We discussed Munton’s malt a little while ago.  The big name in brewing malts in North America, however is Briess.  You will undoubtedly find their malts at any homebrew store you visit in North America.  So how do their malts stack up to Munton’s?  They are excellent quality products and are used in commercial and homebrewing extensively.  We’ve never noticed a huge difference in the quality of the dry malt from Briess vs that from Muntons.  Some people prefer Munton’s malt extract to Briess and we’ve found that it may sediment slightly less than the Briess DME.  However, that being said, this is still an excellent product that will make great beer.  If price is important to you this will almost undoubtedly be cheaper in North America than Munton’s will. 

The big advantage to Briess malts is that they are widely available here in liquid form.  That is our preferred malt packaging, and malt is substantially cheaper that way than in dried form.  We have had great success brewing with Briess liquid extract.  In particular their wheat extract is excellent and works very well for German style Hefeweizens.  The company has been in business since 1876, so they are certainly doing something right.  Homebrew is just a tiny part of their business, but they seem to meet homebrewing needs with the same level of quality that they provide to their commercial partners.

Malting is the process of taking grain and turning it into a combination of sugars and proteins. This is key to the production of great beer since malt is essentially what’s fed to yeast to produce beer.  Large breweries often do their own malting, taking barley and hops, and sometimes wheat, in and producing beer.  Other companies, and most homebrewers rely on someone else to handle this early stage of the brewing process.  We do exclusively extract brewing for reasons of time and space, so we rely on good quality malt for our end products.  Beer is mostly malt, so making that decision matters.

One of the celebrated names in malting is Muntons.  Their own slogan, as we mention in the title, is “World Class Malt.”  And that it is.  Muntons is based in the UK but their products are available worldwide.  If you speak to any experienced home brewer they will tell you that Muntons’ products are as good as any out there.  We’ve always had good experiences with both their liquid and dried extracts.  The dried extracts are much easier to find stateside for reasons of shipping cost. They also make home brewing ingredient kits, but since we’re partial to our own recipes we have never tried them. Given the quality of their other products, these are likely to be good.  We always lean toward fresh hops, however.

There are plenty of other companies that produce good quality malt.  However, if you’re buying top shelf ingredients, Muntons is probably on your list.

Having just been on the topic of bottling, this seems like a good time to address the age old question about which base to use for priming your bottles, corn sugar, or dry malt extract?  There are, of course, other sugars that people use for this purpose, including molasses, table sugar, brown sugar, priming drops from various manufacturers, and a whole lot more.  But the two main staples are the two in the title of this post: corn sugar and dry malt extract (DME).  To understand which is better for your purpose, you need to understand what you’re doing when priming.

Bottled conditioned beers are carbonated by the gas produced by a final stage of fermentation.  The yeast is given some sugar to eat, it produces carbon dioxide, and the close confines of the bottle force the carbon dioxide into suspension in the liquid since there is nowhere else for it to go.  We’re not trying to change the taste of the beer here, nor produce more alcohol (though a little is formed).  The chief concern is getting the yeast to efficiently generate carbon-dioxide, while not affecting the high quality of our beer.

So lets analyze corn sugar and dry malt extract for that purpose alone, initially.  Corn sugar is made of simple sugar, all of which is fermentable.  There is nothing in corn sugar that will produce additional sediment beyond the yeast cells that will form no matter what sugar you prime with.  Corn sugar is easily and very efficiently consumed by the yeast to produce carbonation quickly and reliably in all bottles.

Dry malt extract on the other hand is made of several sugars, some of which are not easily fermented (or at all in some cases) and will take longer to produce carbonation.  It also costs significantly more than corn sugar, which is quite inexpensive by contrast.  DME will leave some leftovers in the bottle.  Some people claim these help with head retention in the resulting beer, but in our experience this is not noticeable.  On the other hand, in some cases a krauzen forms in the bottle when bottling with dry malt extract and that can be undesirable for the potential drinker of the bottle.  It is also more difficult to evenly distribute the DME in all of the bottles, resulting in less even carbonation among bottles.

It’s our opinion that in nearly all cases corn sugar is superior to DME for bottling.  This is not to say there is anything wrong with using the extract, simply that we don’t believe it works as well as corn sugar for this purpose.  As with anything in brewing, people will do what they want.  But our results have always been better with corn sugar, and we believe logical analysis is on our side.

In the future we may do a back-to-back comparison where we brew a single batch of beer, divide it in two at bottling time, and use corn sugar for half and DME for the other half.  If you’d be interested in seeing that, leave a comment.

Cheers!

There are lots of things you can do to make your brew clearer when that quality is desirable for the style–and it’s not always.  But if you’re brewing a lager or pilsner and want to have the brew cleared there are a few simple things you can do that will help.  There are also additives you can put in your beer while fermenting, but we’ll save those for another time.  What we’re talking about here are things you can do whlie brewing to help out with clarification.

What causes cloudy beer?  Generally there are three main factors:

1. Proteins left from the malt and specialty grains that are suspended in the wort.
2. Small clumps of yeast that remain suspended after fermentation.
3. Yeast clumps in the bottle from bottle conditioning.

The first of these issues is most easily addressed at the time of the brewing. The simplest thing to do is to add Irish moss to your brew just about 10 minutes before the end of the boil.  This is a natural algae that grows along the ocean in Northern Europe and other places.  It attracts proteins from the brew and helps keep them clumped to the moss so that they strain out of the wort when you put it into the fermenter.  It’s called a fining agent, which is anything that is added to clarify beer. This stuff is not expensive and you only need about 1 tbsp. of it for a 5 gallon boil.

The second thing you can do about this issue is to cool the wort as quickly as possible, which helps the proteins drop out of suspension.  Fancy brewers do this with a wort chiller.  In our guide we provide some solutions that are simpler and several orders of magnitude cheaper.

So what about #2 and #3 then?  Several factors can affect that.  The primary one is which yeast you are using.  If your style is a clear one, then you ought to use a yeast that has high flocculation.  That’s a brewing term that means “high clumping factor.”  Basically the larger the clumps the yeast form, the more easily they drop out of suspension.  White Labs and Wyeast post this information about most of their strains, and some other yeast suppliers do as well.

In commercial brewing of bottle conditioned beers it is not uncommon to use a different strain of yeast to handle the bottle conditioning, one that produces less sediment.  That’s a bit extreme for home brewing, and not something we ever bother with.  If you’re hardcore you could experiment with this.  We advocate simple solutions, so we won’t go into it here.

As I said before there are other things you can add to the fermentation process to clear your beer and we’ll get into those another time.  Generally this is not needed.

Keep in mind that clearer beer is not always desirable.  Many styles look and taste better with a bit of clouding.

EDIT: Also see Part 2 in this series.

Yesterday we covered why you might want to pay attention to the temperature at which your wort ferments into beer.  That’s all well and good for people with lots of expensive equipment, or for commercial breweries.  But what about at home where you don’t have all that?  Not to worry.

We always say this, but it’s worth repeating any number of times (or is that a gust of hot air I hear?): brewers have been doing this for millennia now and climate control in the modern sense is less than a hundred years old.  That’s a lot of time on the side of simplicity.  Still we can use some 18th century (1724 to be exact) technology to do this simple job, thanks to Mr. Fahrenheit.  We use a thermometer.

Our other tool belongs entirely to the natural world and we’re subjected to its patterns constantly, so we might as well take advantage of it.  As the planet tilts, so do the seasons change, and that’s good for brewers who like variety in their beer.  For those of you in the equatorial areas this tool is less helpful, but for a large portion of the world’s population you can use seasons to your advantage.

So those are the tools.  Secondly you need to remember those temperature ranges from yesterday’s post:

• Ale yeast are happiest at 60-75 degrees Fahrenheit (18-24 Celsius).
• Lager yeast are happiest at about 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit (10-18 Celsius).

As brewers have been doing for centuries, lagers work best in the colder seasons.  You know which ones those are where you live.  If you’re fermenting with lager yeast pick the late fall or early spring, or whenever the season is likely to be a fairly even temperature in the lower ranges.  The dead of winter can be good, too, if you can find a good spot in a basement for the fermentation to happen.

Ale is easily brewed all winter in a climate-controlled house and in summer in a climate-controlled house since it’s happiest in the same temperature range as we humans are.

Your house or apartment has a lot of different temperature zones.  You might not notice too much, but it’s true.  We can sniff them out with a simple house thermometer.  It doesn’t need to be digital.  Just get any old air-temperature-measuring thermometer.  Now we follow these steps:

1. Leave the thermometer in various zones of the house where it’s appropriate to ferment beer (remember it can be messy on occasion if you’re not careful).  An hour in each spot or so should be good enough.
2. Check the readings and write down the temperatures at various places.
3. Find the place that has the closest temperature to the one you need.

It’s that simple.  You’ll be shocked at the ten degree differences you can find in your house.  This is different by season depending on whether or not you have a furnace heating part of the house, etc.

Here are some general suggestions:

• Lagers work well in cold basements and cold closets in spring, fall, and winter.
• Ales work well in those same places in summer.

As always, if this raises questions, feel free to ask.  Enjoy your brew!

Does it matter at what temperature your beer ferments? If you’ve looked around at recipes you will have read all kinds of very specific directions about temperatures and sometimes it seems pretty arbitrary.  Nobody explains why or how.  This will be a two-part posting about what this is all about, today, and then tomorrow we’ll talk about what to do if you’re not lucky enough to have a climate-controlled fermentation setup.  We don’t!  You don’t need fancy stuff to brew great beer. That’s what we’re here for. Remember that people have brewed outstanding beer for centuries before electricity was discovered.  This is low-tech stuff.

The answer to the first question above is: yes, it can.  It totally depends on the yeast you’re using and the desired flavor for your beer.  When you dump a packet of yeast into a freshly brewed batch, what happens is a chemical process undertaken by the digestive system of yeast.  These are very simple single-cell organisms and they are profoundly affected by their environment.

We do the first step for them by giving them the right ingredients to work on.  But getting the temperature right helps the yeast be more efficient and, sometimes, less efficient with certain chemical reactions that take place.  What happens for one yeast cell is not very important, but when you magnify it by the huge number of yeast we’re growing in a batch of beer, it matters.  This is, after all, where most of transformation from sugar water to beer happens.

There are two general families of beer yeast.  Ale yeast and lager yeast.  There are other distinctions between the two, but here we’ll concentrate on temperature ranges.  Ale yeasts are happiest at about 60-75 degrees Fahrenheit (18-24 Celsius) while lagers yeasts are happiest at about 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit (10-18 Celsius).

So that’s great, but how do you know what to do for your particular beer?  Many recipes don’t tell you.  The yeast producers step in to fill the void.  Good businesses like Wyeast and White Labs give you information on their websites.  Here is an example.  Let’s say we’re brewing a stout and we want to use Wyeast’s Irish Ale Yeast to do it.  We hop onto their web site and look it up.  If you click on that link you’ll see that Wyeast says this about the yeast:

Beers fermented in the lower temperature range produce dry and crisp beers to fruity beers with nice complexity in the upper range. Ester production is enhanced with fermentation temperatures above 64 degrees F (18 C).

This looks like speaking in tongues to the uninitiated, but what’s it’s telling you is that the yeast ferments well over a range of temperatures, giving you an idea of what to expect from the yeast in the different temperature ranges.

In plain English what this says is that fruitier tasting beers (think banana-like smells) are fermented by this yeast at higher temperatures. At lower temperatures you get a nice, dry, crisp beer.  Esters produced by the yeast are what affects this fruitiness.  So the 64 degrees marker shown in this spec means that if you want a fruity taste in your stout, aim for a temperature above this.  If not, aim low.  Generally for a stout, as opposed to some other dark beers, you don’t want a fruity taste.

So in this case we now know we ought to ferment below 64 degrees (probably around 60-62 degrees) for our most desired taste.

Tomorrow: how do I control the temperature?

Let’s say you find a recipe that calls for a certain variety of hops.  But you can’t find that variety of hops near you.  Well it turns out that this is a pretty common dilemma, and given the immense array of hops out there, you have a number of possibilities to choose from.  This is where we come in.  We’ve assembled a hop information chart with as much information as we’ve been able to amass about hop varieties.

Here’s how to use this:

• If you’re looking to brew something that requires Chinook hops, for example, you look down the left column for the variety.
• In the Substitute column you’ll see a list of hop varieties that can be substituted for this variety.
• In the Uses Column you will see how this hop is typically used.  If you are using it for bitterness you can also cross reference the alpha acid % column which tells you how bitter the hop is.

Here’s the full chart!

Enjoy!

Brewers are lucky enough to get the choice of many varieties of hops, and thankfully home brewers have access to many of them. Some are harder to get in various regions of the world depending on what is grown closest to you. Here in the Pacific Northwest it’s quite easy to get Cascade and Mt Hood hops, for example.  Finding Polish Lubliner hops is nearly impossible.

But worldwide one of the more celebrated hops is the Czech Saaz hop, originally from the region around Žatec (Saaz in German). Due to its popularity it has generally been available to home brewers in all parts of the world.  Unfortunately of late it has been harder to get in the U.S.

Plzen

Hops have varying levels of bitterness and aroma and are used accordingly. The Saaz hop has a low bitterness factor and a stronger aroma, and thus is used to give some of the aromatic character to signature European beers. This type of hop is known as a “noble hop” and shares this naming with other European hops like the Hallertauer and Tettnanger. All are high aroma, low bitterness hops.  Great pilsners like Pilsner Urquell and Budvar (Czechvar in the U.S.) are strongly influenced by this hop.  The pilsner was invented in the Czech town of Plzeň, hence the local hop shaped the style.

If you’re brewing a pilsner and can get your hands on Saaz hops, they’re a great way to go.  Definitely one of my favorites.