Going With the Grain

It's been a while since I've brewed a batch. Trying to align the busy schedules among our six-member brewing crew, The Hoplings, isn't easy. So I've been spending the past couple of months reading books, Web sites, and magazines about beer and beer-making while collecting the necessary equipment to brew "all-grain" batches.

For those very new to brewing, there are essentially three versions of a homebrewing recipe. There's the extract version, which is considered the easiest method since it requires less time and know-how. It's kind of like buying pre-made pasta sauce when making spaghetti. As with commercial sauces, there is a wide variety of malt extracts available—both dry and liquid, and with a range of color and flavor characteristics—but you are still limited to what is on the shelf.

All-grain brewing, by contrast, is like making the pasta sauce from scratch, and is thereby considered more challenging than extract brewing. Instead of buying malt in a prepared form (already extracted by companies called maltsters), an all-grain brewer purchases types of grains, cracks them with a mill, and uses a heating process called "mashing" to withdrawal and collect the sugary water that is a key ingredient in beer. (Mashing is different than "steeping," by the way. I'll be covering the topic of mashing in greater detail as I begin to brew all-grain batches.) Carrying on with the pasta analogy, this method allows you to customize your sauce, making it thicker or thinner, more or less potent, and unlike anything you can buy in a store. In fact, there are no available extracts for certain types of grains used in beer-making.

The third approach to a beer recipe is called a "partial mash," which is viewed as an intermediate stage between extract and all-grain brewing. It's similar to jazzing up a basic, store-bought pasta sauce with some other ingredients you prefer: you conduct a small-scale mash and then use malt extract to bring the amount of fermentable sugars to the desired level.

I used to believe there was little difference between the three methods and that you could use whichever you wanted depending on the time and money you had available. See, all-grain brewing takes longer but can be cheaper in the long run because you can buy ingredients in bulk and store them. Extract brewing takes only two to three hours and, unlike all-grain, can be easily managed on your kitchen stove top.

My opinion changed, though, while reading Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. It's a complex book and still a little over my head, but I found this passage in Chapter 3 to be incredibly enlightening:

Data on winning beers demonstrate that you can make great beer using extract as the base for your creation; however, they also tell us that grain plays an important role in virtually every beer recipe. You can certainly make drinkable beer from nothing but extract, but to make truly wonderful beer, you will want to add some grain to the mix.

How much grain is enough? Well, ultimately that depends upon the recipe and the style you are brewing. In general, however, 25 to 67 percent of the gravity of your beer should come from grain.

After reading that, it was clear to me: I needed to add the capability to mash—to conduct either full or partial mashes—to my brewing regimen. And after months of researching and collecting equipment, I'm finally ready.

Hopping Up to Portland

Later this month, I'll be taking a trip to Portland, Ore., to have a face-to-face meeting with one of my hops suppliers to check out this year's harvest.

OK, I'm not nearly professional enough to justify the above statement but I just so happen to have a good friend in that beer Mecca of the Northwest whom I've been meaning to visit for quite a while. And coincidentally, he has hops growing on his property. I've known this friend, Jason, since 2nd grade and we grew up together in Memphis, Tenn. He moved to Portland many years ago but retains a peerless craving for Memphis-style barbecue.

I believe the last time I saw him was in June 2005, when we took a trip to Indianapolis for Formula 1's U.S. Grand Prix (yes, the one that was a complete disaster) and made a post-race swing south to Nashville and Memphis for a BBQ binge that he dubbed "Porkfest 2005." I figured it's only fair that we resurrect the tradition with our own "Beerfest '09" in his neck of the woods, right?

As for the hops, Jason has a generous neighbor with a thriving hops plant that grows over the fence into Jason's backyard. (We're not sure of the variety but we're pretty sure they aren't wild.) As I mentioned in a previous entry, Jason shipped a large Ziploc bag full of dried hops to me last season when he learned I was beginning to brew beer. Unfortunately, I was even more of a fledgling brewer then than I am now, and I made poor use of them. My brewing buddies and I dumped the whole bag in for the full 60-minute boil and used none of the pungent little flowers for aroma or flavoring hops. That beer, targeting the IPA style, ended up not tasting very hoppy at all.

This time around things are going to be different. First off, he's collected a lot more hops for me. (He emailed the above photo to me with the caption, "We're gonna need a bigger box.") When I get up to Portland, we'll finish picking them from the vine and ship 'em back to Nashville. I'm more confident and ready to experiment this time—trying them for flavoring, aroma, and dry-hopping. I'll post my results here, of course.

Meanwhile, if any readers want to share a can't-miss beer spot in Portland, post it in the comments and we'll try to wedge it into the itinerary. Horse Brass Pub, the Rogue Ales Public House on NW Flanders, and one or more of the McMenamins locations are already on the short list.

Win, Lose, or Draw

To date, I've been a part of nine batches in my young brewing career. All batches were basic brews using malt extract, which is sort of like using instant coffee instead of grinding the beans yourself. Well, slightly more advanced in that they included the steeping of specialty grains for some added character.

Based upon my own criteria (i.e., my taste buds and those of others), I have a record of 4-2-3.

English Pale Ale: Win
My friend Tyler captained this brew day in June 2008. It was an introduction to homebrewing for me and two other friends, Luke and Eric. We all played a part in the process and the result was (surprisingly) really good. In fact, there's some debate as to whether this still stands as our best beer.

India Pale Ale: Win
Our brewing group grew to five with the addition of homebrewer Nick. I told my Portland, Ore., friend Jason about our pursuits and he promptly sent me a large Ziploc bag of hops that he had harvested from a plant in his backyard. Giddy with excitement, my brew friends and I took turns smelling the bag and were determined to brew a hoppy beer. (In fact, it was about this time that we assumed the name "The Hoplings.") We pieced together an India Pale Ale kit with help from our local homebrew store and cheered as we dumped every last hop leaf into the brew pot at the beginning of the 60-minute boil. Turns out, the beer wasn't that hoppy. But it was a decent pale ale that I would drink regularly if there was any left.

Raspberry Hefeweizen: Draw
This beer, brewed from a hefeweizen boxed ingredient kit the same day we brewed the above IPA, resulted in mixed reviews. In an experiment, fellow Hopling Nick added a bottle of raspberry flavoring to approximate something like Abita's Purple Haze—and to impress his raspberry hefe-loving girlfriend. His girlfriend claimed to like it but most of us thought it tasted too sweet.

Summer Ale: Loss
The Hoplings added yet another seasoned brewer to our ranks and by this point we were feeling pretty confident. As a result, we made the ambitious decision to brew three new batches and bottle the previously mentioned IPA and Raspberry Hefeweizen, all on the same day. Probably not the best decision for any of the beers involved, but this Summer Ale is the one that tasted the worst. Rather, it didn't really have a taste at all. Very, very bland. I ended up pouring it out after five of our six Hoplings got a chance to try it.

Amber Cerveza: Draw
Brewed alongside the aforementioned Summer Ale, this one was my early favorite from the three brewed that day. Soon after conditioning, it developed an odd metallic aftertaste that fortunately and inexplicably disappeared. The beer isn't big on flavor but seems to be decent for its style—especially with some lime juice added. Still suffers from a wet-cardboard off-flavor, which I've since read comes from aerating the beer too much while cooling and transferring. Lesson learned.

Extra Special Bitter: Draw
Hopling Tyler pretty much single-handedly brewed this ESB as the rest of us bottled two other beers. He used a recipe that he found posted at a local homebrew store. Shunning the box kits for a more a la carte approach, he turned out a beer that had more body than anything we'd produced to that point. If you ask Tyler, this one should go in the win column. Unfortunately it's plagued by a really pronounced wet-cardboard taste so we'll call it a draw.

Irish Red Ale: Loss
For my first solo brew, I picked a recipe from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. It required the toasting of some grain, which turned out to be a double-edged sword. On the plus side, grains toasting in your oven make the house smell amazing. On the other hand, they may have ruined the beer. I've since learned that you should allow toasted grains to rest for a several days before brewing with them. Mine went straight into the brew pot. As a result of that, or a broken thermometer, or both, this beer was incredibly husky tasting. Bottom line: undrinkable.

Fat Tire Amber Ale clone: Win
Fellow Hopling Eric wanted to brew a beer on his own to learn the whole process firsthand, and I sort of supervised—despite not really being qualified to do so. The result is a really solid beer that has been well liked at parties. Not sure I can really take credit for this one but I need all the "wins" I can get at this point.

Chimay Premiere Red Belgian Ale clone: Win
I had my first Chimay a few months back while at Nashville's Flying Saucer location with fellow Hopling Kevin. It was the Premiere Red and I was blown away. The desire to make a clone of this beer—for both educational and budgetary purposes—moved it to the top of my "To Do" list. Using the recipe from the book Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers, I made this as my second-ever solo batch. The brew day was my worst yet, with countless numbers of mistakes, accidents, and curse words. And although my original gravity reading (a measurement one takes using a hydrometer and a sample of the unfermented beer to indicate how much fermentable sugar it contains) came up well short of the recipe's target, the finished beer turned out to be my favorite of all those listed here. My first really satisfying win.