90% Labor, 10% Creativity

It only took us two days of class to start getting our hands dirty at Doemens. As we got oriented to our new school on Monday, Michael Eder, our lead instructor, gave us our schedules for the next few weeks.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the class would be split into two groups, and half would get to brew on Tuesday while the other half did lab work with beer-contaminating microorganisms in the microbiology lab. On Wednesday, we would flip. Michael wanted to get us brewing as soon as possible so that we would have time to make some bottle conditioned wheat beers, ready to crate and bring along with us on our "round trip" (not sure that the Germans fully understand that one) in a few weeks.

My group did lab work first on Tuesday, and we spent a lot of time looking at the various microorganisms that we had learned about during our modules on fermentation in Chicago. We were given agars of cultured yeasts, wild yeasts, and various spoiling bacteria and taught how to plate and identify them. We learned how to use a KOH test, a Catalase test, an oxidase test, morphology, and the Gram test to identify any and all contaminants that can ruin an otherwise good beer. And our instructor, echoing sentiments that other teachers had hinted at earlier in the term, explained that even a very small brewery can accomplish sophisticated microbiological analysis with just a few simple tools. I don't plan on going back to school to get an MS in microbiology anytime soon, but it was easily the most practical and interesting day that I'd ever spent in a lab.

And Wednesday, finally, was brew day. We had waited weeks and stayed the course through numerous lectures on theory in anticipation of a chance to brew on the Doemens system. In the coming weeks, we'll get to do it a few more times, so Wednesday's go-round was Eder's chance to show us how the system worked. We would be brewing 525 litres, or roughly 10 kegs of dunkelweizen--a dark German wheat beer with aromas of bubblegum and clove and a lots of banana on the palate. To teach us the intricacies of the system, he required that we do a three-step decoction mash, an antiquated brewing technique that serves today more for pedagogy than brewhouse practice. And, while the system was predominantly automated, there were some crucial transfers (and lots of manual cleaning!) that we would have to do.

Though it took us nine hours, we successfully mashed, sparged, hopped, whirlpooled, and cooled our wort and pitched in some proofed weiss beer yeast, which produces all the esters and phenols (ie banana and clove) that give dunkelweizen its flavor profile. Andrew Hood, one of my classmates and an assistant brewer at Black Diamond BC in California led the charge in our hop selection, and we found a nice variety of Hallertau to make an early addition to the kettle. The day went smoothly: we had time to take the 150 or so kilos of spent grain to the cows at a nearby farm, since the nutrient rich mix makes for great cattle feed; we also siphoned off an entire keg of unfermented wort to use as "speise" (a kind of sugar water that serves as yeast food) when we do a secondary fermentation in the bottles.

Now, the brew is, mostly, out of our hands. One of the unique features of the Doemens system is that the fermenters are open-top, rectangular vessels--as opposed to the cylindroconical tanks preferred by most brewers--so we can actually watch the fermentation take place. As of Thursday afternoon, our yeast looked healthy, if not happy (fermentation, after all, is basically tricking yeast into basically asphyxiating itself), and we expect that our first class brew should be ready to bottle next week.

Next time we brew, Michael has assured us that he'll be absent the entire time or will read a newspaper in the corner. The choice of style will be ours, with one predictable constraint: it must be a traditional German style. Any suggestions?