Working Hard and Hardly Working

Yes ma'am.

Ah Labor Day weekend - the unofficial end of the summer - one last chance to fire-up the grill and enjoy some time with family and friends before sending the kids back to school and getting on with the rest of the year. Obviously, whenever cooking outside with family and friends is involved, there is an obvious nexus to craft beer, but it would be too easy for me to just say “go drink craft beer on Labor Day” and end the blog right there. Nope. In the spirit of Labor Day celebrating those who worked hard to make America great, I’m going to work a little harder to bring you avid readers the inspirations.

 

As I just alluded to, Labor Day is about working hard and hardly working. We don’t work on Labor Day as a way to honor those who came before us and worked their tails off. Beer is not often associated with working, but believe it or not, a lot of work goes into that beer you’re enjoying. Tireless laborers who do the heavy lifting, smart guys who do the calculating, creative minded folk who figure out what to sell and how to sell it, truckers who move the beer from place to place, and then of course the stock boys and bar keeps responsible for giving it directly to the consumer… there is an army of people behind the scenes.

 

In order to honor the brewers, you have to understand the work they do. So here is a very simplified explanation of brewing – Brewing 101 if you will:

 

The way things used to look.

Each morning, the first step for the brewers as they get ready to "mash in" is the grist bill. This is the blend of malt that will go into the mash tun to begin brewing a specific recipe. Creating that grist bill involves a process of crushing the barley malt between two large rollers in the mill. This separates the husk and fractures the body of the malt to get it ready for the mash tun.

 

The mash tun is where water is added to the malt and heated to allow enzymes in the malt to break starches into sugars (maltose) leaving a liquid substance called wort. Not all the starch is converted, however, as these unfermented sugars give the beer its body (mouthfeel). The mashing process is all about making food for yeast. The blended malt and water is heated to a specific temperature. Brewers must choose their temperatures, as well as the amount of time spent at the temperatures, to obtain the ideal results for their specific brew.

 

Next, the wort is drained into the lauter tun. Here, the completed mash is filtered by gravity to separate the solids (mash) from the liquid malt extract comprised of fermentable and unfermentable sugars. The husks from the barley provide a natural filtration bed. The end filtered liquid, called "wort", is sweet, amber-colored and clear. The wort moves off to the cooker to be boiled while the spent grains are rinsed with water (sparged) to extract any remaining sugars.

 

If the brewer is environmentally conscience, the spent grains are then hauled off and used for cattle feed. Lucky cows!

The wort moves to the next vessel, the brew kettle, to be boiled slowly and evenly to ensure sterility. It's in this stage that the hops are added. Hops, as you already know, are the spice of the beer that give it its bitterness and aroma.

 

Modern day fermenters.

The boil can last anywhere from 50-120 minutes depending on the recipe and at what stages it calls for hop additions. The boil also achieves a number of other results. During this process bitter and aromatic qualities are extracted from the hops, the wort is sterilized and stops enzyme activity in the mash, and it produces the color and flavor from the wort sugars, which "brown" when exposed to high temperatures.

 

The boiled wort is then transferred to a whirlpool, where the trub (comprised of proteins from the malt and tannins from the hops) is removed. The wort is then cooled to the desired temperature in order to start fermentation, and is also saturated with air. That oxygen is required by the yeast for growth during the next several hours of activity before actual fermentation begins.

 

Next, the yeast is added and gets to work converting the fermentable sugars to CO2 and alcohol.

 

The fermentation produces heat and, therefore, a rise in the temperature of the fermented wort. The temperatures so chosen are a large factor in determining the flavor compounds produced by yeast. Primary fermentation can take up to seven days. At the end lager yeasts settle to the bottom of the tank having fermented at lower temperatures (~50°F), while ale yeasts, by contrast, rise to the top, and ferment at higher temperatures (59°-68°F) for shorter periods of time.

 

There are several other steps that can occur at this point in the process, depending on what kind of beer is being made, such as dry-hopping, secondary fermentation, potion/spice infusions, etc.

 

After fermentation the beer moves on to storage, where the beer is aged between 3-5 weeks to allow the beer to mellow and all the flavors to meld to deliver the complex layers of flavor in the beer. For some beers, an additional stage of aging can also be done outside of the tank in large wooden tuns or barrels. These barrels add a unique character to the beer both from the type of wood itself and the remaining flavors of the barrel's past use from sherry and port to Madeira and beyond. Aging in wood is another avenue for brewers to experiment and develop layers of flavor in the beer.

 

Once the beer has adequately aged in storage, it is filtered. The beer, still slightly cloudy, requires filtering to remove any remaining yeast and other insoluble matter, like protein. Diatomaceous earth is frequently used as a filtration medium. Some beers are filtered twice to achieve brilliant clarity while others, such as wheat beers, are left unfiltered for their cloudy appearance.

 

Here's a diagram. Get it now?

 

Nothing to it right? With today’s technology, much of these processes are done automatically by machines and robots, but it still requires a crew of folks to know what they are doing and monitor what’s going on. Plus, even in today’s breweries, adding ingredients like hops, spices and sometimes even malted grains are done by hand to ensure precision. There is also a lot moving parts that require heavy lifting and countless hours in the brew house.

 

Brewers are usually a goofy bunch… it comes with the territory of making an alcoholic beverage meant to be enjoyed by a responsible public. But before hardly working, they are working very hard to make that brew the best it can be… for you. How nice of them.

 

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!