Not Quite the Siebel Institute

But still.

Yesterday I went over to the brewhouse of Joe Walts (a.k.a. – his home) in order to fulfill my request for a schwarzbier. Walts nearly opened a brewpub and now works for a local brewery while contributing the geekiest material to Madison Beer Reivew.

The first thing to do when brewing beer is to get all of your equipment out of the basement. Here's the brew kettle, mash tun, lauter tun, and what have you.






I think the reason I love Grape Nuts cereal so much is because of its barley content. It smells just like it. Here's the grain bill.





And here I am running it through the mill.





We wanted lots of surface of the inside of the grain exposed. The husk, not so much.

Joe gave me the water hardness/pH lecture. His life on Easy Street in Michigan where the water was soft came to a screeching halt here in Madison where every gallon of tap water has the equivalent of about a stalagmite's worth of suspended solids. He treated the water prior to my arrival and so, when I drained one of those big Gatorade thingies, the bottom was covered in a thick layer of calcium that had dropped out of suspension. That's one of the reasons I love Joe. While I get all fired up about the use of long takes and wide angle lenses in movies, he gets all intense and excited about water hardness. I suspect that his wife would have abandoned him long ago were it not for his ability to satiate her beer desires.

As Joe said, brewing beer is simple. All you're doing is converting starch into sugars which yeast can eat and turn into alcohol. So yeah, when you step back far enough and look at the really big picture, brewing is pretty simple. But spend some time with him or read his posts at MBR and you won't think it simple. If you don't boil long enough your beer will taste like cream corn because the dimethyl sulfides remain. Did you fuck up the fermentation process? Well, that explains why your pale ale tastes like bananas instead of hops.

We let the mash steep in one of those Gatorade coolers. Mashing is when your malty enzymes break down starches into sugars and yeast loves itself some sugar. I used the special long plastic brewing spatula to give it a good stir. I presume this is to keep the temperature uniform. When the steeping was done, we separated our beer-to-be from the grain. I believe it was when the level of the liquid got to within an inch or so of the top of the grain that the cooler went from being a mash tun to a lauter tun. And so the sparging began.





Sparging is basically rinsing. You slowly add water to the mash so the sugars are set free to be eaten by the yeast later. Your pre-beer concoction is wort.



My precious…


It was at this point that Joe introduced me to a drink that is unique the brewing arena – the Hot Scotchie. I'm not sure where it came from but the idea is that you take some of your wort freshly drawn from the kettle and add a bit of scotch. In our case it received bourbon so I guess it technically wasn’t a Hot Scotchie but who cares. It was very tasty. The way I tasted it was that the sweet malt came through first followed by the bourbon. Although the booze became the predominant flavor, the malt was always there in the background tempering its sharpness. Good stuff.

Joe then cleared a spot on his patio and busted out a propane tank and burner. The wort was then boiled.

This is Joe using his super-secret brewing tongs. (I hope he doesn't mind me revealing his secret here.) You put one on the volume gradations marked on the outside of the kettle and you can compare that to the liquid level inside.





After about 35 minutes or so, I added the hops on schedule.





First it was Magnum hops followed by a slightly lesser amount of Hallertau. I really love the aroma of Hallertau. (No offense, Magnum.) It's on the spicy/piney side of things as opposed to U.S. hops that begin with the letter "C" which tend to me more floral and grapefruity. Joe noted that hops thrown in at the beginning of the boil add to the flavor while hops towards the end of the boil contribute more to aroma.

Here's some of our wort being carefully tested by a hydrometer which measure the specific gravity.





Basically you're measuring how much sugar is in the liquid. Your reading is a ratio of the density of the wort to the density of water at a certain temperature which was 60 degrees Fahrenheit, if I recall correctly. We were shooting for 1.049 and we ended up with a SG of 1.051. I think that you take the SG again after the yeast has chowed down on those sugars and then you apply a formula with the two readings to determine how much alcohol your beer has.

With the boil done our precious was cooled and then siphoned off into a fermentation vessel which was brought back in the house where our rehydrated yeast was pitched into it.






We aerated the proto-beer the old fashioned way: by shaking it. Before the yeast start snacking on sugar, I guess they need oxygen to grow to full strength and reproduce. Then you have a full army ready to make your alcohol.





Lastly Joe checked the seal, got the overflow tube in place, and we bid our tank farewell. For a while. Until February, my precious…





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"Schwarzbier" simply means "black beer" in German. I can't honestly say I've drank dozens of examples of the style but there are a couple versions I absolutely love. From Germany comes Köstritzer Schwarzbier. Just love the stuff. From these shores, a favorite is Sprecher Black Bavarian. BB is maltier than the Köstritzer and has more alcohol. When I'm in the mood for a bigger schwarzbier, I go with Sprecher. Köstritzer is a bit hoppier to my palate and has a cleaner taste. It's flavor is more of what you traditionally think of lagers as tasting like. (Anyone have any schwarzbier recommendations?)

At one point Joe asked, "Have you ever tasted wort before?" I don't think I had so he poured out a couple shots worth of the stuff. It was a bit lighter than we had anticipated but still a deep, dark brown. I was surprised at how little dark malt is required to make a dark beer. Look again at the photo of the grain above. It is mostly pale malt with a few specks of the dark stuff sprinkled in. For whatever reason I always thought that dark beers required a fairly hefty portion of the grain bill to be dark malts. Whodathunk?

Now, as for the taste of the wort. It was like…like…like an Old Scotchie without the liquor. Sweet water with malt flavor. It's amazing what those wee yeasties can do.

Lastly, since Joe's most recent blog post is about brewhouse efficiency, I want to note that we achieved a 92.9% rating. (I think that's what it was anyway.) BE is a measurement of how well you converted the starches into sugar. We were a bit above Joe's average and I attribute this to my professional stirring abilities and nascent sparging technique.