Gospel and homily in the brewhouse

After our return from Wisconsin on Monday, we dove head first into a week focusing on wort production in the brewhouse. Wort is the sugar water that leaves the brewkettle ready for fermentation--full of hop compounds, proteins, carbs, and minerals; it is basically "beer before alcohol." So starting Tuesday morning, we moved swiftly through most of the brewhouse process: water preparation, grain milling, mashing, cereal cooking, lautering, sparging, boiling, whirlpooling, cooling, aerating, effluent disposal, and cleaning. By Friday afternoon, our theoretical beer was ready to sit and let the yeast do the work.

For many of the folks in the class, these topics were a welcome relief after Week 1's emphasis on raw materials production. These are the daily operations of brewing, and for both homebrewers and professionals, it was easy to tie these lectures into personal experiences. For me, personally, it was enlightening to get a perspective on how things might work in breweries of all sizes--from a small 2 bbl setup to a production brewery that puts out 4 billion+ bottles a year. And, I think that I finally understand why many of the Leadville brews came out with lower hop utilization than Andy and I had planned.

Despite my familiarity with the material, the volume of information--ranging from process to theory to equipment functioning--was daunting, and I found myself struggling to keep separate the 11 purposes of boiling from the 6 reasons that brewers sparge from the 7 different hose and pump sizes that work for different sized breweries. So, to keep the information straight, I scaled back up to the macro level and decided to tell myself story of the brewhouse. Happily, my classmates agreed that there's something about what follows that makes everything in the process easier to remember.

As we moved through the brewing process, what became clear is this: the creation of beer is about a battle of good versus evil. There is such a thing as normative ethics, and nowhere do they better play out than in making beer. There are evil forces that attempt to ruin beer at every turn in brewing, and it is the good brewer's responsibility to shepherd the wort through the danger-ridden landscape of the brewhouse. What are these evil forces? It is the trifecta of low extract, low enzymatic activity, and low yield as well as their servile henchmen high viscosity, haze, flavor instability, lowered hop utilization, harsh polyphenols, alkalinity, DMS and poor foam retention.

Their threats take different sizes and shapes in different parts of the brewing process. In the mash evil uses strategies like high temperatures and pH. Later, during the sparge, it becomes essential to keep water at 170 degrees to balance the threat of high viscosity and the extraction of tannins.

But the brewer is crafty, and no obstacle should get in the way of a brewer and his beer. With control over temperature, chemicals, flowrate, time, and equipment design, the forces of beer destruction can be kept at bay one batch at a time. Every time you taste a good beer, and especially every time you taste a great beer, good has triumphed at least one more time.