Microbrewed Adventures (6 page)

“Charlie, can you make two barrels?”

My brain quickly calculated: Thirty-one gallons in a barrel. Two barrels. Sixty-two gallons. About ten 6½-gallon carboys worth of beer. In other words, over a hundred pounds of malt! I've never had that much malt in my house at one time.

Adrenaline was coursing through my veins. But I remained calm, because brewers who say “yes” simply breathe deeply and repeat three times, “Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew.” It works every time.

“Okay George, I'll do it.”

“We'll send you eight quarter-barrels in time for you to use.”

That was the beginning of that!

 

YOU'VE GOT
to take into perspective that this was 1983. The best commercially available homebrewing yeast was dried yeast and came in small envelopes. Ale yeasts were often not of the best quality, and “dried lager yeast” was not lager yeast at all, but simply ale yeast called lager yeast on the package. Therein lay my dilemma. If I could gain access to a quality culture of ale and lager yeast, I might have a chance at brewing beers that would be acceptable to the people of the “King.” The challenge was to avoid compromise. The beers
had
to be good.

I called in a favor to friends at a brewing laboratory. One week later I had two small test tubes, one each of anonymous ale yeast and anonymous lager yeast. I was assured that they were of very good brewing quality and had been removed from a frozen yeast bank and cultured back to activity inside these tubes. I looked disbelievingly at the tiny drops of liquid and the small, almost imperceptible, amount of sediment that dusted the bottom. From these two drops of liquid sprang forth hundreds of beers, the first two emerging as lagers, Masterbrewers Doppelbock and Masterbrewers Celebration Light Lager. Juggling carboys and available space, I brewed several 12-gallon batches to top out at 31 gallons of final beer. Brewed on a stove top in a 5-gallon brewpot, fermented in 6½-gallon glass carboys at room temperature and “lagered” for three weeks at the same room temperature under my kitchen table, the beer was finally ready to keg. I called George, announcing, “You can deliver those kegs.”

I'll never, ever forget the look on my neighbor's face when the Anheuser-Busch van stopped in front of my home. He leaned on his yard rake with an expression that spoke for itself. I shrugged my shoulders as the Anheuser-Busch representative wheeled into my front door eight empty quarter-barrels of beer. After the van left, I looked over at my neighbor, who was still frozen leaning on his rake, his mouth wide open. I didn't say a word. He knew I was a homebrewer…but the van from Anheuser-Busch?

A short time later, the beer was transferred into each keg with a gravity siphon. A small amount of corn sugar was added for initiating natural carbonation and the hole was ceremoniously bunged with a wooden cork and a hefty whack of a hammer. One week later I summoned Anheuser-Busch to pick up the filled kegs.

My neighbor was doing yard work as the Anheuser-Busch van pulled up to the front of my home for a second time, and he again stopped and with a dropped jaw, stared at the scene in silent disbelief. The two-wheel dolly entered the house empty and emerged with two quarter-barrels of beer—four times. As the King of Beers guy drove away, I turned to my neighbor, feeling that by now I owed him an explanation. I said, with a shrug, “Anheuser-Busch needed some beer, so I'm helping them out.” I immediately turned and walked into the house without waiting for a reaction.

 

THOUGH SATISFIED
that the beer entering the keg was excellent, I was nervous. Would it survive the trip to St. Louis? Would it carbonate? How would it survive the journey into the can?

The can. That was the unknown factor beyond my control. I heard months later that a “small” canning line, perhaps used in a pilot brewery, was used to fill and seal the cans. I wondered later why more than half the cans were only half full and there were so many commemorative empties. It was later explained to me that it took more beer to fill the canning line's plumbing than there was beer. The kegs were emptied before the beer began to emerge on the filling end! Empty cans were flying off the conveyor belt and half-fills barely made it to the sealer. Anheuser-Busch was a union brewery and all the professionals had to keep their hands behind their backs, sweating over the whole procedure as the line workers did the best they could. The way it was described to me, the scene sounded like an episode straight out of “I Love Lucy.”

But the beer survived and was enjoyed by the nearly 100 attendees. Both brews were miraculously “clean” and did not suffer from traveling. The Doppelbock was preferred, though both were beers in which I took a great deal of
pride. How did I feel? Totally surprised at how well they had turned out. This success inspired me to have no fear and pursue beer as a passion for years to come. The support given by George Charalambous, Anheuser-Busch, the Master Brewers Association of the Americas, the American Society of Brewing Chemists and the Ball Corporation was tremendous. It was the beginning of a long, mutually supportive relationship between homebrewers, microbrewers, craft brewers and the technical people involved with the large brewing companies. For these opportunities I am forever grateful.

There is one more part to this story.

I continued to brew with the lager yeast, using it in virtually all my beer recipes. It behaved extraordinarily well and resulted in great-tasting “ales” and “lagers” even when I knew it was not an ale yeast and I had no facilities to cold lager my lagers. So, my secret was that I was not making true ales nor true lagers for many years. In fact, nearly all of my recipes in the first editions of
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing
(1984 and 1991) and
The Homebrewer's Companion
(1994) were based on having used this unknown strain of lager yeast. Ten years later I asked the source whether they could tell me where this lager yeast had come from. Their answer was a simple “no we can't tell you, sorry.” A few years later, I tried one more time. A friend I had taught to homebrew had a job at the company. “Do you think you could tell me where this yeast came from if I told you the catalog name?” I asked. He'd try.

The next day I received a call. “Charlie, I know the source of that yeast you've been using. Are you sitting down?”

“Should I sit down?” I asked, puzzled.

“Well, I would suggest you do.” There was a pause, “that yeast was originally cultured from a keg of Budweiser.”

I was in shock. And then a huge homebrew inspired grin crossed my face
and I began chuckling uncontrollably. All those barley wines, doppelbocks, India pale ales, brown ales, porters, pilseners, Oktoberfest beers, English ales and Irish stouts unknowingly made from a culture of Budweiser yeast!

With a deep sense of satisfaction I finally realized what I had done. This colony of yeast and the generations that followed were perhaps the happiest Budweiser yeast in the world! And they made me happy too.

I
F YOU
didn't make your own homebrew in the 1980s, the beer landscape was pretty damned bleak. Of course, if you were brewing at home or visiting with homebrewers, craft beers with flavor and soul abounded. But what happened when you went out for dinner? What were the choices? The meager choices almost always included Bud, Miller, Coors, Bud Light, Miller Light and Coors Light. If you wanted something different you might find a Corona, a Heineken or a Beck's. Rarely would you find a microbrewed beer, even at better restaurants. I often made do with what was available. All that has changed, and today I won't patronize a restaurant that doesn't offer a real choice of beer character.

Why? I feel offended. I really do. It shows prejudice or ignorance on the part of a restaurant if customers are not offered a choice of beers. And as much as possible, that choice should include locally brewed options. If the food a restaurant is offering is worth paying good money for, then it is worth being complemented with the flavor of an appropriate beer. A good beer list offers true diversity, not by country of origin, but by flavor. If people will pay $20 to $40 for a good bottle of wine at dinner, why not offer a beer for which one might expect to pay 50 cents to a dollar, even two dollars, more per serving? Our world is a world of different foods and different cultures. Beer is an important contributor to life's pleasures and when all restaurants realize this, not only will their customers be happier, but their profits will grow.

Drinking with Our Eyes

I
N
1999,
on a tour of breweries of the southwestern United States, I organized a series of beer tastings to make the point that we are all prejudiced. Whether we like to admit it or not, whether we know it or not, we are severely influenced by beer's color, beer labels, beer commercials, the color of beer bottles and beer marketing. There is no way around it—our sense of taste is influenced by our environment and factors besides simply the taste of the beer.

The first stop on my 1999 microbrewery tour of the Southwest was Colorado Spring, where I visited several homebrew shops. Ending up at the Bristol Brewing Company, my wife, Sandra, and I enjoyed their craft microbrewed beers and set up a blind tasting among 50 homebrewers, beer enthusiasts and their guests. The crowd was a mix of avid and casual beer drinkers out for a good time. We presented three pairs of beers. All the tasters were told was to choose the beers they would prefer to continue to drink. There was no indication whether these beers were microbrewed, American, homebrewed, imports—nothing.

After we tallied the votes, the audience was quite amazed. New Belgium Blue Paddle Pilsener easily won over Corona. Sam Adams Boston Lager creamed Heineken, and Boulder Stout was overwhelmingly preferred to Guinness Stout. The point that interested everyone was that American microbrewed craft beers were preferred over brand names. What astounded many in the audience was that several regular Corona, Heineken and Guinness drinkers had made the American choice.

Encountering thunder in Taos, we rolled on through New Mexico, visiting the Second Street Brewery/Pub in Santa Fe, moving on to Albuquerque to visit the Wolf Canyon Brewpub and Il Vicinos brewpub, and finally rendezvousing with the Santa Fe Homebrewers at the Rio Grand Brewery on the evening of the third day of the tour.

We once again had a blind tasting, among 40 homebrewers and their invited friends. Grolsch Lager tied with Grand Desert Pils, Sam Adams Boston Lager had twice as many votes as Heineken and in-house-brewed
Cabezon Stout garnered more than twice as many votes as Guinness Stout. There was the same astonishment among beer drinkers who had voted against their preferred brands.

We wound our way through the Southwest, on to Tucson, Arizona, visiting Brew Your Own homebrew shop and being welcomed by more than 100 beer enthusiasts and their spouses at the Pusch Ridge Brewing Company and Pub. Another beer tasting was held, and the results were Sam Adams 42 versus Corona 3; bottled Sierra Nevada Pale Ale 27 versus Bass Ale on draft 19; Guinness on Draft 1 (that is correct: 1) versus Pusch Ridge Old Pueblo Stout 47.

The beers were all served in glasses without any indication of origin. Brand-loyal, die-hard Guinness drinkers were stunned. Bass Ale aficionados could not believe their vote. After that evening, a few Corona drinkers were Corona drinkers no more.

The point has been made over and over again in other tastings. Freshly made local craft beers are preferred to imports when taste is the only factor. But the fact is we do enjoy certain beers simply because of the mystique created by their brand and advertising. That is not necessarily a bad thing if you truly enjoy what you are drinking.

If beer is really all about taste, then a real effort must be made to educate that taste—to allow us to recognize what our taste buds really do enjoy. It is my premise that if you can tune in to what you taste and learn to enjoy beer because of taste, the pleasure of beer is magnified.

 

THERE IS
one more point I would like to discuss regarding how we taste beer: the controversy surrounding adjuncts.

The very word
adjunct
will cause many a homebrewer to cringe. In the name of purity, malt, hops, water and the Holy Ghost (yeast was known as godisgood in former times), homebrewers yearning for the full flavor of beer forsake everything else in favor of all-malt beer. But with the skill of an open-minded brewer, it is possible to maintain the full flavor of malted barley while adding the character of grain adjuncts. Grain adjuncts can add desirable character to beers, producing full-flavored beer with warm-weather drinkability. Now don't get me wrong: I do enjoy a cold all-malt porter on the warmest of summer days. My beer-drinking moods are as diverse as there is diversity among homebrewers and microbrewers.

Let's look at this from a fair perspective. If we label any ingredient other than hops and malt as an adjunct, then we've got to include the ripe, flavorful red cherries and raspberries of Belgian lambics and American wheat beers. The roasted barley of stouts. The coriander and orange peel of some Belgian
ales. The cinnamon in your holiday brew. The honey in your honey pils and Weizen. The chili pepper and chocolate in your Goat Scrotum Ale. And you know all the other secrets that have been used to create the wonderful experience we have come to know as homebrewed and microbrewed in the U.S.A.

So why is it we have a reaction to rice and corn? I think I know why. We have let the large breweries define for us what we consider “adjunct beer.” We've been suckered into a general mind-think about these ingredients. Light-lager brewers throughout the world have manipulated these adjuncts in ways that suit their needs. Let's not forget they have reduced the hop character and increased the carbonation to levels that quite a few of us don't really care for any longer. It's a matter of taste—theirs and ours. Let's not let their taste result in hang-ups we call our own.

How many times does the word
cheap
precede the use of the word
adjuncts
? Wait a minute: my flaked corn isn't any cheaper than the malts I use. In some parts of the world, corn is a lot more expensive than barley malt. So have we been duped? The word
cheap
is really a reaction to a taste many of us simply don't want any part of. But in this day and age as homebrewers are microbrewing craft beer, adjuncts are only figuratively cheap. Let's focus on the qualities we desire and what we can achieve as homebrewers. Our personal indignation shouldn't interfere with the possibilities of using ingredients to our advantage.

Have I heard microbrewers and homebrewers criticize large brewers for the grain adjuncts they use? Have I heard the large brewers poke fun at the weird (say “adjuncts,” please) ingredients small brewers and homebrewers use? Yes and yes. It's all relative, and it's really about what you do with the process. It's about what YOU like. It's about your perspective. And it's about not being a victim of someone else's mind-think.

America's First Brewpubs

T
HE WHOLESOME QUALITIES
of malt liquors greatly recommend themselves to general use as an important means of preserving the health of the citizens of this commonwealth,” concluded the Massachusetts legislature passing an act in 1789 “to encourage manufacture of strong beer, ale and other malt liquors.”

It was only 149 years earlier, in 1640, that the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a regulation that “no one should be allowed to brew beer unless he is a good brewer.” So it was with a great deal of anticipated pleasure that a group of microbrewery enthusiasts headed north into Massachusetts's emerging beer country in 1987.

As we slept off the beers we'd had earlier in the day from the as-true-as-it-gets German-style Vernon Valley Brewery in northern New Jersey, the bus quietly dieseled through Connecticut. It was late in August and we were headed for the small Massachusetts town of Northampton, a town that had recently taken great pride in the opening of their own Northampton Brewery and Brewster Court Pub. The brewpub's having opened only about six weeks before our arrival, we beer travelers were eager to see and experience a brewery restaurant that had been only a kitchen-table conversation 10 months earlier.

Arriving in the early evening, we checked into the venerable Hotel Northampton, and in true colonial fashion we wasted little time in hightailing it to the brewpub. Down a small hill off the main street we could see a brightly lit building as we approached our quarry for the evening. Blue neon cleanly outlined a large second-story circular picture window. The scene was reminiscent of an airbrushed painting one might have called “beer fantasy-land.”

People had come from miles around for the pleasure of each other's com
pany and the fine beers brewed right there on the premises. Behind the bar, a glass wall separated the “New England Deco” pub from the small, beautifully lit 800-square-foot brewery.

Peter Egelston, 1987

A table awaited us with glasses of beer (pitchers had recently and ridiculously been outlawed in Massachusetts; certainly the founding fathers were turning over in their graves). Gold, amber and bock beers complemented the warm ambience, quiet conversation and excellent food. We spoke with the four owners; Peter Egelston brewed the beer while the other three managed the restaurant and bar. (Peter later moved on to establish New Hampshire brewpub Portsmouth Brewery and microbrewery Smuttynose Brewing Company.)

The passion for homebrewing and good beer got the better of the four founders of the Northampton Brewery, and now there they were, operating a brewery and restaurant/bar filled with enthusiastic customers in a small town in western Massachusetts. In 1987 they were among only 21 brewpubs in the entire United States. Only a few years earlier, in 1982, brewpubs were illegal in most of the country. There were none. As brewpub laws were enacted, permitting breweries to serve fresh beer at their own pubs, the numbers have grown.