A lot of people seemed surprised to find out that I brew beer at home (well, not technically home, since my home is a 500 square-foot apartment in Manhattan, but you know what I mean). It is actually not that difficult and hopefully today I can introduce the basic concepts in a way that everyone can understand and will inspire the most intrepid of you to continue your education and maybe even try it out for yourself.
Brewing beer is a lot like cooking food, except the main result takes weeks (at least) before it’s ready to be consumed. And just like cooking, there are basically two approaches to brewing beer: you can follow a well-written, detailed recipe exactly, or you can understand the basic concepts and put together your own process based on those concepts. I am a fan of the latter approach when it comes to both cooking and brewing and hopefully you will be too, but even if you’re not, hopefully the information here will help you get started.
At it’s very, very, most basic level, beer is a kind of sweet porridge made from barley and possibly other grains that is fermented by yeast to make it alcoholic. I like to think about it like oatmeal: when you make a bowl of oatmeal, you are mixing water and some grains (oats in this case) to form a kind of porridge. The water acts to draw out the sugars from the grains so that if you taste the liquid part of the oatmeal it tastes sweet and probably a little bready from the oats. Now if you take that same bowl of oatmeal but replace the oats with malted barley, and then you drain the water away from the barley and then you add some yeast to that barley water and let it sit for a while you will have beer.
At a basic level, that’s all beer is and that’s “all” that is required to make it. Beer doesn’t have to be carbonated or otherwise flavored in any way. Of course, I think there is almost universal agreement that beer is better when it is carbonated and at least flavored with something bitter–like hops–to balance the sweetness of the fermented barley water.
A very important thing to remember when brewing your own beer is that these raw ingredients when combined in this way want to become beer. It is not a fool-proof process by any means but neither is it an exacting, scientific or especially tricky process. Which is why great beer can be made from guidelines and principles instead of only from exacting recipes. If nothing else from this post, keep this in mind and I can almost guarantee it will save you lots of stress during your brewdays.
The main challenge your barley water and yeast combo will face in trying its darndest to become beer is contamination by a collection of microbes ominously referred to as “spoilage organisms”. Basically the thing is that yeast (certain types of yeast, anyway) love sweet barley water and given no competition will colonize and proliferate in a batch of barley water (a.k.a. wort, pronounced “wert”), happily eating the sugars and farting out CO2 and alcohol. (This is literally what yeast do.) The problem is that these spoilage organisms also love sweet barley water but instead of eating the sugars and making alcohol, they eat the sugars and make all kinds of nasty-tasting stuff, and sometimes also prevent the yeast from doing their thing.
The good news is that yeast are pretty resilient little buggers and if they manage to gain the high ground in the battle to colonize the wort then they will almost always win–there’s no such thing as spoilage organisms “coming from behind” to spoil a batch of beer–once the yeast get going munching those sugars and farting out that alcohol, it is too much for any spoilage organisms to overcome.
So how do we make sure the yeast can get a good foothold? Sanitization. Cleanliness. There’s a saying that 50% of brewing is cleaning and I’m not sure that’s right–I think it’s probably more like 75%! You have to be a stickler for clean brewing otherwise I can guarantee you will eventually get a batch of beer that will make you never want to brew again. Of course, there are some products on the market that can help immensely in this area: the two most important “ingredients” you need for making your own beer are some form of sanitizer solution and some form of oxidative cleaner.
Sanitizer’s role is to kill all the spoilage organisms present on an otherwise clean surface so that there is no competition for the yeast in the wort or beer which will be touching that surface. I literally cannot overstate the importance of sanitization for brewing. Even if you think some piece of equipment is “clean”, it definitely has tons of microscopic life on it and most, if not all, of that microscopic life is going to turn your wort into something other than delicious beer.
The oxidative cleaner’s role is basically to prepare a surface for sanitization. There is a lot of gunk generated during the brewing process and you need an effective way to get rid of that sometimes very persistent gunk. If you don’t get rid of the gunk then it can become a breeding ground for spoilage organisms in later batches no matter how much sanitizer solution you use to try to sanitize that surface.
Without the help of both of these products, you can still technically make beer, but you are pretty unlikely to be able to make good beer.
Hopefully now you have at least a conceptual idea of what beer is and how it comes to be beer, along with the understanding of how important it is to keep things clean when brewing your own beer and why it is so important to keep them clean. (In case you can’t tell already, this really is the most important thing!) And now that you have satisfied your pre-requisite, hopefully you are looking forward to Homebrewing 102 next semester : )