HOMEBREW Digest #158 Wed 24 May 1989

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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator

Contents:
  MEAD-ANDERINGS (ROSS)
  Re: short boil OK? (Pete Soper)
  Lagering (was Re: Sam Adams Doppelbock) (Rick Noah Zucker)
  Bud Bashing (was Reinheitsgebot) (lbr)
  Sam Adams (uiucdcs!att!iwtio!korz)
  re: refrigeration (Darryl Richman)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 23 May 89 09:21 EDT From: ROSS at mscf.med.upenn.edu Subject: MEAD-ANDERINGS Date sent: 23-MAY-1989 09:15:30 I have a great interest in mead and recently saw a mention of a publication called MEAD-ANDERINGS. Does anybody know the address of this magazine? For the longest time I have wanted to brew something resembling Belgium's Chimay Trappist beer but haven't seen any recipes. If anybody has any all-extract recipes for this brew, I'd really like to give it a try. Thanks. --- Andy Ross --- University of Pennsylvania Medical School Computer Facility Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 23 May 89 13:17:11 edt From: Pete Soper <soper at maxzilla.encore.com> Subject: Re: short boil OK? >From: prcrs!bstar4!qa at uunet.UU.NET (John Link): >This gentleman stated that he felt that single stage was better and the >goal was to reduce the amount of trub formed. He stated that if you >limit your boil to 20 minutes their would not be as much chance for the >protein to coagulate; thus less trub. >Does this sound reasonable? Has anyone used this method and if so This does not sound reasonable to me. If you don't coagulate that protein and other stuff out of your beer you are going to leave it in your beer, right? Right. And what will those whopping big molecules look like? They will look like the haze in Mexico City. But the kicker is that this stuff is going to be in very intimate contact with the beer during fermentation (and forever after), allowing for the weird chemistry and other hazards (infection!) that you wanted to avoid by racking off the trub after primary fermentation. A 20 minute boil is also too short to get proper bitterness and other good effects from your hops. There are other problems, but you get the idea. The bottom line is that you would not mistake a beer made this way for one you are used to buying. Boil the wort as vigorously as you can for around 60 minutes as Miller, Burch, and the wise other heads in the literature recommend. On the other hand, while I feel strongly that you should get the big molecules settled out of your wort, I feel that at this stage in your homebrew career you should not worry *at all* about trub sitting in your fermenter for a week or two. Sitting in the fermenter, most of the trub is covered with a yeast cake most of the time anyway. Get experience with maintaining immaculate sanitation levels while racking (at bottling time) before you rack just for the sake of racking off the trub. Then when you've gotten everything under control and are looking for things to refine, return to this subject. >could you pass on a recipe? Budweiser, Bass, Heiniken (sp?) are beers >I typically purchase. I'd love to, but I'm doing all grain stuff that would be worthless to you at this point. I think you would have best luck copying Bass first. Or you could start with Burch's "bitter" recipe. This was the basis of my third and fourth batches and was a great leap forward from the beer kits I'd brought back from England. Return to table of contents
Pete Soper +1 919 481 3730 arpa: soper at encore.com uucp: {bu-cs,decvax,necntc}!encore!soper Encore Computer Corp, 901 Kildaire Farm Rd, bldg D, Cary, NC 27511 USA Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 23 May 89 10:38:57 PDT From: noah at june.cs.washington.edu (Rick Noah Zucker) Subject: Lagering (was Re: Sam Adams Doppelbock) The word lager means to store in german. The reason this beer style is called lager (which applies to all bottom fermented beers) is that it was stored (lagered) in caves that were colder than above ground temperatures. This allowed bottom fermentation to be used. Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 23 May 89 14:36:49 EDT From: holos0!lbr at gatech.edu Subject: Bud Bashing (was Reinheitsgebot) In #154 florianb%tekred.cna.tek.com at RELAY.CS.NET writes: > I believe more important than the ingredients are the contents of > the brewing water and the brewing process. I hold that one reason > why American beers are so awful is that strict attention is not > paid to the proper temperature processes during the brewing. > This leads to nasties developed in the fermentation that come back > to haunt you after drinking. When I first started homebrewing, in 1979, there was a lot of Bud-bashing in homebrewing circles. Many folks claimed that on your first try you could make beer superior to Bud or Coors using malt syrup, lots of added sugar, dried ale yeast, no water analysis, boiling only part of the wort, high fermenation temperatures, and little temperature control. There was lots of talk about how awful commercial American beers were. Worst of all, the occasional (or not-too-occasional) batch of bad homebrew was referred to as "tasting like Budweiser." Yeah, right. You don't hear much of this silly macho talk any more, thank God. If you don't like Budweiser, it means you don't like its *style*. A-B has far better control over their beer than any homebrewer could ever have. Do you have a microbiology laboratory? Exact control over mash temperatures? Detailed analysis of every ingredient? The ability to test hop acids yourself? Do you really believe that the major American breweries risk their multi-billion dollar businesses by using insufficient temperature control at any stage? American breweries do, in general, ferment at higher temperatures than the Germans--54 degrees instead of 48, say. They also use different yeasts and far different ingredients. This adds up to radically different beer. But to claim that A-B doesn't pay attention to *any* aspect of brewing is laughable. A homebrewer can beat A-B for beer style any day. All you have to do is get some good malt and hops and not be afraid to use them. You can even beat good imported beer (with considerable effort) because of your freshness. But nearly all homebrew has minor flaws that would be unacceptable to a brewery: diacytal, oxidation, haze, etc. Those of us trying to rid ourselves of the last of these problems still can't make beer with brewery-like consistency, though I don't care if there are minor differences from batch to batch. And now for legitimate A-B bashing. Who the hell wants a beer with "no aftertaste"? What kind of sicko would come up with such a thing? What's next--Carbernet Sauvignon with no aftertaste? Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 23 May 89 14:02:22 CDT From: hplabs!uiucdcs!att!iwtio!korz Subject: Sam Adams Not that this is a big deal or anything, but just to fit another piece in this Sam Adams puzzle: Sam Adams is available at Osco in the Chicago area. (I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Osco stores, which are pretty popular here in the Chicago Metro area. Osco is a large variety/drugstore affiliated with Jewel foodstores (they even share buildings). The reason I mention this is because it's a very "everyday" place to buy beer, as opposed to going to the connoisseur section of a liquor store.) I have tried Sam Adams and I really like it. I haven't tried that many microbrewery beers, but Boston Lager is one of the few lagers made in the U.S. that actually has some body, aroma, and bouquet. Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 23 May 89 12:52:41 PDT From: Darryl Richman <darryl at ism780c.isc.com> Subject: re: refrigeration From: ferguson%X102C at HARRIS-ATD.COM (ferguson ct 71078) ">From: Darryl Richman <darryl at ism780c.isc.com> ">Subject: re: Sam Adams "> The bold print says "Sam Adams ">Was An Ale Drinker!" Of course, lager beer was unknown before the 1840's-- ">it's a creation of mechanized refrigeration. " ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ????? "I have no idea when lager was first brewed or whether it was a product "of mechanical refrigeration. However, I have seen or heard of several "old breweries that were located in caves (sometimes man-made) because "of the cooler temperatures there and I always assumed that the beer "brewed in these caves was a lager or lager/ale hybrid. For example, "the now defunct Wolf brewery in Stillwater, MN was in a man-made cave "carved into a solid limestone rock at what must have been considerable "expense. If these caves were not for lagering, what the heck were "they for? True enough that caves were used. Lager brewing actually depended on two coincident scientific advancements that occured in the decade of 1835-1845. I haven't got an encyclopaedia here, sadly, but the first was (Carl?) Linde's invention of mechanical refrigeration (using ammonia, I believe). The other was the culturing of yeast from single cells, which allowed brewers for the first time to acquire true strains. Most of this work occured at the Carlsberg brewery (hence the name of lager yeast, until recently, Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis). Once you have true strains, you have to figure out which one(s) to use, and it was discovered that some strains flocced to the bottom of the fermenter. So, back to the caves... Before refrigeration, beer would go sour in short order if left warm. Caves were convenient because they held their cool temperature relatively constant throughout the year. When it got too warm to brew in the summer, the brewers would knock off til fall. The Oktoberfest was predated by another festival to celebrate the first new beer of the year; the fest would drain the dregs of last spring's beer. In a sense, beer was lagered long before Linde, but the yeasts used were ale yeasts, with their fruity overtones and higher esters and alcohols. After Linde and Carlsberg, it was possible to consistently make smooth, crisp, clean beers year round. The older style of German beer still exists today, although it is dwarfed by the lager output. This style is Altbier, old fashioned beer. It is brewed in the Rhine valley, where they don't take to ideas from Bavaria and Denmark easily. --Darryl Richman Return to table of contents
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