the beer into the first bottle before letting gravity take hold, pulling beer into each of the next 30-35 bottles. These are usually brown as light shining on beer, especially homebrew, can cause it to produce unwanted off-flavours.
After another wait of about a week, the beer is here. Perhaps one day beer will be back on the grounds of Winchester College – perhaps it already is( Cook’ s …).
Anton Oliver( H, 2021-)
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