Getting to know your ingredients - Water (part two)

You can make good beers without knowing anything about brewing water.If you are lucky, you might choose an ideal grist for your water profile and things click into place by accident, resulting in the best beer you've ever drank. In general, if it's good enough to drink, it's good enough to make beer from. If you have high chlorine/chloramine levels in your water, you may want to just add half a crushed campden tablet to your brewing liquor to dispel them. Many brewers do this just in case. I'm not aware of any damage it can do if not entirely necessary, and they cost next to nothing. If you're happy to change a little more, please read on;

Water typically composes around 95% of our beer, so it’s very helpful when we start off with the right profile. It is often seen as an advanced topic, and it certainly can be, as can almost every other aspect of brewing when you go into enough detail, but it doesn’t need to be too complicated. 

There is plenty of software and many online applications to help us, so if we’re happy learning ‘how’ and willing to put the ‘why’ on the back seat for a while, you should be able to improve your beers quite easily.

It’s worth noting that brewing is a natural process, not a linear one, so the calculations made on our behalf by the software can’t be 100% accurate, but they should give us a very good indication of what can be changed to adapt our water profile to certain beer types.

I will be using my own water as an example for this post, looking at alkalinity, pH and the ratio between sulphate and chloride.

In order to examine this, I gathered some information from my local water supplier’s website and used a Salifert kH/Alk pack to test my waters alkalinity. This is what I found;

I was unable to obtain the Magnesium and pH, so have estimated them. Fortunately, they aren’t crucial to this exercise. 

The calculator on brewersfriend.com found here is an excellent resource for evaluating and adjusting our water chemistry.

I will concentrate particularly on the water used in the mash. It is important to get the pH here to a suitable range, most often quoted between 5.2 and 5.5 at room temperature. Getting it wrong may result in undesirable tannin extraction, lower efficiency, haze or just a generally lousy beer.
You may notice above, my estimated water pH is 8. This will naturally reduce when adding malt due to its acidity; darker grains imparting more acidity than lighter base malts.

Alkalinity & pH

It took me a while to ‘get’ Alkalinity, and if like me you find practical examples helpful, this video compares alkalinity to pH and assisted my understanding. Alkalinity is basically the buffering capacity in our water. It is the ‘bouncer’ on the door of the ideal pH club. The bigger the bouncer (the higher the alkalinity) the less our malt is able to naturally reduce the pH. For example, with my alkalinity of 28ppm CaCO3, when using 5kg of a 3 Lovibond base malt, my mash pH is estimated at 5.67. If Alkalinity is increased to 150ppm; the malt only brings it down to 5.84.

We can reduce our alkalinity by adding Gypsum (calcium sulphate) or Calcium Chloride (as well as other salts, but let’s keep it straight forward). In this example, it would take a fair amount of salt additions to reduce the alkalinity enough to get down to the ideal pH, which is not ideal. Another option is increasing the acidity. This can be achieved by adding darker malts or acids. Let’s suppose we want to make a pale beer, and are happy to increase the colour to 6 SRM. The calculator shows the acidity of the extra dark malts brings the mash pH down to 5.63 from 5.84. We can then add 150g of acidulated malt to nudge the pH down to 5.41 which is within the ideal range.

Calcium & Sulphate/Chloride Ratio

Returning to my own water profile, I notice my Calcium and Sulphate levels are low. I am reliably informed that the low level of Calcium could be a contributor to hazy beers which I have suffered with. I want to increase the levels of this from 36 to above 50, or preferably around 100ppm. I have a few options here – I could use Gypsum, Calcium Chloride, Chalk, Baking soda etc… etc…
As my Sulphate is also low, I will opt for Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate). A teaspoon (4g) of Gypsum bring my levels up to “normal”.

Another thing to consider is the balance between Sulphates and Chloride. If I wanted a hoppy beer, I would want a ratio favouring Sulphates and the opposite if a more malty beer is desired. After the addition of Gypsum, I now have 21 mg/l if Chloride and 95 mg/l of Sulphate, so the ratio between them is 4.5-1 in favour of sulphate. This is classed as “extra bitter”. 

Let’s suppose I’m making a beer that is only moderately hoppy. I could either add table salt to increase the chloride, or reduce the gypsum addition to half a teaspoon and make up the calcium deficit with half a teaspoon of calcium chloride. I would opt for the latter to keep additions to a minimum. This would bring the Sulphate to 70 mg/l and the Chloride to 42 – the balance now considered appropriate for slightly bitter beers.

To illustrate further, I will show my process of designing a water profile for a stout. The colour is 40 SRM and the grist contains 10% roasted colour, the total weight is 5kg. I will be using 35L of water in total, 12.5 of which in the mash.

After this information is added, because my water is naturally very low in alkalinity, the acidic malt has pushed the pH down to 4.94, so here we actually need to increase the pH. We will do this by increasing the Alkalinity, but I also want to increase the calcium and sulphate whilst attempting to balance the sulphate/chloride ratio towards chloride to help the malt character shine through.

If I add 3g of chalk (calcium carbonate) and 3g of bicarbonate of soda to the mash, this increases my calcium to 50 mg/l, the alkalinity to 105 and crucially, the mash pH to 5.2. I will address the other issues in the boil.

I would like to increase sulphates whilst balancing the ratio with chloride to favour a malty beer. To do this I can add 8g of salt and 4g of gypsum to the boil. The resulting water report looks like this;

The additions I have made give me what I wanted. A pH of 5.2, a suitable amount of calcium and a balance of sulphates & chloride favouring a malty beer.

This way of tackling water using a water calculator is very much trial and error, experimenting with additions and checking levels along the way, always mindful that each salt or acid addition will generally make more than just the desired change to your profile. If you can kill two birds with one stone, you should. Once you’ve played around with the calculator, you become more accustomed to its functions and it starts to look much more straight forward.

I can’t stress enough though, the theory isn’t going to be 100% accurate, but the alternatives are to either ignore the water and hope for the best, or spend huge amounts of time and resources testing and evaluating practical experiments.

I hope you have found this helpful, if you are interested in reading further, I highly recommend John Palmer's How to Brew. This is a comprehensive book detailing all aspects of brewing from beginner to advanced. I have a copy on hand on brew day and have found it helpful on many occasions. 

If you have made it this far, thank you for your efforts.The topic can be daunting and many brewers never get this far. I realise water isn't the most fascinating part to brewing, but it can make the world of difference. To quote John Palmer himself, "with a little knowledge about water, you can turn a good beer into a great one".

Please take the time to read my posts about hops, malt and water part one.

Getting to know your ingredients - Water (part one)

In Western Czech Republic, proudly sits Pilsen, the birth place of the worlds most consumed beer, Pilsner.

Beer had been produced in the Bohemian City for hundreds of years before Pilsner but was inferior in quality to those made in Germany to the west. So much so that many of the beers in the city were imported from Nuremburg and Bavaria. It came to a head in 1836 when the brewers got together and chucked away barrels and barrels of this swill. It was potentially dangerous to drink, and it just wasn't good enough, something had to change.

Josef Groll

At around this time, the world was coming to terms with yeast. It wasn't yet fully understood, but they knew what yeast did, even if they didn't know why or what it was exactly. The poor quality ales of the time are thought to derive from poor fermentation techniques due to a lack of knowledge of the process. 

So in comes the “Gordon Ramsey” of 1830’s European brewing; a young Bavarian named Josef Groll who was appointed to facilitate an increase in quality and consistency.

At his disposal, Mr Groll had some Bavarian yeast (reportedly smuggled out of the region by a monk), a good supply of Saaz hops, some suitable caverns for lagering and some very soft water from a local well. The hops will have been familiar to the brewer, being part of the Noble Hop family used widely in Bavaria and the rest of the process will have needed his experience and ingenuity to turn around the fortunes of the brewing fraternity of Pilsen.

Work began immediately, and within a few years the raw ingredients were transformed into a pale, clear, crisp, spicy, refreshing beer of the likes that had never been enjoyed before. Shortly afterwards, imports slowed and for the first time, the Country had a booming export beer market. The original Pils, Pilsner Urquell was no doubt a fixture in bars of the time and is still regarded as one of the finest Pilsners in the world today. The style became the subject of many imitations, from as far out as the USA, but even using the same malt, hops, yeast and process, brewed elsewhere, you would struggle to achieve such excellent results. This perhaps is due to the most subtle ingredient of this beer being the most important - Water.

Pilsen water is soft, low in alkalinity and other ions important brewing beer. A perfect balance of water and grist creates an ideal pH during the mash which gives such a fantastic balance found in beers such as Pilsner Urquell. Conversely, the hard, high alkaline water of Dublin lends itself perfectly for the dark, roasted, acidic malts used in Guinness. If you brewed Stout with Pilsen water and a Pilsner with water from Dublin, without any alterations, it's safe to say you wouldn't have great beers. These are two of the extreme examples however, and the majority of us probably will have a water profile somewhere in the middle, perhaps leaning one way or the other. 

In part two of this post, I will look at my own water, in an attempt to determine what style of beer it would be most suited to, and how I can alter my water profile to suit a different style. It is more technical than my other posts, but I urge you to stay with it, if you are a new comer to brewing or a seasoned beer maker that hasn't got around to looking into water, I'm confident it can help clear a few things up. 

Firstly, I need to find out what the make-up of my water is. To do this, I will consult my water report and use a Salifert Alkalinity test kit. I want to find out the levels of following;

Alkalinity, Calcium, Magnesium, Sulphate, Chloride and Sodium. 

With this information, I can consult the water calculator found here, to tell me what I'm working with and it's relevance.

Please read my next post; Getting to know you ingredients – Water (part two) to find out more.

Getting to know your ingredients – Hops

There is a story that India Pale Ales were the creation of George Hodgson and his Bow Brewery of London. In the early 1750's when there was a call for home comforts in British colonies in India, Mr Hodgson found himself in the right place at the right time.

His beers, often Porters or October beers were held in high regard within the colonies. The time at sea in often warm climates significantly aged his product. The pale October beers faired particularly well as they were very high in alcohol content and balanced with a healthy addition of hops. They were perfectly matured and well received upon arrival in the East.

Although probable that the Bows Brewery beers were quite excellent, their success was likely, at least in part due to their location, near the Docks of the East India Company. Throw in a generous line of credit permitted to his customers and George Hodgson had the ticket to monopolise the market of ex-pat's and the serving military in India.

The brewery changed hands within the family a few times and in the 1820's the brewery decided to ship the beers to India themselves to maximise profit. On top of this, they turned their back on the long standing arrangement with the East India Company, and along with hefty price increases, credit was no longer taken and sales became a cash only arrangement. About 25 years later, with out the might of their former business partner, the Bow Brewery shut up shop with the then owner, Fredrick Hodgson, reportedly fleeing to Paris with the wife of an Indian army officer.

Of course like most 'stories' there are some irregularities. Firstly pale, strong, hoppy beers like the aforementioned October beer were shipped to India long before George Hodgson was on the scene. Also the term India Pale Ale was not recorded prior to the 1830's, with one of the first advertising their product as such being Bass in 1841. So George Hodgson may have been an entrepreneurial legend creating a successful brewery which traded for almost a hundred years but the “Godfather of IPA's”? Probably not. What is credible however, is that accompanying a high ABV, hops and their preservative properties have greatly influenced the type of beers available in the wider world over the last three centuries.

...which brings me conveniently to the topic for this blog; Hops.

When referring to hops, brewers will be referring to the female flowers of the plant Humulus Lupulus. This incredibly complex and diverse flower imparts three main characteristics on our beers. Bitterness, Flavour and Aroma.

In truth, the subject of hops is extremely extensive and many a book is devoted solely to the topic. As these short blogs are intended only as a summary into the world of brewing, I will bullet point what I believe are the main areas of relevance for the home brewer; 

Bitterness – Lupulin glands within hops contain a key contributor to bitterness, Alpha Acids (AA) When purchasing hops, the AA% should be detailed, the higher the content, the more bitterness it should impart on our beer. Most hops considered 'bittering hops' will have a high Alpha Acid content. When boiled, the Alpha Acids become Isomerised and it is these Isa-Alpha Acids which increase IBU's (International Bitterness Units). The longer the boil, the more bitterness we can extract, up to about 90 minutes, at which time, we'll probably have all we can from our hops, without undesirable characteristics. Hops boiled for the amount of time necessary to extract high levels of bitterness generally offer very little in terms of flavour or aroma.

Flavour – Essential oils within hops create many flavour compounds. From spicy, earthy flavours of classic English hops like Kent Golding and Fuggles, to the popular citrus and fruity flavours of many American hops like Cascade and Amarillo. Flavour hops additions are regularly added half way through and towards the end of a boil . The closer towards the end, the more flavour, but less bitterness they impart.

Aroma – To get the most aroma from hops, you would add them at the end of the boil, or often post boil. Many techniques have been developed in recent years to increase aroma, including 'whirlpool hops' which are added when cooling the wort to pitchable temperatures, whilst stirring or pumping wort in a circular motion to centralise the debris before extracting to the fermenter, leaving the trub behind. The more popular way of getting a great aroma from hops is 'dry hopping'. This involves transferring the beer to a secondary vessel after the main fermentation is complete and then adding a dose of hops.

Hops are not yet fully understood, and could command a full PhD to get anywhere close to scratching the surface, but in my opinion, you can't often go wrong on a homebrewing level by following this principle;

Higher alpha acid levels and longer boil times extract more bitterness. Less time boiling allows more flavour compounds to come to the front and adding hops without boiling them at all lets the aroma shine through. Also, don't be afraid to give your hops a good sniff. This will give you a good idea what characteristics they will give you.

Luckily, today there are several varieties of software such as 'Beer Smith' and the free 'Beer Engine' which help us predict bitterness levels. These along with experience and recipe books help us predict what hop schedules are suitable for our own recipes.

A comprehensive account detailing hop varieties, their properties and characteristics can be found here. I would also highly recommend "For the love of hops" by Stan Hieronymus as a great read on the subject.

I will talk more about the practical use of hops later in my series of brewing blogs. I hope you enjoyed reading. Please stay tuned for more!

Getting to know your ingredients - Malt

Many brewers and beer lovers have a romantic notion that one the world’s first consumer protection legislations was safeguarding the purity of beer. Whilst this may be the case, it was far from a straightforward act to make sure customers got their monies worth.

The Reinheitsgebot was instituted across Bavaria on 23^rd April 1516, after obtaining the backing of the relevant Dukes. The law permitted the use of only malted barley, water and hops in their beer; this was before yeast was discovered. Although this ensured there was nothing inappropriate used in brewing, it also excluded some common ingredients of the time – mainly other types of malt and gruit (a mixture of herbs often used in place of hops). Any beer found not conforming would be destroyed, and the owner fined. This meant that most beers made elsewhere in Europe could not be consumed in Bavaria, monopolising the drinking market for local produce. The authorities also placed caps on the amount that could be charged, so it was affordable and the brewers could not take advantage of their new found exclusivity, perhaps also reducing the likelihood of an untaxable black market.

Another main reason for the creation of the Reinheitsgebot was that it increased the availability of wheat and rye malt for use in bread making. This brings me nicely on to the topic I wanted to cover in this blog; Malt.

Malt, more often than not in brewing refers to Malted Barley. This cereal grain is the base for most beers and much goes into its production. The most appropriate barley grains are selected from the harvest and treated in a way that makes it possible to extract the natural starches in order to convert them into sugars. This process is called Malting.

Once the grain has been selected, it is dried and stored for several weeks which improves the viability of the grain and allows them to sprout uniformly. It is then steeped in water (germination), shoots and air dried. This ‘green malt’ is then kiln dried at various temperatures depending what sort of malt is being produced - dark malts being kilned at higher temperatures than pale; and then we have malt ready for brewing, after being crushed of course.

There are many types of grain, each contributing a different characteristic to our beer. You would most often have one or two base malts, complimented by some speciality malts. For example, a simple grain bill for a golden coloured ‘Pale Ale’ might look something like this;

Pale Malt	89%
Torrified Wheat	3%
Crystal malt	8%

The base malt here is Pale malt. This contributes most of the sugars which will be turned into alcohol later in the process and provides the malty backbone of the beer. The torrified wheat is added to give enhanced head retention and a fuller body. The crystal malt is darker and provides a little sweetness and toffee/caramel flavours.

You can find a comprehensive list of malts and other mash ingredients here.

This is the first in a series of blogs about beer and brewing. This part is all about getting to know your ingredients. In a later blog about Mashing, I will examine what we do with the malt in order to make wort.

Thank you for reading, please stay tuned!

Brewing - An Introduction

Brewing – An introduction;

Beer has been around since Christ were a lad. Actually for many years before. From cereal grains fermented by wild yeasts, fuelling parties amongst middle eastern tribes in around 3500BC - to Monasteries setting up breweries in Belgium after fleeing from Napoleon in the late 18^th Century – to the thousands of craft breweries located all around the globe today, pushing the boundaries of taste and creativity in what are really exciting times for beer lovers.

I started making beer a few years ago and quickly discovered that it's impossible to know everything about it. It's actually one of the reasons the hobby has stuck, there's always more to learn. With just some basic equipment, some raw ingredients and patience, you can make almost any style of beer. If done properly, seldom will you have a finished product unequivocal to something you would happily pay in excess of £3 a pint for, made at a fraction of cost. You might want to brew to save money, you might like the idea of being able to create something that you can proudly call your own, or you might just want a hobby to share with a friend on an otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon. I personally brew for all those reasons and more (except the money saving one hasn't quite gone to plan). What ever the motivation, it's creative, it's intriguing and it's fun. On top of that the end result is several gallons of beer! Fantastic surely?

What makes good beer is a question of taste and inclination. The far simpler question of just 'What makes beer?' is one I will attempt to answer in detail over my next few blogs.

To try and summarise however, beer is made from four main ingredients; malted grain, hops, water and yeast. Each just as important as the other. The malt is soaked in water heated to a specific temperature, which converts the starches present into sugars. The grains are then rinsed and water drained to extract as much sugar as possible before being boiled. At various stages in the boil, hops are added. The 'Wort' is then cooled and transferred to a suitable vessel before yeast is added. The yeast eats away at the sugars producing amongst other things, alcohol , and beer is created. That's beer in a nutshell, and I will expand on the process and ingredients over the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading, and please stay tuned in.