Brewing Beer on the Farm

by J.B. Reynolds of Graton, CA

“O many a peer of England brews
A livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.”
– A.E. HOUSMAN

INTRODUCTION

Although a guest from the city might be pleased to have some home-made bread or garden fresh vegetables served to them at our table, knowing as they do that they’re getting a better quality product than could be had commercially, they’re plain astonished to learn that the beer they’re swigging was made on the premises, also. “You’re kidding me,” they usually say, glancing back at their mug as if they expect it to wink at them, “you made this?”

Many seem to believe the process of making beer is so infernally complicated it can only be done by ancient European guild members or a team of guys in white lab coats – and so, what you’re serving them will doubtless render them blind and insane. Or it’s strictly illegal – and now they’re party to a federal crime. Or it’s so expensive you might as well be drinking Dom Perignon. None of these things is true. In fact, home brewed ale has been an English farmhouse tradition, which dates back centuries, if not millennia. It was the daily beverage of hard working, simple, thrifty people and it was also safer for them to drink than their own well water. Brewed at home in surprisingly immense quantities (keep in mind that the standard container for storing it would have been a wooden cask of thirty to seventy gallons in capacity!) it was actually less expensive for a farmer to drink his own mild ale than to drink that other most British daily commodity, tea.

With some big pots and a little practice, almost anyone can brew their own beer in their own kitchen or out in the laundry shed, whether they use a “just add water” beer making kit or the basic raw materials which you might even grow and prepare yourself.

So exactly what IS this stuff, anyway?

What is beer made from? Is “ale” any different from “beer?” What about “lager” beer?

Fermented grain beverages go back to the beginning of human history, in fact well into prehistory. Hieroglyphic graffiti on the great pyramid sings the praises of onions and beer, which were probably the wages of the farmers who built it. The oldest recipe known to exist, written onto a Sumerian clay potsherd many thousands of years ago, is a recipe for making beer.

By the time this recipe, with a certain amount of regional variation, made it north to medieval Saxon England it was called “ale.” It was very much a commoner’s drink, brewed by the tun and consumed (if the literature is to be believed) almost by the bucketful. In the 13th century the Dutch were making their own version of it and the Flemish weavers who had settled in the southeast of England were starting to make it, too. They flavored their concoction with the bitter dried flowers of a cultivated vine (namely, hops) and they called the drink “beor.” The English did not fancy this version and continued to call their own brew “ale.” For centuries the term “ale” continued to mean the old fashioned un-hopped brew, but using hops was gradually adopted by the English for very practical reasons: it preserved the unrefrigerated final product for much longer. Eventually, the terms came to mean the same thing.

Meanwhile in Germany it was discovered that accidentally leaving a cask of beer out in the snow all winter actually improved it, making it smoother and more complex tasting, so this popular style of beer came to be known as “lager” after the word’s literal meaning, “cold storage.”

But as mentioned, there were hundreds of local variations to the basic Sumerian recipe and they employed a wide range of sometimes surprising (if not alarming) ingredients. So by the 16th century, the kingdom of Bavaria decided to settle everything once and for all by adopting the “Reinheitsgebot” or “Beer Purity Law.” In a nutshell, the Bavarians decided that to be sold as beer, the drink must have four, and only four, ingredients:

1) WATER – Wineries are always built close to where the wine grapes grow, but breweries are not built exclusively in barley-growing regions of the world- they’re built where there’s an abundant and reliable supply of water. One of the biggest if least known differences between distinct beers is the water they begin with, particularly what concentration it has of a few dissolved minerals. From the point of view of the home brewer this is not a big issue unless your water actually smells or tastes foul, or if your municipal water contains chlorine or other unpleasant tasting chemicals. In these cases you might be better off brewing with bottled or specially filtered water, or even fetching some home in clean containers from your next camping trip up in the mountains. Otherwise, your tap water will do.

2) BARLEY – A fermented beverage can be made with almost any cereal grain, and worldwide a great variety of grains are used. Corn is the main ingredient in Latin America’s original pulque beers, wheat beer (Weizen in German) is a summer staple all over Europe, oats are often employed in Irish stouts, and rice is a significant part of the U.S.A.’s most popular brews, but barley (Hordeum distichum) is the real beer brewer’s grain of choice. It is the starchiest of the cereal grains, and with a little natural enzyme action it becomes the sugariest, in a process known as “malting.”

“Malted” barley is grain, which has been wetted and then encouraged to sprout to a certain exact point, at which time growth is halted in kiln. The sprouting triggers an enzyme reaction in the seed, which starts to change the abundant starch into a simple and fermentable sugar known as Maltose. The barley seeds remain in the kiln a bit longer after their life has been halted, in order to take on a particular toasty finish the extent of which governs the beer’s final flavor and its color, which can range from pale straw gold to nearly jet-black. The beer’s flavor is also governed by which variety of barley is employed, though to a lesser extent.

I find it easiest to buy finished American or British pale malt in fifty pound sacks from my brewing supplier. I have never grown nor malted my own barley, but that’s not to say it can’t be done at home. The threshed grain must be thoroughly dampened, and then kept at a constant temperature between 63 degrees and 68 degrees Fahrenheit for about a week to a week and a half. If it cools off it should be raked into a small heap (called “couching”) to get warmer, and if it gets too warm, raked out flat again (presumably called “uncouching”) to become cooler. When the barley seeds have sprouted an acrospire almost as long as the seed itself, they must immediately be put into a 120 degrees F. kiln or oven to die, dry out, and then roast. How long they should roast depends on how much barley you’re roasting, but when a sampled seed cracks between your teeth, it’s dry enough. Extra kilning (at up to 140 degrees F.) will result in a darker, roasty-toasty malt, and a darker and toastier beer.

Before use, your barley malt must be milled or cracked into “grist,” that is, cracked and not ground. The rule of thumb here is that you’re trying to break apart the interior or endosperm of the seeds but not break up the husks which you need as a filter bed, later on. You want to make as little flour as possible since it just gums things up.

3) HOPS – These are the green flower cones of a fast-growing, attractive perennial vine by the name of Humulus Lupulis. Hop vines are easy to grow, provided they have full sun and a sturdy trellis of wire or cord on which to climb. With good soil and plenty of water they can grow more than a foot a day, to spectacular heights! Once pollinated the tiny hop flowers develop in clusters into multilayered papery husks that look a bit like little pinecones. Each contains a pinch of a fragrant, bitter yellow resin powder, the more or less bitter, depending on the variety of the hop. There are dozens of varieties used in beer making, some delicately flavored and flowery-herbal, and others astonishingly bitter.

The bitter flavor which hops bestow is essential to balance the malty sweetness in your beer, and it also acts as a preservative. Stored properly, dried hops themselves will keep for many years. Some European breweries will only use hops after they have aged for a year, or longer.

(SEE SIDEBAR 1)

4) GOTTESGUT – Translated literally, this last Bavarian beer ingredient means, “God’s Goodness” or “The Lord’s Grace,” since for many centuries nobody had the slightest clue what it was that got the fermentation process going. In other words, brewers prepared their concoction, set it out in a big pan by an open window, and prayed. In a few days, the pan was either spontaneously foaming away… or it wasn’t. Amazingly, many beers are still prepared in this most time-honored fashion, such as the “lambics” from Belgium.

The true culprit was finally apprehended only in the 18th century with the advent of the microscope: a tiny, single celled fungus known as Saccharomyces cereviseoe, or yeast. Yeast organisms are what turn a flat, sweet “wort” into sparkling, potent “beer.” Yeast is native to every part of our world. For millions of years this humble organism has lived a placid existence of eating sugars and drinking water, reproducing, peeing (alcohol) and burping (carbon dioxide), a life not unlike many elected officials. Given the right conditions their numbers steadily increase until their food supply is exhausted and they’re literally drowning in their own waste products – the yeast organisms, that is. The process is called “zymurgy,” better known as “fermentation.”

There are many, many varieties of yeast on our planet, but only a few dozen are fit to be employed in brewing beer. For instance, most kitchens have dry bread yeast available, and this is usable but only when nothing else can be had. Brewer’s yeast is much better for the task than baker’s, since brewer’s yeast varieties have been selected for generations to have a lower level of gas production and higher alcohol production, instead of the other way round which makes good bread but (as the British put it) ‘windy’ beer.

I buy the special yeast cultures I need in liquid form when I buy my malt, and store them in the refrigerator until needed. The cultures will last for a few months, but generally not much longer. Dry yeast live longer, and without refrigeration, but liquid brewing yeast makes a better quality final product than dry brewing yeast and there are lots of specialty strains available from suppliers.

(SEE SIDEBAR 2)

So there it is – only four ingredients! It may be hard to believe, with the amazing wealth of different brews which is available at the market, but in the manner he handles them, a competent brewer can make half a dozen styles of beer starting with the same raw materials.

We will content ourselves to look into the making of an honest, straightforward English Farmhouse Ale of moderate octane, and also its muscular cousin known as a Strong Ale (or “Old Ale”) by either of two possible methods.

HOW IT’S DONE

Simply put, the process for making beer is to create a sweet liquid solution from malted barley (a king of “tea,” really), boil it for an hour with added hops, cool it off, and then inoculate it with a single variety of brewing yeast. Then at the point when the yeast’s activity is over, the resulting liquid is transferred to a cask or into bottles, modestly dosed with sugar, and sealed. In a month you’ve got home-brewed beer to pour at the dinner table.

NOTE: In either method, always start by thoroughly cleaning all your equipment. Actual sterilization is only required for your fermentor and the cask or bottles which will hold the final product, but keeping your gear and work area scrupulously clean is a very sound precaution against even minor contamination, which will happen to you sooner or later if you aren’t careful. Minor contamination won’t poison you but it makes the beer taste sour, medicinal or otherwise “off” and unpalatable.

YE ANCIENT METHOD

The 18th century English “cottager” did not have a lot of money to spend on anything, let alone the huge kettles beloved of brewers, so he made do with the only large pot he had, namely his big laundry tub often called the “copper” since the better ones were made of just that material. With a wood or coal fireplace built underneath, it held maybe fifty gallons, or more. Laundry, after all, wasn’t often done more than once a week, if even then.

And so the cottager brewed in impressively large batches. For our purposes we will deem one Ancient Batch to be about 33 ½ gallons, or One Barrel liquid measure (about 125 liters).

(SEE SIDEBAR 4)

You will need two clean and sound casks; one of 33 ½ gallon capacity for storage, and one larger and open-ended as a fermentor. You will also need a “copper” or boiling vessel capable of heating about forty gallons in one go, and a “kive” or special brewing tun which was often made from another cask, or even a trough or large wooden tub. The kive should have a bung-hole at or near the bottom, sealed with a large wooden tap if you have one or just a smooth tapered stick if you don’t.

A good dairy thermometer eliminates a lot of guesswork and will help insure a higher quality brew. In the cottager’s day, temperature was wholly estimated, leaving a wide margin for error even with an experienced brewer, and yet they still managed to brew.

A big handful of fresh gorse, hay or straw should be bound with a clean bit of string and tied up against the inside end of the kive’s tap to act as a filter. If you’re using just a set stick, wrap the bundle around the inside where the stick is set and weight it down with a few clean stones.

Thirteen gallons of near-boiling water should now be poured into the kive, and when the water has cooled to around 165 degrees F. – the cottager would judge this to be when you could clearly see your reflection looking down onto the surface of the water – an entire 50-60 pound sack of cracked malt (known as “grist”) should be carefully and thoroughly stirred in. I crack my barley malt with an ordinary Corona hand mill, with a few washers inserted to space out the grinding plates so that the barley isn’t ground into flour. A good rule is, that if whole barley seeds are coming through without being broken, the setting is too coarse, and if the husks are being ground up along with the endosperm, it’s too fine. Ideally the husk should be almost intact while the white interior of the seed is broken into three or four bits. A motorized grain mill is a fine thing, if you have one and it can be adjusted wide enough. It’s especially nice when you’re faced with milling an entire fifty-pound sack of barley malt.

As you stir in your grist, the temperature will drop slowly until it comes to rest at around 150 degrees F. which is the ideal level of warmth for enzymes to start converting the starches in the malt (now known as “mash”) to sugars. If with your thermometer you discover the mash is too hot, stir in some cool water to get it down to 150 degrees, and if it’s too cool, stir in some hot water from the copper to warm the mash up to the right temperature. Then cover your kive with a blanket to keep it warm and to keep the flies out, and leave it alone for an hour or two, but not much longer. This is known as a Standard Infusion Mash. Sometimes the cottager let it go overnight, but then again, they started it late and got up very early.

After an hour or so the kive’s tap or the stick should be loosened gently, and a reasonably clear liquid (called “wort” or “sweet wort”) will trickle out. Catch it in a large, strategically placed bucket called an “underbuck.” There should be a few under bucks, since they must hold all of this sweet wort until the copper is emptied of its remaining twenty-odd gallons of hot water. As the flow of sweet wort continues, teakettles of 165-170 degrees F. water from the copper should be poured over the mash in the kive to rinse out more sugar. This is known as “sparging” and should be continued until a little more than your full batch volume has been collected, say about 35 gallons. It should take about 45 minutes. Your sweet wort is now poured into the emptied copper, and set to the boil.

This may sound like a crude scenario, but it worked well for over 900 years. It was eminently affordable for a small-time independent farmer, and technologically sound.

Bring your sweet wort up to a sturdy boil in the copper. One messy hazard at this point is “boiling over” which can be avoided first by using a copper substantially larger than your batch volume, and second by assiduously removing the foamy scum with a ladle throughout the boil so it doesn’t form a “lid.”

If you want to make Strong Ale, you can add ordinary sugar at this point. This is not a modern innovation. Most strong British ales have traditionally been made with added sugar, ever since sugar-producing regions such as the West Indies became British colonies. Brown sugar is pleasantly flavored, and will darken your beer somewhat. Five pounds of sugar ought to be plenty, perhaps eight or ten pounds for very Strong Ale but not much more. Stir it in well so that it’s completely dissolved.

After a steady boil had been achieved for ten minutes, put anywhere from ten ounces to a pound of dried hops into a clean muslin sack if you’re making Pale Ale, and from a pound to a pound and a half for Strong Ale. Use less hops if you have a very bitter variety. Tie the sack shut and toss it in. Continue boiling for an hour.

How bitter a person’s beer should get is very much a matter of taste, so you are well advised to keep accurate notes of your batches and adjust the amounts as required, once you sample the results of your toil a month later. That is, if your beer is too bitter, use fewer hops next time. A good balance of flavors is generally what is sought after in all foods, but you must be the judge.

After a solid hour of boiling, you have to cool off your wort as quickly as possible but still keep it sterile. The cottager ladled out his steaming wort into big cooling pans and waited a few hours before collecting it and filling his fermentation vessel, counting on the indifferent English climate to cool it off. But as pointed out earlier, this is a fine way to introduce wild strains of yeast into your wort and that is exactly what we don’t want to do. Just extinguishing the fire under the copper will cool it down eventually, but it may well take overnight. This is OK if you have a tight-fitting lid for the copper, to protect your sweet wort from airborne nasties.

Two other strategies are useful. One is to boil up a few gallons of water a week before you begin brewing and transfer it to a clean pail – this should effectively sterilize both the water and the pail. Then, freeze the whole thing. When it comes time to cool your wort, carefully remove the big ice cube from the pail and plop it in. As it bobs around it will rapidly chill the wort. It will also add some water to your batch and weaken it slightly, but not much. The second (and recommended) strategy is to invest in a copper “wort chiller” coil, of which more later, and use that.

When the wort is finally down near 70 degrees F., mist your hands with isopropyl alcohol to get them absolutely germ-free, air dry them, and fish out the sack of hops. Do wring out the wort it has soaked up! Your spent barley mash can be fed to cattle, swine or poultry, or even included in hearty bread recipes for yourself. Spent hops are a wonderful high-nitrogen booster for the compost pile.

With a boiling-water-clean hose you can now siphon the wort into your fermentor, which for the cottager was often as not another cask – a larger one with the lid knocked out to give the frothy “barm” enough room to expand at top during fermentation, even when covered. The cask must be sound and angelically clean from scrubbing and scalding. Set it in a shady, cool (60 degrees F. is best) corner. After transferring the wort to it, add (or “pitch”) your yeast solution. Cover the top with a clean cloth, and walk away. If you use a cask that’s big enough (at least 25% bigger than your Batch) you can use a sealed cask, fitted with a water-filled “fermentation lock” at the bung-hole. This is a little valve, which lets the carbon dioxide bubble out, but nothing else in.

“Two Sundays” was the generally accepted time it took a cottager’s batch of ale to ferment properly, which means anywhere from 8 to 12 days depending on how warm or cool the weather gets, and how large (or how lively) the yeast culture was to begin with.

When the fermentation appears to have slowed to almost nothing, it’s time to cask your brew, which is now known as “beer,” by the way. Get your storage cask as utterly clean as you can do it with scrubbing, boiling water, steam, or perhaps an Iodophor or bleach solution (see below), whichever works best without leaving an off-tasting flavor to the wood – or just seal it with paraffin. Have it ready where you intend to store it – a cool and shady cellar is best – because if you change your mind you will need the use of two Russian weight lifters to shift it. With your boiling-water-sterilized siphon hose, transfer the finished beer from the fermentor without stirring up the muck or “lees” at the bottom too much, straight into your One Barrel storage cask. This step is called “racking.”

For the important secondary fermentation (or, “cask conditioning”) one good slurp of the lees with the siphon hose while racking will be enough. Then, while you’re filling the cask, add three cups of sugar dissolved in a quart of boiling water, cooled off a little. This will serve to briefly reactivate the fermentation process to add the sparkle to your beer. Toss in an extra handful of dried hops, fill the cask as much as possible and then stopper it tightly with a wooden tap (closed, of course) or bung. In about three weeks, it should be ready to drink.

Your beer should emerge malty smelling, reasonably fizzy, and clear, unless the cask has been agitated during tapping and the residual yeast stirred up. Don’t worry, it will settle again in a day or so. At some point after your beer cask is “tapped” and quantities of beer removed, outside air will get in and the brew will begin to oxidize. This is not a problem, but it means that the beer ought to be consumed within a few months if not sooner. Strong ale, being higher in both preservatives (i.e., hops and alcohol) than Pale Ale, will last longer.

THE MODERN VERSION

Any kitchen that is ready to do some serious canning already has most of the hardware necessary for modern-day beer making although some few special additions are useful. First of course, you’ll need a stove or propane burner which can get eight gallons of liquid up to a good strong boil and keep it there for over an hour. Doing this for the first time in the summer kitchen or even outside in the yard might be a good idea, since beer making involves sticky, sugary liquids and can be a messy affair.

You’ll need at least two big enameled or stainless steel stockpots; three is best. We’ll define one Modern Batch of home-brew as about five gallons (or 20 liters) so 7 ½ gallon pots are ideal. Bigger is OK. One pot is for your “mash tun” and the other will hold the hot water for your sparge, and perhaps double as your boiling kettle. That third stockpot for a dedicated boiling kettle is very useful, but not essential.

You will also need a “lauter tun” (or as the English cottager called it, a “kive”) which consists of an eight gallon container made of sturdy plastic, wood, or stainless steel, with a second perforated container suspended within it to hold back the grain and let hot water run through. For instance, a net bag suspended in a big plastic bucket works fine, as does a perforated pail or a big colander, slung within a cask. A valve or spigot from the bottom of your lauter tun makes things much easier, though a siphon hose running up from the bottom and out the top can suffice.

A glass (easy to clean) or stainless steel (hard to break) fermentation vessel of 7-8 gallon capacity is required, and finally lots of strong bottles or jugs to store the final product. If you clean them thoroughly, you can save old beer bottles and re-use them (brown and green ones are best, toss the clear ones) but not the “twist off” style, which are only good for single use. Wine bottles are not adequate since they tend to explode under pressure, but champagne bottles are excellent, since they can also be sealed with a crown cap like any beer bottle. “Crown” style bottle caps are reasonably cheap and commercially available, but you’ll need a gizmo to crimp them on to the bottles. The self-reliant can stockpile lots of “Grolsch” brand bottles (as well as a few other brands), which have that nifty swing-reseal closure, so you’ll never need to acquire anything else but an occasional new rubber gasket.

You will need a few thermometers – the floating “dairy” kind are perfect – and if you want to determine exactly how strong your brew is, a floating “saccharometer” or sugar measure is needed and you must also have a tall thin vessel to float it in.

A copper coil or some other means to cool the wort down quickly is a marvelous device. I am assured that an in-churn milk cooler works as well. The “copper coil” wort chiller is just a long piece of copper tubing, artfully bent into a cylindrical spiral and fitted with threaded ends. A garden hose is screwed onto one end, and cold water flows through the tube and then out of a second hose attached to the other end. When the coil is immersed in boiling wort, even an inflow of very cold water will come out quite hot indeed, and it will lower the wort’s temperature very quickly. Adding ice isn’t really feasible with a mere five gallon batch, as it will water down the beer immoderately. Of course, two strong people can set the hot boil kettle into a bathtub of cold water, and that will certainly cool the wort, but keep in mind that 7 ½ gallons weighs rather a lot, and it’s sure easier if you don’t have to lift it and carry it around.

For a five gallon batch of Pale Ale you will need ten pounds of cracked barley malt (“grist”) and about two ounces of dried hops. To make Strong Ale, you can use fifteen pounds of malt and/or some sugar during the boil, and three ounces of hops.

While you’re grinding your malt, heat up 2 ½ gallons of water for Pale Ale, 4 gallons for Strong Ale (that is, 1 quart per pound of malt) in the stockpot designated as the “mash tun.” At the same time, start heating up six gallons of water in your “sparge tank.” This may take some time. The sparge water must be at or near 170 degrees F. in about an hour, so start earlier or later as your equipment deems necessary.

When the water in the mash tun is at 160-165 degrees F., switch off the heat and gradually stir in your grist until it’s wetted through like loose porridge. Mix thoroughly so there are no dry pockets or ‘balls’ left. The temperature will drop to about 150 degrees F., the ideal level for sugar conversion in what is now your “mash.” If it is too hot just stir in a little cool water to get it down to 150 degrees, and if it’s too cool, turn the heat back on and stir gently for a few minutes to warm the mash up to the right temperature. Then switch off the heat, put on the lid, wrap a towel or blanket around it to keep it warm, and leave it alone for an hour or two. Brewers refer to this as a Standard Infusion Mash.

After an hour your sparge water should be hot enough. Unwrap and uncover your mash, turn on the burner, and heat it up quickly to 170 F. This process, though it isn’t absolutely essential, is called “mash-off” and makes it easier to rinse out the soluble sugars from the mash during in the next step of the process, known as “sparging.”

Transfer the whole of the hot mash quickly to the container inside your “lauter tun,” and start collecting the liquid, which is running off from the grain. This is best achieved when the not-too-ground-up barley husks act as a filter bed to hold back the mash. This precious liquid is your “sweet wort.” Taste it, and you’ll see that it is very sugary indeed, or ought to be.

With a teakettle, ladle, dipper or a siphon rig, slowly sprinkle the mash with your 170 degrees F. sparge water. It will trickle through and either run out of the spigot at the bottom of the lauter tun, or be removed with a siphon hose, and transferred to the boil kettle. This removal process is best carried out only after more than half a gallon of runoff has collected in the lauter tun, and at a slow pace too, so as not to stir up too much sediment. Roughly 40 minutes is a good estimate for sparging the whole batch, by which time the runoff should be quite clear and a paler color. You should have at least 7 ½ gallons of accumulated wort in the boil kettle.

If you are obliged to double up on your big pots and have to use your sparge water vessel as your boil kettle, you can empty the entire contents of the sparge at one go into the sealed-up lauter tun (of course, first make sure it will hold that much!) and then slowly let it trickle out from that point, for 40 minutes.

When you have your 7 ½ gallons, heat it up to a vigorous boil.

NOTE: Modern home-brewers have the wondrous luxury of avoiding the whole process as described up to this point, by simply purchasing malt extract and adding sufficient boiling water to make up their batch volume. That’s really all it takes! Malt extracts come in three different grades of darkness, in either dry powder or a kind of goop, and they make a very good quality of beer. They are certainly convenient, but like other conveniences, they’re expensive. You can still brew a batch of beer that will be cheaper than what you buy at the market, however, even with the most expensive extracts. Use 5 pounds of dry malt extract for Pale Ale, and 7 ½ pounds for Strong Ale. Add 10% more, if you use the goop.

At this point, however, you’ve made your sweet wort, if you like you can check it with a saccharometer to determine how strong your beer is when it’s done. Collect enough wort to allow the saccharometer to float freely, and note the precise level it floats at, and the temperature of the wort. Return the sample back to the batch, and continue on. If you take a second saccharometer reading after fermentation is over, consulting a table and doing a little math will give you a good idea of how much alcohol your beer contains.

(SEE SIDEBAR 3)

Bring your batch of sweet wort up to a sturdy, rolling boil. Avoid “boiling over” by using a kettle that’s larger than your batch volume, and by removing all scum with a ladle. Fifteen pounds of grist will make a strong enough ale on its own, but you can also add sugar if you want your beer to be stronger. Brown sugar is pleasantly flavored, and will darken your beer somewhat, but ordinary table sugar will do. A pound of sugar is plenty, perhaps two pounds for a very Strong Ale but not more. Stir it in well so that it’s completely dissolved.

After ten minutes of boiling, add the two ounces of dried hops tied shut in a clean muslin bag. You really don’t want the hops floating around loose, as they are a great trouble when it comes time to transfer the cooled wort to the fermentor, hopelessly clogging up the lines! For Strong Ale, make it three ounces of hops, or more. Get the wort back up to a boil, and continue boiling for an hour. The volume of the wort will boil down to about 6 gallons or less, by the end.

You may want to try a modern alternative to whole hops, namely “pelletized” hops, which are conveniently added straight into the wort without the muslin bag. They look like rabbit food – and oh, if only they cost like it! Huge batches of hops are ground up and forced through small apertures to make these pellets, which have the advantage of disintegrating into largish particles within minutes and not clogging your siphon hose. The disadvantage is that you can’t grow your own pelletized hops.

Again, how bitter? It’s up to you. Keep accurate notes of your batches and adjust the hop amounts as required, once you sample the results a month later. If it’s too bitter, use fewer hops. Advice is all very well, but you must be the judge.

A useful technique to improve their flavor is to split up the addition of your hops into two equal lots, qualified as “bittering hops” and “ aromatic hops.” Put in the first lot for “bittering” and leave them in for the whole 60-minute boil. Then for the last 30 minutes (or even just the last 10 minutes) put in the other lot, for “aromatics.”

When the boil time is up, cool everything down as quickly as possible so as to give any unwanted microorganisms the least possible chance to get into your now sterile wort. As mentioned before, this is handily achieved with a special wort chiller, though you could even set your boil kettle down in a cold running steam if you have one handy. Just make sure the lid stays on tightly, so contamination doesn’t occur. If you do use a coil chiller, collect the hot runoff in a laundry tub and you have some “free” hot water for cleaning your pots and pans with.

An eight gallon glass carboy is ideal for a fermentation vessel, although splitting your batch in half to put into a pair of five gallon glass carboys is OK as well. Use a large bottlebrush to ensure that your fermentor stays impeccably clean between batches. A forty quart (ten gallon) stainless steel vessel with a lid is perfectly adequate, but before introducing your cooled wort, your fermentor and siphon hose ought to be sterilized, which is most easily achieved with a mild solution of ordinary (unscented!) household bleach; two tablespoons per five gallons is the ration. Fill your fermentor (with the siphon hose inside) with this solution to the very top and allow it to sit for half an hour, then transfer the solution to another clean container since it can be stored and reused quite a few times before it peters out. Using the siphon hose for this transfer, will further sterilize the hose.

A very handy modern material available from brewing supply houses is “Iodophor” or iodine-based sanitizer. Mixed at the proper concentration it will do just what bleach does but in two minutes instead of thirty, and leave no aftertaste even if still damp. Either way, it’s best if the sterilized fermentor and siphon hose can dry out before transferring the wort.

When your boiled wort has cooled to about 70 degrees F., mist your hands with isopropyl alcohol to get them absolutely germ-free, air dry them, and fish out the sack(s) of hops. Wring them out. Now use the sterilized siphon hose to transfer the wort to the fermentor, which should be set in a quiet, shady spot that gets no warmer than 70 degrees F. and no cooler than 50 degrees F. – as you might guess, 60 degrees F. is ideal. Your fermentor should be out of direct sun at all costs, and even shaded from fluorescent light if possible, as both are bad for beer. At this point add (“pitch”) your yeast solution to the wort, lug the top with a stopper fitted with a fermentation lock, wrap it in an old blanket and leave it for a week or so.

When fermentation appears to have slowed to almost nothing, it’s time to bottle your brew – now finally known as “beer.” This is the second step during which sterilization should be maintained. A day before you plan on doing it, clean all your jugs and bottles thoroughly and then sterilize them with bleach or iodine solution, afterward storing them upside down so they dry out and are kept free from dust. Also sterilize your bottle caps, corks or whatever closure system you employ. Then with a sterilized siphon hose, transfer the finished beer from the fermentor without stirring up the muck or “lees” at the bottom too much, into a sterilized stockpot. This step is called “racking.”

Add half a cup of sugar dissolved in a pint of boiling water, cooled off a little, which will “bottle condition” the beer by temporarily re-activating the fermentation process. Using a siphon tube which can be easily pinched shut and then opened again (or has a valve) fill as many stone jugs, champagne or beer bottles as necessary to within an inch of the top, and cap them securely.

Put the bottles in a dark, cool cellar (50-60 degrees F.) for three weeks or so, at which point the contents will be ready for drinking. If properly cellared, bottled homebrew Pale Ale will keep for months. Strong Ale will keep even longer.

GETTING FANCY

Very good homemade beer will result from the use of nothing more than ordinary “pale malt” kilned to a light degree. Even better beer will result from using your own hops, but as beer drinkers know there are plenty of styles to choose from in the world of suds. Beers come in a bewildering array of colors: pale straw, deep gold, amber, coppery, nearly red, brown, nut brown and basic black. This is achieved by using, in addition to pale malt, measured amounts of “specialty malts” which have been roasted to a darker color. Darker roasts are graded on an ascending scale known as “SRM” where 10 is a pale yellow and 400 is black.

You need only substitute 10-30% of your specified pale malt for a specialty malt, to achieve substantial results. That is, for a Brown Ale you might try eight pounds of pale malt, plus one pound of SRM 40 roast and one pound of SRM 60. The darker you like your beer, the higher number on the roasted malts should go, not the more pounds you should use. About 70% of your grist should always be made up of pale malt, even for the very dark stouts. You don’t need much SRM 400 “chocolate” malt to achieve even Guinness density.

For all I know, lagering your beer could easily be achieved on the original German model, of simply leaving a well-filled cask out where it will be substantially buried in snow for a month or two. Your beer won’t freeze because the alcohol gives it a lower freezing point (enough snow also acts as a good 30 degree insulator) but your beer certainly will “lager.” Naturally, this Ancient Batch scenario is limited to certain climates.

Those of us unlucky enough to have snow-free winters might invest in an old second-hand refrigerator as long as it will hold one or two 5-gallon glass carboys and keep them at 30 degrees F. for two or three weeks. Bottle the beer afterwards as you would an ale, and it will be ready to enjoy in less than a month.

A FEW NOTES ON CONSUMPTION

Your cellaring or storage temperature of 50 degrees F. also happens to be the perfect temperature for drinking your home-brewed ale. If it is served much colder, such as fresh from a refrigerator (40 degrees F.) the freshness and aromatic character is numbed and much less rich. If you keep them in the ‘fridge, take out your home brews twenty minutes before you intend to serve them, to let them sweat a little bit. You might be surprised at how much better it is.

Americans often comment that they’ve heard British beer is served “warm.” This is not true. British beer is served at room temperature, which in England likely as not happens to be about 50 degrees F. anyway. Having lived in England for extended periods of time, I don’t recall a great many English rooms being what I think of as warm. If you try it, you’ll find that 50 degrees F. really is plenty cool enough for a glass of fresh ale, particularly on a warm day, and it allows a range of more delicate flavors to emerge that would otherwise be lost in the chill.

An exception to this might be made for home-brewed lagers. True German-style lager beer ferments with a special yeast which operates in a ten degree cooler range than ale yeast; in fact the yeast actually survives lagering at 30 degrees F.! Therefore, refrigerator temperature is actually better for serving this style of beer.

To dispense your home-brewed beer properly from a bottle, you must decant it instead of just pouring it out or you’ll stir up the yeast sediment in the bottle and make the beer cloudy. First make sure that your glass is 4 ounces larger than the volume of your bottle, to account for any head, which will form, and then you must pour out the whole beer gently and continuously. To pour for a smaller sized glass or to serve a number of guests, it’s generally easier to decant a bottle or two into a pitcher, and then serve it from that instead.

Those who serve their ale from a cask, of course, needn’t concern themselves with any of this. They need only drink it!

Cheers!

SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE AND SUPPLY

If you wish to have a book, which goes into the subject of modern home brewing in much greater detail, there is no better one to have than Brewing Quality Beers, The Home Brewer’s Essential Guidebook by Byron Burch (ISBN 0-9604284-2- 9). Dense with information, it will lucidly walk a beginner through the whole process, it’s beautifully illustrated and has plenty of recipes for all grain, and using extracts, to duplicate many popular beer styles.

Also of interest for those who wish to pursue the craft of making traditional British ales are two books by Dave Line, The Big Book of Brewing (ISBN 0-9008413-4-6) and Brewing Beers Like those You Buy (ISBN 0- 9004815-1-6) which is fairly bursting with recipes for everything from Younger’s “Wee Willie” pale ale to the veritable holy grail of home brewers, Theakston’s “Old Peculier” dark strong ale.

Joining an amateur beer-brewing club, if there’s one in your area, is warmly recommended. You will be astonished (and educated) by what creative people can do to solve brewing problems in this most rewarding hobby.