May 28, 2015
This weekend kicks off the sprawling 10-day celebration of everything beer-related known as Philly Beer Week. The suds-soaked festival includes bar crawls, beer tastings, and tap takeovers hosted by some of the biggest names in craft brewing — Allagash, Troegs, Dogfish Head, and Ommegang, just to name a few.
But for a growing number of Philadelphians, drinking beer has become only half the fun. Homebrewing has become a popular hobby among many beer aficionados who are deepening their love for ales, stouts, and the like by creating their own concoctions. As much a science as it is an art, brewing beer combines elements of cooking, chemistry, and biology to create the fine alcoholic beverage we all know and love.
“Homebrewing in Philly has definitely grown and taken off, and there's constantly new people coming to club meetings,” said Tom Pettine of the Philly Homebrew Outlet in Fishtown, which hosts the Philadelphia Homebrew Club's 115-plus members once a month for tastings and presentations. “It's a great do-it-yourself project, and once they brew beer, they want to do cider and wine.”
Getting started with homebrewing is now easier than ever with the many beginner beer-making kits out there, designed to be especially foolproof for the uninitiated brewer. These are sort of the homebrew equivalent of a Betty Crocker cake mix that contain all the ingredients (just add water!), along with most of the necessary equipment. After making a few batches and getting to know the process, many homebrewers can then riff off recipes and create their own unique beers.
“We've done a Philly soft pretzel beer, a kimchi beer, a chamomile wheat beer — there's a lot of flexibility and fun in homebrewing,” said Pettine. “Learning the science behind it will help you avoid making a beer that you might dump down the drain.”
Beer is made up of four core ingredients: grain, hops, yeast, and water. The grain used for beer is typically barley that has been through the malting process. Malting involves letting the raw kernels steep in water until they start to grow a bit, which exposes the seeds' starch reserves. They are then dried out to stop the growth process so the plant can't consume the starch reserves, and thus the barley is frozen in a state of maximum starch content.
There's a lot of flexibility and fun in homebrewing, Learning the science behind it will help you avoid making a beer that you might dump down the drain. -- Tom Pettine of the Philly Homebrew Outlet
This now-malted barley also contains a special enzyme called diastase just under the husk. When heating a mixture of malted barley and water — “mash” in brewing lingo — diastase activates and converts the starch into maltose, a type of sugar. The grains themselves are strained out and discarded, leaving behind “wort”: a solution of water, maltose, proteins, and various carbohydrates.
The wort is then boiled for sterilization, during which hops can be added, and it is rapidly cooled before fermentation. During fermentation, yeast is added to the mix — this single-celled fungus eats the maltose to produce carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol. The carbon dioxide gives the beer its fizziness, while the ethyl alcohol provides the booze.
Yeast was one of the earliest domesticated organisms. Even before we knew that such a microbe existed, our ancient cultures harnessed its powers to bake bread and brew alcoholic concoctions roughly 8,000 years ago. Thousands of years later, French chemist Louis Pasteur observed the organism itself and explained its role in making beer.
“Before Louis Pasteur looked in a microscope and discovered that yeast was what was going on in a brewery, all beers were randomly fermented with whatever got in them,” said Hummel. “The only difference they noticed was that sometimes the beers were a little cleaner, and sometimes they were more sour and funky.”
Today, home brewers have the luxury of choosing yeast strains based on what style of beer they're making. Most beginners kits contain strains of ale yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), also known as “top-fermenting” yeast, used to produce ales, porters, stouts, and wheat beers. These microbes need contact with oxygen, so they gather at the top of the wort while fermenting.
Lager yeast (Saccharomyces uvarum), or “bottom-fermenting” yeast, don't require any oxygen to thrive. You'll find them hanging out on the bottom of your wort. Lager yeast is used for Pilsners, Dortmunders, Märzen, and Bocks.
“Yeast has a huge impact on the overall flavor of beer,” Pettine said. “You have Belgian strains that tend to be a little more funky, more wild. German strains tend to be straightforward and clean. American strains are all over the place.”
Along with strain, the fermentation temperature matters in terms of flavor. For instance, higher temperatures can produce chemical byproducts that taste like banana or spicy clove. Strains of lager yeast do well in colder temperatures, so many home brewers will convert a refrigerator or freezer into a controlled fermentation chamber to hold their lager.
Some brewers even adjust the mineral content of the water they use. Similar to how New Yorkers claim the city's water is responsible for its top-notch bagels and pizza dough, purists will use Irish water (or an approximation) to brew a stout and German water to brew a lager.
So what's the best way to get started with home brewing? Both Hummel and Pettine recommend buying a home brew kit that contains most of the necessary equipment in one bundle. Making ales are easier than lagers, since they don't require a cold storage cabinet for fermentation. Also, save the sour beers for when you're more advanced, since making them involves using wild yeast strains or bacteria that can infect your equipment and turn all your beers sour.
As with approaching any new hobby, the jargon and science can be daunting at first, but with the growing popularity of homebrewing, there's plenty of literature out there to help you learn. Dive in with a kit, get the basics down, improvise based on what your tastes — and have fun with it.
“Homebrewing is a unique thing in that it is both an art and a science,” Hummel said. “I've had beers that are technically perfect, but are devoid of a soul. Ideally, you have to have a good balance between the two.”
