Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (57 page)

And yet the following morning, when Isaac
and I went down to the basement to check on our carboy, we got pretty excited.
Overnight, the big jug of honey-colored liquid had leapt dramatically to life. A thick
layer of creamy foam had formed on the surface, like a great frothy head on a beer, and
through the glass walls of the carboy we could see thick currents of brown wort
circulating like powerful weather systems in time lapse. The little reservoir of water
in the airlock was bubbling like crazy, releasing a damp, yeasty gas that smelled,
agreeably, like an English pub. By now I knew all about yeasts and their appetite for
sugars, but it was hard not to feel there was some serious magic under way down here in
our basement.

After a few days, the fermentation settled
into a less hectic rhythm, the bubbles now infrequent enough to count as they formed
and, one by one, slid through the airlock to perfume the room. The currents in the wort
slowed, too, and a whitish-gray mass of yeast and other detritus, called
“trub,” formed at the bottom of the carboy. (Only centuries of British
devotion to beer making could produce such a superbly earthy vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon
brewing terms: “trub,” “wort,” “pitch,”
“malt,” “mash tun,” and, my favorite, “sparge.”) The
instructions said we could bottle after two weeks, so, on a Saturday
morning, Isaac and I together hoisted the carboy out onto the back porch, and
carefully siphoned the fermented liquid into bottles, which we then sealed with metal
caps. We had already added the bag of priming sugar to the beer to stimulate a last
climactic bout of fermentation in the bottles; trapped under the bottle cap, the carbon
dioxide produced by the yeasts would disperse in the beer as bubbles. Two weeks later,
it would be ready to drink.

Our English ale was pretty good, too. I
mean, it tasted just like beer, which, at this point in my education, was good enough
for me. Isaac was somewhat more discriminating. “The bubbles could definitely be
livelier,” he declared, “and I could do with less hoppiness.”
Befitting the English style, our ale was fairly bitter, with a pronounced hops flavor
and aroma. We had brewed two whole cases of the stuff, and I wondered if we would ever
get through it all. But as the weeks went by, the beer got better and better, as the
hops mellowed and the warm, malty flavors came to the fore. After a month of
“conditioning” in the bottle, I felt good enough about Pollan’s Pale
Ale to bring a cold bottle down to Kel Alcala, at the Oak Barrel, for his professional
evaluation. Kel, who is an earnest young brewer with a long blond ponytail and thick
forearms tattooed with Goth-pagan imagery, poured himself a glass. He sniffed; he held
it up to the light; he sipped. And then he stared at the beer for what seemed a very
long time.

“For a first effort?”
Kel’s voice is a friendly growl. “I’d say this is really not bad at
all.” He brought the glass of beer to his nose a second time, inhaling deeply.
“But I’m getting a slight off note in the finish. Do you get that? Fresh
Band-Aid
.
Yep, that’s it.” I took a sip and had to admit he was
right. There was a faint chemical scent reminiscent of first aid. “That comes from
a compound called chlorophenol. I’m guessing your fermentation was a little warmer
than you probably want. Even just a few degrees can do it.”

It’s funny how a well-chosen metaphor
can, for better or worse, completely change the flavor of something. Never again could I
drink Pollan’s Pale without thinking about Band-Aids. Johnson &
Johnson’s Pale Ale would probably have been a better name for our first brew. But
I was not discouraged. I wrote off the flaw to the fact that we had made this first
batch in August; a second batch brewed over the winter turned out much better, with not
even the slightest hint of hospital. Yet the Betty Crocker question still nagged at me,
and when an opportunity presented itself to help brew a batch of beer truly from
scratch, I grabbed it.

I had heard that a friend I hadn’t
seen in a few years, a psychiatrist whose son had gone to middle school with Isaac, had
fallen deep into home brewing. I knew Shane MacKay to be an inveterate, if not
obsessive, tinkerer and gear head (a serious guitarist, he also built his own amps and
speakers from junkyard parts), and when I heard he had transformed part of his backyard
into a brewery, I immediately gave him a call to see if I might assist on his next
batch. I was certain Shane MacKay would not be using any kit.

There was the unmistakable hint of the mad
scientist about Shane as he proudly showed me around his backyard setup early on a
Sunday morning, his white thatch uncombed, his steel-blue eyes lit up by this latest DIY
fire. Shane’s teenage boys having long since lost interest in Dad’s brewing
project, the alchemist seemed delighted to have an eager new apprentice. In the shade of
a lean-to he’d built behind the house, Shane had erected a tall structure of steel
shelving to hold, at different heights, various kettles and kegs, each atop a propane
burner, and all of them linked together by clear plastic tubing that passed through
various valves and spigots. Thermometers, hygrometers, jars
of
sanitizing chemicals, pumps, filters, funnels, carboys, bottles, airlocks, and propane
tanks completed the scene. It occurred to me that, by learning to brew beer, Shane had
found the perfect way to combine his engineering gifts with his professional interest in
brain chemistry and how it might profitably be altered.

With the help of some incomprehensibly
elaborate brewing software, Shane had concocted a recipe for a beer modeled on a
traditional Irish ale; he was calling it, for obscure reasons, “Humboldt
Spingo.” As he typed into his laptop various parameters—types of malt, hops, and
yeasts; temperatures and times—the software showed him exactly where the finished beer
would fall along several different spectrums, including maltiness, sweetness, bitterness
(measured in IBUs, or International Bittering Units), original and final
“gravity” (dissolved solids), and alcohol level. Shane’s whole
approach—the software, the metrics, the scrupulous sanitation—was a world away from
Sandor Katz’s. Wild fermentation was the last thing Shane wanted going on in
his
carboys.

Shane had picked up the ingredients at the
Oak Barrel the day before: a blend of malts, dominated by an English type called Maris
Otter and supplemented with smaller amounts of Victory, Biscuit, Cara Red (for color),
and a few ounces of roasted (i.e., unmalted) barley. For hops (which Shane proudly
showed me he had planted along his back fence), we would use U.S. Golding to supply the
bitterness (but not very much—the Irish ale style is considerably less bitter than the
English) and Willamette for aroma. As for yeast, we were going to divide the batch in
half and pitch two different strains: an English yeast and a Scottish. Shane proposed
that I take one of the carboys home to ferment in my basement, and later we could
compare the effects on the beer of the different yeasts. A controlled experiment, or
close to one.

Brewing from scratch, or
“all-grain” brewing, begins with the soaking of the malt in hot (but not
boiling) water. Before we added the crushed grain to the water, I sampled a few of the
seeds. They tasted surprisingly good, sweet and nutty, but full of cellulose, like a
ridiculously high-fiber breakfast cereal. The hour-long soak allowed the enzymes in the
barley to break down the grain’s carbohydrates into fermentable sugars. As we
stood around the mash tun—a steel kettle with a screen at the bottom—watching the hot
cereal steep, Shane asked about my brewing experiences to date. Being both a
psychiatrist and a Canadian, he did a magnificent job politely masking his disdain for
my Duncan Hines approach to beer making; he had started out the same way.

But though it added a couple of hours to the
brewing process, steeping the grain seemed well within my capabilities. So did the next
step, which was to sparge the cooked mash. After Shane opened a valve at the bottom of
the mash tun to drain the sweet brown steep water into a second kettle, he directed a
stream of boiling water from a third kettle overhead down onto the mash, in order to
leach, or sparge, any remaining sugars from the nearly spent grains. After this water
passed through the mash, it emerged from the spigot below golden brown, warm, and
fragrant. I tasted the grains again. They had been completely bleached of flavor.

Now we had our wort—thirteen gallons of
sugary brown liquid. Shane poured a few ounces of it into a glass test tube into which
he floated what looked like a big fat thermometer. In fact it was a hygrometer, which
measures the density, or “gravity,” of the wort: the amount of dissolved
sugars in the liquid, which gives the brewer a good idea of just how much alcohol the
final beer will contain. The scale on the side of the hygrometer indicated the wort had
an “original gravity” of 10.50—precisely what the software had predicted.
(When it dropped to 10.14, the software said, the fermentation would
be complete.) Shane pronounced himself pleased. Now he rigged up a system to cool the
wort as quickly as possible by submerging a spiral of copper tubing that he then
connected to a cold-water line. You want to cool the wort as rapidly as possible to
minimize the risk of bacterial contamination. (The addition of hops, which contains
antimicrobial compounds, also helps prevent contamination.)

Between steps, brewing beer consists mainly
of hanging around watching pots boil, so there’s plenty of time for talk.
(Drinking, too, though, this being a Sunday morning, we stuck mainly to coffee.) Shane
and I covered many bases, catching up on family and work and other fermentation
projects. He asked about this book. I told him the premise, how the four elements
corresponded to the principal methods humans have devised for transforming the stuff of
nature into things good to eat and drink.

“So where does beer fit into your
scheme?” Earth, I explained, since fermentation draws on the same microbial
processes of destruction and creation at work in the soil. But then it occurred to me
that, in fact, all four elements were represented in the beer-making process. The barley
is first cooked over a fire; the grain is then boiled in water; and the beer, after
fermentation, is carbonated with air. Beer is the complete four-element food. Which, I
realized, is exactly the sort of insight you would expect beer to sponsor.

When, after forty-five minutes, the
temperature of the wort had fallen to our target of 70°F, we divided the liquid between
two carboys and pitched the yeast, the English in one and the Scottish in the other. To
aerate the yeasts, we vigorously shook and rolled the carboys till the wort began to
froth. Then we plugged them with airlocks. Nearly five hours after putting the grain in
to soak, we were done. Shane helped me hoist the carboy out to my car.

On the drive home, one hand on the steering
wheel and the other steadying the neck of my carboy, I thought about
S.
cerevisiae
, the invisible single-celled creature that had been the recipient of
the morning’s sustained and scrupulous attentions. “Man’s best
friend”: By now, I had heard several brewers use the same phrase to describe it.
But after devoting five hours of our weekend to the building of an idyllic environment
for this species—a carboy full of sweet brown wort—it seemed to me it would be just as
accurate to call Shane and me and all the other fermenters “Saccharomyces’
best friend.”

“Coevolution” is a strong term,
implying that both partners have been changed by their relationship. It’s not hard
to demonstrate how the human desire for alcohol (bread, too) helped to redirect the
evolutionary path of this particular fungus, as our species selected yeasts for their
ability to ferment various substrates and produce varying amounts of alcohol or carbon
dioxide. But for our relationship to this yeast to qualify as coevolution, the changes
must be reciprocal. So can we make a case that
S. cerevisiae
changed us,
too?