On the way home after church on Sunday I stopped off at my local homebrew shop to pick up
the ingredients for a Scotch Ale. The folks next to me at the grain
mills were a nice young couple looking about college age or slightly
older. I ended up in line behind them, and as we were chatting (the
store was busier than anyone had ever seen, so there was plenty of time
for talk) it turned out that they’d never done an all grain batch
before. I and the fellows behind me noted with some surprise that they
were about to buy around nine pounds of barley and no extract.
Those of y’all who’ve never brewed before (poor souls!)
probably don’t know that there are different levels of brewing one
can do. Most folks start out with hopped extracts; these are barley
syrups with hops already added—the brewer simply mixes with water,
boils and adds some yeast. The next step up is to use unhopped extracts
and add hops of one’s choosing. The step after that is to steep
ground barley (or other grains) in warm water to extract some desired
flavour, then to add extract and hops. This is where a lot of folks end
up stopping for awhile, as it requires no extra equipment and is fairly
simple. It’s relatively expensive, though (extract isn’t
cheap to produce or transport) and doesn’t give one very good
control over the final beer.
The most advanced sort of brewing (and that done by almost all
commercial breweries) is all-grain brewing. One takes ground grains and
mashes & lauters them. Mashing is the process which converts the
starches in grain into sugars; lautering is the process of straining the
sweet sugar water from the spent grains. Both of these steps require a
certain amount of skill and special equipment. One has to calculate the
right amount & temperature of water to add in order to raise the
grain to a temperature where the right enzymes can go to work and one
has to lauter the mash so that the wort is relatively clear.
In effect, this couple was going from buying freeze-dried coffee to
green coffee beans—and they didn’t realise it! Fortunately,
it’s not that difficult a process, but to leap into
unsuspectingly is…mind-boggling. We did our best to give them a
brief overview of the process and point them to some good resources and
I hope that they were successful, but I fear that they might have had
one rotten Sunday evening.
