What's yours old chap?

 In 1915, a year after the outbreak of the Great War, the Government had a tight grip around the throat of pubs and brewery's. Drinking was deemed derogatory to the productivity of the war machine, so pubs were told they could only open their doors for a few hours in the afternoon for lunch, then for a further 3 hours from 6pm until 9pm.

It didn't stop there though. Last orders was called an hour earlier on Saturdays, and Sundays were already a dry day throughout the most of Great Britain. Bizarrely though, there was a clamp down on getting a round in. “Treating” was barred! You couldn't even lend your mate the money to get his own beer. Barmen and women put less in the till, but went there a lot more often. Within the hustle and bustle of a crowded pub, the familiar boom of "What's your's old chap?" faded to a whisper. 

 

Sunday drinking died a slow death from 1828 after a temperance movement and the Church put pressure on the Government to keep the Sabbath Holy. At the time, there were many more villages and fewer big towns and cities. Very often would a Church and a pub be neighbours, which led to complications. A temperance movement had started in the preceding years and as ale now had a safe drinking alternative in tea and coffee, many people wanted to end the drunken debauchery that had plagued the streets.

First the Alehouse Act of 1828 decreed that licensed premises should not trade during the hours of holy service, then the Forbes-Mackenzie Act closed the doors all day in Scotland in 1848. This soon spread to Ireland in 1878 and to Wales in 1881.  This of course led to a huge increase of sales of smaller casks which were sold in underground, unlicensed ale houses. The Cardiff Old Brewery recorded 872 sales of 9 and 4 and a half gallon casks in 1880-81 and 39055 in 1888-89, almost a 45 fold increase. Boarder pubs in England became very popular. Folk walked or cycled for miles in to get a pint. Dry Sundays weren't completely abolished until 1996! One wonders if Jesus had turned water in to the most consumed beverage in the country at the time - ale instead of wine, if this would have happened at all. 

Somewhat ironically, the Great War probably saved the brewing industry in the UK. Before the war, the original gravity of beer was much higher than after. This in part, was due to the general scrutiny of brewers and drinkers of the time, and of course the lack of resources to make the product. In 1914 the average gravity was 1.052, by 1919 it was 1.039. To none brewers, this equated to the average beer being about 5.2% at the outbreak of war and 3.5% ABV after. It's only in very recent years that it's started to climb. This had an effect on the behaviour of drinkers and in turn to the attitude towards drinking. In Cardiff in 1932, Convictions for drunkenness were about 10% of those recorded in 1897. 

In the states, Prohibition was introduced. Back in Blighty, the stranglehold was relaxed somewhat. By the time War once again consumed our nation, it was out of the question to introduce such measures again. It would affect morale… You know?

My Ghetto Mini Brewday

I'm moving house soon, so i've not brewed in a while. I quite miss having a fermenter bubbling away in 'Breezer' (brew freezer) and had a few hours to spare so I decided to make a beer.

Time and space were constraints, so I went for a mini batch that I could make on the hob with normal pans. It would be improvised to say the least. So here's what I came up with;

Malt Bill

900g pale malt

150g amber malt

50g Cara-Hell malt

40g Torrified wheat

7g Challenger hops @ 60 mins

5g Amarillo hops @ 10 mins

5g Cascade hops @ 5 mins

5g Amarillo hops @ 0 mins

Wilko Gervin yeast

I started by heating up 4L to strike temperature (76c) and laced the pan with a square of polyester voile (the type you can make a net curtain out of). I then doughed in my malt, tied the tops of the bag together with a strip of the same material and put in the oven, preheated at about 60-70c. I did this because I knew being such a small volume, it would loose heat really quickly and mightn't totally convert the starches in the malt to sugar. It started at 67c and actually rose a little to 69c after an hour in the oven. 

I then sparged, which was a bit of a challenge without my usual sparge arm. I improvised by sitting a pizza tray on top of the pot, with a colander containing the malt bag on top of that. I slowly poured another 2l of warm water over the top of the grains, which trickled through the now compact grain bed, rinsed the extra sugars and drained into the pot. When the pot was full I put the heat on and brought it to a boil.

Ghetto sparge

When the rolling boil started, I added my first hop addition. After half an hour or so, a fair bit of the wort had evapourated, so I topped up with boiled water from the kettle. Probably another litre or so. The next addition was a pinch of irish moss, then the remaining hops.

After the hours boil, I put the pan in a sink of ice water to chill to pitching temperatures, then syphoned into an empty 5l water bottle. I had earlier added some Starsan to the water and used it to sanitise my equipment and drilled a hole in the lid for an airlock, flanked on each side by a rubber seal. I gave it a good shake to add some oxygen and sprinkled half a

packet of yeast I bought from Wilkos earlier that day on top.

And there we have it, a couple of hours in the kitchen, making beer with no brewing equipment used at all, except the syphon.

Ice bath cooling

Morrisons fermenter

If I did it again, I would adjust the recipe to liquor back to 4.5L in the bottle. I halved the amount of water I started with by the end of it. I must have lost best part of a litre to the grain, some to the hops, plenty to evaporation and a little spilt on the floor when I was putting it in the bottle. I probably only got 3.5L or wort over all, which will probably only make 6 or 7 bottles of beer after the trub in the 'fermenter'. Admittedly, I was never going to get too much out of it, and it's not an economical way of brewing in terms of cost or time spent per pint, but it was good fun, a good challenge of my improvisational skills and a good way of soothing the brewing blues after a while out of the game.

Cheers!

Getting to know your ingredients - Yeast

Picture the scene; A Scandinavian farm house stands close to a small, Viking village, with a fresh stream feeding a nearby well.

Barley, the staple grain harvested during the Viking Age in Scandinavia, has been soaked in the stream to start the germination process. It is kilned at a fairly low temperature for the time in the local sauna producing a paler than average malt, and mixed into water in a large vessel. The starches convert to sugars before the spent grain is used as feed for the village’s livestock.

A log fire burns underneath the kettle, boiling the wort. Juniper berries and herbs are added for flavour before being fed in to a large vat. The concoction cools overnight and in the morning, the Clans Jarl stirs the wort with his staff and gives it life. Because of the Jarls intervention, in the following few days, the wort transforms to beer and sustains every man, woman and child in the village. 

The staff is a treasured family heirloom, providing beer for the clan for generations, but why? As well as life, the stir gave the beer a unique taste, a taste that the villagers had been accustomed to for many years. The staff must have been revered as magical, or Godly, but in fact it was not the staff that turned wort in to beer. It was microorganisms living within the knots and grain of the wood. It would be another thousand years before science could prove that it was no magic or work of God that nourished this village, but that it was in fact Yeast.

What is yeast?

Yeast is the living component of our beers. It consumes the sugars from our wort, resulting in the creation of by-products including alcohol and carbon dioxide. Most commercial breweries filter the yeast out of the finished product before bottling or kegging the beer, but those brewed at home retain a small amount of yeast which allows the beer to carbonate naturally and mature in the bottle. Yeast also contributes to the taste of a beer. Some brews call for clean, neutral yeast to allow the malt or hop characters to shine through. In others, like German Weissbier’s, the yeast is the focal point, making banana and clove flavours amongst others.

What does yeast need to successfully ferment our wort?

Beer at high krausen 

The right environment is critical for yeast to reproduce and prosper. They need food which is provided in the form of sugars from our malts. They also need a clean, sanitary environment with little competition from other bacteria and oxygen is required to give them a good start. The number of viable yeast cells relative to the volume of the brew is important too. The optimal amount required differs between styles and higher alcohol beers generally require a higher pitching rate than lower ones.

Another very important aspect to fermentation is temperature. Too hot and the yeast will die, too cold and they will hibernate. Generally speaking, for ale yeast, a steady temperature between 17-21 degrees C is a good range, personally for most beers; I ferment at 18 degrees C.

Which type can I use?

Yeast is either sold in liquid form, or dry, in small packets with granular looking contents. Dry yeast has been dehydrated in order to increase the shelf life. You can either rehydrate the dry yeast in a little warm water before pitching, or just sprinkle the contents on top of the wort after transferring to the fermenter. Rehydrating will increase the amount of viable, healthy yeast cells, but it does come with an additional risk of contamination. Some argue that the risk outweighs the benefits, and personally I have done both, with little difference in the end product.

A Yeast Starter

Liquid yeast is normally packaged in a vial which contains a lower cell count than a dry yeast packet. If you are brewing a low ABV beer then you may just want to empty the vial directly into the wort. For most beers however, it is best practice to make a yeast starter. This, in short is a process where you would make a mini brew with malt extract and water. You would boil this for 15 minutes to sanitise, allow to cool to room temperature and then pitch the yeast. In the following few days, the yeast will ferment the mini brew and grow their numbers to a level adequate for pitching in to your wort.

Although the yeast is filtered out of most kegged and bottled beers, cask conditioned ale still contains live yeast. The cask is often filled just before the yeast finishes consuming the sugars, meaning that it finishes the job in the cask. The carbon dioxide produced by this secondary fermentation is now sealed in the keg and is absorbed back into the beer to produce a naturally gentle carbonation. When arriving at the pub, the beer is ‘green’ but matures and conditions over the following few days or weeks before the finished product is poured in to your glass.

I hope this post has helped you understanding of one of the most vital ingredients of beer. Of course there are many in depth works on the subject, this just being a short introduction.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. It concludes my series on 'Getting to know your ingredients' and if you've missed them, here is Hops, Malt and Water.