Category Archives: homebrewing

The Pain of the Home Brewer

Detail from the cover of Home Brewing Without Failures by H.E. Bravery.You spend the entirety of a precious day off home brewing. Everything goes wrong that possibly can but eventually, several hours later than planned, you plonk the fermentor in a dark corner, wipe up the last spills, and go to the pub for a well-earned pint.

Several weeks or even months later, you open the first bottle, taste it and… sigh. It’s not very good. The flavours are muddy. There is a distinct, hard-to-pin-down off flavour lurking around the edges. It’s an utter disappointment which makes you wonder why you bother.

Ever hopeful, you keep trying it at intervals. For a while, it gets worse, and you ponder throwing the rest of the batch away so that at least you can make use of the bottles.

Then, slowly, you note a little improvement. It gets brighter and cleaner with each bottle, and the off-flavour seems to disappear. ‘This is actually getting to be pretty decent,’ you exclaim.

Then, finally, something magical happens when you pour one out: it gleams in the glass, the carbonation just right, the aroma enticing. ‘I’d pay good money for this,’ you say. ‘It’s like a different beer.’ It has come good, reached perfection, at last! You want another at once.

But that, of course, was the very last bottle. This is the bittersweet pain of the home brewer.

We asked people to suggest words to describe the particular feeling that this moment brings.

Our own best effort? Breweavement.

Happy Maudlingsday, Home Brewers!

Reginald Maudling as proud mother of the 1963 budget.

Reginald Maudling as proud mother of the 1963 budget.

Fifty years ago today, Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling made this statement as part of his spring budget speech:

Under the present law, people who brew beer either for their own consumption or, in the case of farmers, for consumption by their workpeople are required to take out an Excise licence and, in some cases, to pay duty based on the Schedule A valuation. The amount of revenue involved is very small indeed, and is probably less than the cost of collection. The abolition of the Schedule A valuation system provides a convenient opportunity for getting rid of these licences. So the private citizen will have the same freedom to brew beer as he already has to make wine.

He didn’t legalise home brewing in Britain, but he did remove the requirement to register and pay for the privilege.

What effect did this have? It led to a boom in home brewing supplies available on the high street, instead of through a handful of specialist suppliers. It meant that home brewing ceased to be a clandestine activity (few people actually registered — they just did it in secret) and prompted a flood of books and columns.

Among the first handful of new British breweries in the seventies, one was based on a back-room plastic fermentor, and another was founded by the owner of a home brewing supply shop.

Now, years down the line, there are quite a few new British breweries being started by home brewers. Would many of them have even got started if they’d needed a licence? Even if they had brewed, in secret, would they have become as good as they are without the option to talk openly with their peers online?

It’s hard to make great beer

Beer recipe close up.

In his post announcing the Session No. 71 on the subject of brewers and drinkers, John at Homebrew Manual says this:

The more I learn the less I enjoy mediocre beers, knowing how easy they are to make. Similarly, great beers seem all the more impressive now.

Since we started brewing, and especially since (to some extent) we got the hang of it, we’ve found that, on the one hand, we’re much harsher in our judgements of ‘craft beer’. We can make just about satisfactory but slightly wrong, disappointing beer at home — why should we pay top dollar for it? We certainly can’t bring ourselves to whoop or holler about brewers who seem to be running before they can walk.

On the other hand, we’ve also learned our own limits, and come to respect really expert brewers all the more. It is difficult to make beer without niggling little flaws; with full, rounded and dare we say clean flavours; and to do so time after time. These are beers we can’t deconstruct, made by people who are in complete control of their processes and understand their ingredients at a level we never will. We don’t take that for granted anymore.

This isn’t just a beer thing, though. Once you learn to make decent pizza or burgers at home for next to nothing, you become very resentful about paying someone else £8 for a crappy one, however ‘artisanal’ the presentation.

Bonus: here’s a previous post on why we brew; and this analogy works for us, too.

Lessons for Beer Street from Gin Lane

Plymouth Gin Distillery, Devon, UK.

By Boak

Last weekend, seeking to avoid what could easily have felt like five wet Sundays in a row in Penzance, we spent a couple of days in Plymouth, and made like tourists. Activity one: the Plymouth Gin distillery tour, where we learned a lot about beer.

We don’t drink a lot of gin, but my Mum’s partial, and I’ve been buying her bottles of ‘small batch’, ‘artisanal’ gin as presents for a couple of years. Plymouth Gin rates itself as the most artisanal of the big brands, if that makes sense. But… the base alcohol is produced in Scotland; the gin is bottled in Essex; and most of the process is automated. “Here’s where our distiller loads the botanicals himself, through this hatch,” said the tour guide. “That’s what makes our gin handcrafted.” At this point, her voice was drowned out by the sounding of the bullshit alarm.

Lesson one, then: unless you’re talking objects, ‘handcraftedness’ really is a poor measure of quality.

The tasting stage of the tour was the real eye-opener, though. First, we were talked through the various herbs and spices (‘botanicals’) in the recipe and couldn’t help but think of Belgian Witbier when talk turned to coriander, cardamom, lemon and orange peel. It was when things got tactile that a bulb really went on: crushing the small-seeded Russian coriander used in Plymouth Gin, we realised it is nothing at all like the earthy, woody Indian stuff we use at home. It smells more like lemons or lemon verbena, and extremely pungent.

Lesson two: coriander is a more complex variable than we’d appreciated, and we need to experiment more.

We’d never even heard of Orris Root which the guide tells us is used mostly for its ability to help keep essential oils in suspension in the gin.

Lesson three: there are more herbs and spices to play with in brewing than we’d previously been aware, some of which might be very useful.

After all that, we enjoyed our complimentary gin and tonic at the end of the tour, but, being beery people at heart, found ourselves itching to brew a gin-inspired Wit sooner rather than later.

The tour costs £7 per person and takes about 30 minutes. The cocktail bar upstairs also happens to have a small selection of bottled beers including Brewdog Punk IPA and Anchor Steam.

How that 1912 stout turned out

1912 stout close up

What the critics are saying:

“No brewing faults I could detect… a taste of history.” Ed Wray, brewer and blogger.

“Yeah, it’s… alright. What else have you got?” Bailey’s Dad.

A couple of months ago we brewed a stout using an adaptation of a 1912 St Austell recipe.

With our usual impatience, we cracked the first bottle open barely days after the crown cap had gone on. At this point, it had a little carbonation but not enough and tasted rather like an ashtray — a result of using what our various home brewing manuals would call ‘too much’ black malt.

As the weeks passed, the ashtray thing faded and the carbonation improved, but the body seemed to thin out. For a beer of around 5.7% ABV, it seemed too light-bodied. The huge amount of sugar called for in the recipe can’t have helped on that front, and perhaps the Burton yeast we used was a little too hungry?

Now, though, the body seems to be improving — if anyone can tell us how that can be the case, we’d be very interested to know — and the fag-end effect has entirely gone, replaced by a sweet milk chocolate flavour. The head doesn’t stick about as long as we’d like, but it is a nice brown colour while it lasts.

We’ll definitely brew this again but we’ll make it our own, starting by dropping the amount of caramel in the recipe, but probably keeping all the black malt. We also need to do more with brown malt to get our heads round what it is bringing to the party.

Next on the home brewing agenda: a recreation of the 1972 Selby Brewery strong bitter; something fizzy and bland we’re calling ’1970 Big Six Bitter’ and brewing out of morbid curiosity; and another batch of Saison to a recipe adapted from Pierre van Klomp.

The Best Books on Home Brewing

Publicity shot of Boots home brewing range 1979.

Publicity shot of Boots home brewing range c.1979.

Every time we find ourselves answering the same question more than two or three times on Twitter, we take that as a hint that a quick blog post on the subject is in order, if only to save us the trouble of repeating ourselves. One common question is ‘Which book on home brewing should I buy?’ and these are our recommendations.

  • How to Brew by John Palmer. This is one of the best all-round guides. It’s perhaps a touch dry and even (or so we found) discouraging in places, but it’s worth a look, especially when the first edition is free online from the author’s website.
  • Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher. Full of historically-informed recipes, crazy ideas, solid research and step-by-step advice, this is like having an inspirational teacher at hand. Particularly good on decoction mashing and brewing lager at home.
  • Brew Like a Monk by Stan Hieronymus. In-depth research into the practices, recipes and ingredients used at Trappist and abbey breweries in Belgium, with bonus material on Duvel and other related beers. A fascinating read as well as a practical guide.
  • Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. Saison and Biere de Garde are given the same treatment as above. The book that helped us understand saison and, recently, to brew a pretty bloody good one.
  • 1909 Style Guide by Ron Pattinson and Kristen England. Self-published so a little scrappy in places but the content… wow. Not only an education in what British beer was really like before World War I but also a goldmine of inspirational recipes and ideas. (Short version: more sugar in everything!) (Print on demand.)

Note: we haven’t yet come across a book of ‘clone’ recipes which is worth the bother; read one or two of the books above and you’ll be able to work most of them out yourself.

Recipe: 1912 St Austell Stout

Roger Ryman, head brewer at St Austell, kindly let us look at their historic brewing logs earlier this year. With help from Ron Pattinson, frequent reference to his blog and to the book he wrote with Kristen England, The 1909 Style Guide, we think we’ve just about managed to make sense of some of the earliest recipes (MS Word file).

So, here’s the recipe we’ll be using later this week. Brewers and home brewers — what do you think?

SPECIFICATIONS
Dead black
Original gravity (OG): 1059
c.55 international bitterness units (IBUs)

INGREDIENTS
4400g English pale malt
630g brown malt
630g black malt
420g invert sugar No 2
210g caramel (aka E150 colouring, aka ammonia caramel, aka ‘browning’)
88g East Kent Goldings hops at c.5.8% alpha acid
‘Burton’ yeast, e.g. White Labs WLP023

MASH grains at 66c/151F for one hour. Sparge in two batches of equal size, the first at 79c/175F; second 85c/185F.

BOIL for two hours. Add sugar No 2 and caramel at the start (120 mins). When the sugar is fully dissolved, add 65g of the hops (or c.70% of total). Add the remaining hops (18g, c.30% of total) at 90 mins (30 mins remaining).

COOL and FERMENT as per your usual procedure. (For added historical accuracy, though, you could try an open fermentation…)

Notes

1. In 1912, St Austell’s brewers were a bit slap-dash with their book-keeping: whole brew days are dismissed with a ‘ditto’ for the previous; key columns are left blank; and information is written in the wrong places, ignoring the printed boundaries. Like many breweries of the time, St Austell seemed to be terrified of industrial espionage, and so, even where information is provided, it’s in a rather cryptic format.
2. The biggest problem was the lack of information about the volume of liquid used at each stage but, after months of staring at it, we worked out that ’34′ under ‘B’ referred to the number of barrels in the boil.
3. We’ve gone with a Burton yeast because another recipe in the 1912 St Austell log says this:

Burton No 1 yeast note.
4. Post-WWI St Austell recipes call for, e.g., 70lbs of yeast cropped from an active fermentation. We can’t be any more precise than to suggest that a decent-sized starter would therefore be a good idea.
5. We’re guessing about the timing of hop additions based on other contemporary stout recipes. We’re also guessing at the variety, but St Austell used ‘Worcesters’ in many other recipes.
6. No finings: what would be the point in a beer this black?
7. We know it’s meant to have an OG of 1059 because of this helpful key:

Gravities list, 1912.

Brewing Without Reference to Styles

We’ve just brewed a… something.

For once, we didn’t set out to make a tripel, an IPA or a stout — we just looked at the ingredients we had, thought about the beer we wanted to drink, and off we went.

It uses a Belgian saison yeast (because that’s the only one we had in) and borrows some aspects of our tripel recipe (because we liked how it turned out) but it doesn’t fit the parameters for an ‘average’ tripel as set out in Stan Hieronymus’s Brew Like a Monk, or those for a saison or ‘super saison’ given in Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. It uses English pale malt (all we had), Tettnang hops (because… why not?) and a bit of white sugar.

We’re not claiming to have done anything especially innovative (although it does have some unusual secret spices) — all we’ve done is tinker with the variables a bit. It’s going to turn out to be a Belgian-inspired blonde beer of some description, and that won’t set the world alight.

But, still, it felt liberating. We’re going to do this more often.

Lots of commercial breweries defy or even define standard styles: Orval, for example, isn’t anything but Orval, love it or loathe it, and sits awkwardly among the other Trappist beers which have fallen into line with each other.

Many newer breweries, on the other hand, seem to us to trot out one of each from the recipe section in Homebrewing for Dummies and, for a bit of variety, take two standard styles and cross-breed them. The beer might great, but will this approach produce classics? Will it create genuinely new, individualistic, original beers?

Home Brewing Without Failures

Home Brewing Without Failures by H.E. Bravery

Bailey’s mum keeps her eye out for books on beer and brewing and pops them in our Christmas stockings as little extras. Suffice to say, they are often among the most interesting gifts we receive.

Following on from yesterday’s post about reckless, thrill-filled world of elderflower champagne making, here are some hints and tips from Home Brewing Without Failures by H.E. Bravery (1965; our edition 1969).

1.”For fermentation purposes, a polythene dustbin bought especially for the purpose is ideal… [A] thick polythene bag… may be used quite well for fermenting beers provided it has suitable support… [such as] an old barrel.”

2. “Where there must be no flavouring from the sugar and where darkening must be practised… gravy browning may be used, but go easy with it.” (B&B’s emphasis.)

3. “How does the trade get the yeast out of bottles? The fact is that they let them ferment right out, and then siphon the still beer into bottles… and then charge them with gas. The word used is ‘carbonated’. Maybe one day there will be a means by which any home operator will be able to do this; until then, the commercial brewer has the advantage over us.”

4. “Mild Ale recipe ingredients: 4 lb crystal malt, 3 lb demerara sugar, 1 lb. flaked maize, 5 oz hops, small level teaspoonful salt, ¼ oz citric acid, dessertspoonful caramel.” (B&B’s emphasis.)

5. “Brown Ale I recipe ingredients: 4 lb roasted malt, 1 lb black patent malt, 4 lb demerara sugar, 4 oz hops, 1 level teaspoonful salt, ½ oz citric acid, yeast, nutrient.” (B&B’s emphasis.)

6. “I have come to the conclusion that France and the Frenchman do not know what good beer really is… Beers in France are more like thin lager and I have a suspicion — probably false — that some of them are produced from the remnants of the grape crops.”

7. If you decide to make beer with black grapes “use only the juice… otherwise you will have a pink lager owing to the colour coming from the grape skins. Pink Lager — well, why not? The die-hards will be at my throat for this one!”

Doesn’t that last one sound like Count Arthur Strong?

Brewing the old-fashioned way

Elderflowers by Liz Jones from Flickr Creative Commons.

We’ve been meaning to make something with elderflowers for ages, given it’s a flavour we notice and usually enjoy in beer (and wine, for that matter).

Last weekend, in a rare four hour rain-free spell, we finally got out onto the country lanes and picked four carrier bags full of elderflowers.  We produced several litres of cordial (including some frozen in icecube bags, for possible later additions to beer) and some elderflower infused vodka, which is developing quite nicely.  But it was elderflower champagne we were really after — not that we’ve ever actually tried it before, but there are enough enticing pictures and descriptions on the internet to tempt us.

What was interesting to us was just how unscientific most of the recipes were.  Most recipes measured elderflowers in heads or volume (a ‘pint’ of flowers!) — what’s wrong with grams?  No recipes mentioned anything about sanitisation; only one mentioned a hydrometer; and most were relying on wild yeasts and luck to get things going.  Most of the fermentation advice boiled down to “leave it for a few days then bottle”. We’re not surprised elderflower champagne has a reputation for being tricky and either undercarbonated or exploding.  We’re complete amateurs when it comes to beer, but the idea of launching into a brew without even measuring the original and final gravity seemed bonkers to us.

The amateur approach to elderflower champagne did make us ponder on the difference between this and home-brewing.  Both have long histories of being made at home, for domestic consumption, but unlike beer, elderflower champagne has never been industrialised. Too seasonal and too labour intensive?

Needless to say, we had to apply some of our beer-brewing principles (proper measurements, some sanitisation) when we finally settled on a recipe. We’ll let you know how it turned out and post the recipe (and semi-scientific instructions) if it’s half decent.

When we were just starting out we blogged on how over-prescriptive homebrew books can be, and how this can be quite intimidating to just getting on with it.  Of course, the more scientific you are, the more consistent your results, as we’ve come to realise.

Elderflower picture by Liz Jones via Flickr Creative Commons.