This newsletter was originally published via email on the 6th March 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right-hand side column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).
Shortly after I had settled in my new flat in Singapore a few years ago, I was out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. I stopped at Brewerkz on the Singapore River, a bit of an institution in the City-State, a brewery-pub and restaurant open since 1997.
I sat outside with a view of the river, Clarke Quay and the Saatchi & Saatchi office just across, where I worked at the time. I ordered a pint of their beer to enjoy on the terrace.
After a few minutes appreciating my surroundings, I started writing a list of things I like.
I was looking for a new hobby to keep myself busy in Singapore.
I was looking for something new to learn or practice, a new hobby to keep myself busy in Singapore outside of work. The two previous years while travelling I’d learned new skills with scuba diving and Thai massage, I thought it would be good to pursue this burgeoning tradition.
I got into drinking different kinds of British ales and beers when I first lived in London. A colleague at my first employer drank London Pride, a great example of the London porter beer style. The name porter appeared in the 18th century and was popularised by street and river porters in London, hence the name. It’s a dark beer, quite strong and hoppy by 18th century standards, hovering around 6.6% ABV. Shortly after for increased taxation reasons they started brewing a range of porters with different alcoholic strengths. Brewers called them “Single, double and triple Stout”. This is where the “stout” style of beer comes from, including Guinness, originally a “Double Stout London Porter” that was later exported to Ireland.
I started appreciating British ales and found out about CAMRA, The Campaign for Real Ale. They are an independent, voluntary organisation campaigning for real ale, community pubs and consumer rights. Founded in 1971, the four men who founded CAMRA were concerned that a handful of companies were taking over many pubs in the UK and standardising products with low quality and arguably bland flavoured beer.
Traditionally, British cask ales are unfiltered and unpasteurised.
Traditionally, the Great Britain is known for cask ales. This is unfiltered and unpasteurised beer conditioned and served from a cask. The carbonation is natural and no additional Co2 is added to the process. As a result they typically don’t have a lot of bubbles like German or American styles tend to have. The casks are served at room temperature, which is why I kept hearing about Britain’s “warm and flat beers” while growing up in France.
France and England having been “frenemies” for centuries I grew up hearing many such legends of the curious habits of our English neighbours, gathered from peers who had been on holidays or school exchanges there and telling us tales of the mysterious foodstuffs they consumed like jelly, Marmite and lamb in mint sauce.
I warmed up to most English foods since, except Marmite. I’ll probably never get why people inflict this upon themselves. It still fits with the overall theme given the black substance is made from spent brewer’s yeast. The process was originally discovered by a German scientist in the late nineteenth century (go figure what he was trying to accomplish when eating concentrated brewer’s yeast. I imagine it was some sort of bet).
While I worked at iris, I was lucky to be near one of the only craft beer bars in London, The Rake by Borough Market. That’s when I also started discovering craft beers from other countries such as the United States, Norway or Denmark.
In 2008 I found out about these new Scottish brewers, growing and sponsoring a few different events I attended like Twestival in 2009, now they have bars everywhere and are apparently planning to build a brewery in the U.S. as well.
You might have heard of Brewdog by now.
I was hooked on the wide variety of flavours available in unpasteurised and unfiltered craft beers.
Quite naturally, beer appeared on the list I was writing that day.
It occurred to me that I’d heard some people make their own beer at home.
I walked back home and started watching home brewing videos on Youtube to learn the basics. I also found out there were two shops in Singapore selling home brewing material.
A couple weeks later I was the proud owner of a new home brewing kit.
The basic beer-making process is surprisingly easy.
Beer is the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic beverage as well as probably the oldest.
After all, beer is the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic beverage as well as probably the oldest. After water and tea it is the third most drank beverage in the world.
Beer features in the written history of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Its main attribute being fermented cereals, some believe initial forms of beer to be as old as the first steps in agriculture of cereals. A 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicts people drinking a beverage believed to be beer through reed straws. A 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron Goddess of brewing, contains the oldest known beer recipe.
Talking about recipes, modern beer is made from four key ingredients:
1. Water, the body of beer
Water constitutes over 95% of the beverage. In fact, during the Middle Ages when water wasn’t deemed safe for consumption, people drank beer instead.
Water often contains minerals, nutrients that yeast will use to ferment the beer and give it flavour compounds. The water matters greatly to the style of flavour of the beer brewed. For example Plzen (Pilsen) in the Czech Republic is famous for having soft water and being almost completely free of minerals. That turned out to be great for making the clear and crisp Pilsener lagers the Czechs are famous for.
In the UK, Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire is kind of the opposite in the brewing world. Their water is hard. Local water from boreholes contained high levels of dissolved salts and resulting sulphate in the mineralised water famously brings out hop flavours.
2. Malt, the backbone of beer
Beer is fermented grain. We use barley in vast majority. Malting is the process by which the harvested grains are steeped in water just long enough to begin sprouting, and then are dried again to interrupt the process.
The sprouted grain releases nutrients and sugars that would be used by the plant to grow, and that will be used to ferment into beer instead.
The malted grain can also be roasted, and depending on the time and technique, this contributes an important to part of the colour and style of the beer being made. Stouts for example contain roasted and grilled malt, giving darker colour, hints of coffee and cocoa in the flavour.
3. Hops, the beer’s personality
In antique times grain fermented beer-like drinks in France or the UK didn’t use hops. They used a variety of different foraged herbs to give the fermented drink flavour.
In 1516 Brewers and legislators in Bavaria got together to draft the “Reinheitsgebot” (“German Beer Purity Law”), stating that beer would contain water, barley malt and hops.
Hops provide the bitterness in beer as well as a great deal of flavour and aroma. It’s the flower of a plant and was first used in beer in the 9th century. In addition to bitter, zesty, flowery, zesty and citrusy flavouring, hops have convenient antibacterial effects that preserve beer. This also helped make it a very common water replacement during the Middle-Ages.
As a side note, the hop plant is a cousin of cannabis and their flowers look similar. The active compounds in hops that are used to bitter and give aromas to beers have psychoactive effects in cannabis. Human beings have been interested in and experimenting with a variety of psychoactive substances for a long time.
4. Yeast, the beer’s soul
When they wrote the “Reinheitsgebot” in 1516, they omitted yeast. That’s because we didn’t know about it and wouldn’t find out for certain until Louis Pasteur came round to study and identify these microorganisms and their role in alcoholic fermentation in the 19th century.
These little microbes absorb simple sugars from the barley malts and transform them into alcohol.
Yeast also provides a whole range of flavours depending on the beer styles sought. It is often the most kept secret from brewers as an important point of differentiation amongst breweries. Indeed they often purchase malted barley or hops from similar supply sources, while the recipes and know-how from the brewer matters of course, the choice of yeast can be the distinctive yet difficult to explain reason people go back to one beer rather than another brewer’s.
The difference between ales and lagers are a matter of the type of yeast used and the fermentation temperature. Ales ferment at higher temperatures (around 20-25ºC / 68-77ºF, while lagers ferment at colder temperatures (often around 10-15ºC / 50-59ºF).
Now we have all the main ingredients let’s find out about the basic beer brewing process.
First you have to measure and heat all the water you’re going to need to brew. This has been calculated in advance based on your recipe. It changes based on the volume of beer you’re brewing of course, and also depends on the material you are using.
It has been heated to a specific temperature conducive to extract most of the simple sugars from the malted barley. The target temperature approximately ranges from 65ºC (150ºF) to 76ºC (170ºF). This part of the process generally calls for pouring the warm water in a prepared recipient like a water cooler that can maintain the water’s temperature for an hour to 90 minutes.
Then you extract this sweet barley juice called the wort, and pour it into a large boiling pot.
Boiling has two functions: sterilizing the mixture and for hops to provide bitterness. When they’re boiled, the alpha acids in hops are broken down and add to the bitterness.
The brew boils for an hour to 90 minutes for most recipes, with different varieties of hops added at different stages of the boiling time depending on recipes.
From the moment you turn the stove off, the wort’s temperature has to be brought down from boiling point to approximately 20ºC (68ºF) as fast as possible in order to add the yeast.
This is a tricky time and everything in the preparation area has to be spotless clean to avoid contamination.
This is a tricky time and everything in the preparation area has to be spotless clean to avoid contamination by bacteria that can easily spoil the beer. Different techniques can be used to cool the mixture down, from throwing giant iced plastic bottles in there, to copper coils running continuous cold water. At the same time stirring the wort aerates it, which is a good thing, sufficient amounts of oxygen will stimulate the yeast and allow it to multiply and thrive.
When the wort has finally cooled down, the yeast will be able to survive in the wort. If it’s too hot, a lot of the yeast dies off. It should be dropped in and then the fermenter is hermetically sealed to prevent air into the fermenting environment. An air lock, usually with a small amount of water, lets the C02 generated by the fermenting process to evacuate while preventing air and bacteria in the fermentation environment.
The primary fermentation takes a few days and generates a scum of dead yeast that accumulates to the surface of the brew. If the recipe calls for it, this can be the time to add hops to brew in the fermenter like tea. It’s called “dry hopping” and gives the beer citrusy aromas. It is a popular process with the American-styled pale ales and IPAs (India Pale Ale).
Leave the brew a few more days and it will be ready to be bottled. A small amount of brewer’s sugar is typically added during the bottling process to encourage any residual yeast to finish fermentation and creates Co2 in the bottle, giving the beer its final carbonation level. Bottles should be left to complete fermentation for a few weeks before being drank.
All in all the process takes three to six weeks from the brewing day to the day you can invite friends around to taste.
In Singapore, I typically alternated between traditional and original beer styles. Even though I didn’t completely master main styles like pale ales, I enjoyed experimenting with ingredients.
My most original recipes included a brown ale with pecan nuts and maple syrup; and a bourbon and vanilla pod oatmeal stout. The latter was like a dessert beer and quite delicious.
I haven’t brewed since I left Singapore and I miss it now.
I haven’t brewed since I left Singapore and I miss it now. I hope to brew again once I’m settled in my new place in London. I love that while it’s fairly easy to make a drinkable beer, there’s a whole world to learn in order to make different styles of beers and it takes mastery to be able to reproduce the same beer again and again. I’ll tell you once I start again and maybe offer to send you some samples to taste it.
I hope you enjoyed reading, enjoy the rest of your weekend! If you have beer, drink with moderation of course.
If you’d like to listen to something I’ve just published a new episode of the podcast, an interview with Philippa White. She founded The International Exchange (TIE), a fascinating organisation that works with creative communications professionals and places them with non-profit organisations in developing countries in need of their skills.
Cheers,
Willem
