Ales and Beer
The brewers of home-made wines are privileged people. They feel it every time
they open a bottle of their own vintage. But there is one thing they miss, and that is the
privilege of drinking freely, carelessly, thirstily, and above all, daily. A daily drink must
be quick to make and to mature, its fermentation must be certain and its materials cheap.
And it must be free from that sort of connoisseurship that leads to odious comparisons
with classical vintages, and robs the amateur of his carefree approach.
Malt liquors satisfy all these conditions. At their simplest, they can be prepared
within a couple of hours, fermented within a week, and drunk within a fortnight. And the
finest compliment the maker will be paid is when old men say they have not tasted such a
drink since they were youngsters.
In the April 1963 Budget, Mr. Reginald Maudling, the then Chancellor of the
Exchequer (whose name shall remain blessed) removed the restrictions upon the home
brewing of beer and ruled that henceforth no duty need be paid. So you are free to brew as
much duty-free beer at home as you please. But NOT A DROP OF IT MUST BE SOLD,
or you are breaking the law.
A home-brewed beer can hardly fail to be better than anything offered for sale
over the bar, and it is incomparably cheaper. The foaming head of a good brew, and its
amber or garnet lights, will rival any wine for the pleasures of the eye. If you are
impatient and cannot wait for it to clear, no matter; it is only yeast you are drinking, and
you would pay dearly for that at a chemist's. If you do not like the idea of long drinks,
swilled down by the pint on hot days, then make yourself a short one. After all beer can
be brewed without difficulty up to 10% alcohol content, that is, the strength of a
Frenchman's vin ordinaire; and a wineglassful of this on a winter's day will do the work
of tankards of your summer brew.
There is a flavour and a strength of beer for every occasion: with meals, or
between meals, or in meals. Strong ale can be used on almost every occasion where a
cooking recipe calls for wine, and on many others, such as cooking hams, stews, Welsh
rarebits, and so on. To have at your command the whole splendid range of malt liquors
you need only understand how to vary the three principal ingredients: fee malt, the herbs
employed to give the dominant flavourings, and the sugar, which will decide the alcohol
content.
Malt
Malt serves the brewer in three ways; it provides a form of sugar that can be
turned into alcohol by the yeast; it nourishes the yeast in the course of its work, and
ensures that it does it well; and it likewise nourishes the man who drinks the brew, since
it contains a fair amount of unfermentable solids, rich in food value, which survive in the
finished drink to give it flavour and body. The hydrometer reading of a finished beer is
proof of this: it will not, like a dry wine, fall to zero or below, but stick at between 2 (for
a light ale) and 8 (for a heavy stout). In a wine this would normally indicate the presence
of unfermented sugar. In a beer it is not sweetness but food that remains behind.
Malted barley grains, like coffee, can be roasted light or dark, and are sold as
"Crystal" malt or "Patent Black." Crystal malt gives light and nutty flavours, and colours
varying from pale amber to rich brown. Black malt brings a burnt and rather woody taste,
and the liquor appears to be black, until you see the garnet-coloured lights in it.
There are several ways of getting the good out of the malted grain. You can
"mash" the malt yourself., steeping it in water in a temperature of 130-150 degrees for not
less than four hours before straining off the "wort" from the grain, and then boiling it up
with hops, or whatever herb you choose. In this method you have the pleasure of handling
a raw material no less mysterious than the grape, and you get on the whole a drink of
cleaner flavour. Or you can save yourself the trouble (this is important if you are brewing
for a daily drink), and buy the malt already extracted. This extract is simply dissolved by
pouring over it the boiling infusion of herbs. Malt extract makes excellent light ales with
a minimum of work. It also brings within the home-brewer's grasp really strong drinks of
the Barley Wine and Audit Ale type, without the cost being in any way excessive. Such
heavily malted drinks would be far too dear to form part of one's daily fare, were
extraction done at home.
Herbs
Whichever method you use for extracting the good from the malt, the result is the same:
the more the malt, the more the body imparted to the finished drink. And the more the
body the drink has, the more it will need some bitter herb added to it to counteract the
heaviness and keep the palate clean. The vintner is not troubled in this way. Nothing need
be added to grape juice, since it contains both acid and tannin which gives wine a natural
astringency—but malt contains neither, and so has to have an astringent flavouring added
by the brewer. From the beer-drinker's point of view this is an asset. The acidity of
grape-wine may well be counteracted in warm countries by the richness of the food
served with it. But with plain fare, and in a cold climate, an acid drink does not always lie
easily on the stomach. It is not only the high food-value of stout that makes it a good
drink for nursing mothers, but its lack of acidity.
You can use what herb you like, so long as it does what you want in the finished
drink. The hop has earned first place as partner to malt, throughout its whole range of
strengths and flavours, ever since it was brought to England three centuries ago. It is a
good preservative. Its flavour when used in small amounts is delicate, fresh and subtle,
while in large quantities its bitterness is never disagreeable. Further, it is a gentle
soporific. Sleep follows easily on hopped beer, and an age addicted to tranquillizers
should welcome this.
Since no other herb by itself can command all the virtues of hop, experiments
with other flavours should not be allowed to displace the hops altogether from your
recipe. Spruce oil combines well with hops. It too is a good preservative, but unlike hop,
it will tend to clear the head of drowsiness. This, combined with its remarkable cleanness
of flavour, makes a drink that will challenge any conventional beer as a refresher. Spruce
beer goes back a couple of centuries into English history, and deserves a revival. It is still
drunk in Scandinavia, and in Greece even grape-wines are "resinated" as a matter of
course, partly to preserve them, partly to give that fresh, resinous tang that is so welcome
in a land where flavours are strong, fish plentifully eaten, and much garlic chewed.
Wormwood, the "mugwort" of old country brewers, provided the bitters in beer
before the advent of hops. It can still be used to make a good drink, and is most
conveniently found in "Heath and Heather's" or those from other suppliers. Here you find
a nicely blended mixture including hops and wormwood, and though intended for a
non-alcoholic drink, they are all the better used in a more powerful brew. This beer is a
fine summertime quencher of thirst, something like a long Vermouth.
Liquorice is used in medicine for soothing rough throats. In beer it gives the
illusion of having added body and sweetness, apart from its own peculiar pungency. In
fact, it has done no more than coat the tongue. For this reason, those who like a clean
taste should avoid liquorice. But it can be useful for taking the edge off a harsh stout,
since you cannot (as in winemaking) sweeten a bitter brew with sugar. This will merely
renew the fermentation, unless the yeast has been killed by pasteurization, or has already
made all the alcohol it can manage. This latter condition is unlikely to be met with in
brewing beer, though common enough in winemaking.
Like liquorice, nettle was traditionally used in stouts. An infusion of nettle is
faintly salty, like a consomme, and if added to a beer it will certainly need plenty of hops,
or the roughness of black malt to give it an "edge" and make it palatable. Salt has the
effect of giving "roundness" of flavour, and should in any case be added in small
quantities to a brew of beer. But as soon as the salty taste is perceptible, it comes as a
disagreeable surprise, and the clean after-taste characteristic of good beer is lost.
The use of old-fashioned flavourings: ginger, dandelion, burdock or sarsaparilla,
must be adapted to suit each brewer's taste. Once the principle of balancing bitter against
sweet is understood, then there is no reason why these flavours should not make
stimulating variations on the original theme of hops.
Sugar
Malt by itself contains enough fermentable sugar to make an alcoholic drink. In
fact German law refuses to recognize a malt liquor brewed with added sugar as "beer" at
all. But the home brewer is not a purist. He cannot afford to be, with malt the price it is.
By adding sugar he can make his beer much stronger than is normally sold over the bar;
he can make it keep better; and he has a wide range of new flavours to play with, since
each type of sugar will add its own particular fragrance.
Honey is the oldest form of sugar to be used in beer, and is still thought by some
to be the best. Nowadays it is a luxury if added in any quantity, and the drink would rank
rather as a hop-flavoured Mead. As in Mead-making, the honey should be boiled 10-15
minutes in part of the water going into the brew, to kill unwanted bacteria which would
otherwise turn the beer sour.
Then there are the various types of cane-sugar. Of these, white sugar contributes
nothing noticeable to the flavour of the drink. Demerara, though dearest, is best,
especially for pale, light-bodied beers. Brown moist is cheapest, and makes a darker beer,
heavier in body, but not necessarily more alcoholic, since it contains more unfermentable
matter. Invert sugar, used commercially in English beers, ferments out quickest of all, and
most completely. It makes a good, dry beer, with a slightly cider-like taste. Golden syrup
for some reason takes much longer than the other sugars to clear, and tastes faintly of
grapefruit. Black treacle or molasses are best kept for medicinal stouts. Its flavour is not
clean on the tongue, and needs the roughness of black malt, and plenty of hops, to
counteract it.
A whole range of beers can be produced by using malt extract and our table shows
four excellent recipes for home brewers to produce beers of varying strength.
These are quite simple, and anyone can produce an excellent, strong beer fully as
satisfying as any which can be purchased at "the local."
Five gallons is the most a man can lift conveniently. If women brew, they had
better halve the quantities and make 2 ½ gallons at a time. Round figures are used. There
is no need for precision, but a hydrometer is worth getting, to let you know what type and
strength of beer to expect. Use tap-water. Galvanised wash-boilers are quite safe for
boiling up the infusion of herbs; there is no acid formed at this stage, and so no risk of
metal poisoning arises. Use Demerara or invert sugar for the lighter brews, brown for the
heavier.
The Extract is easier to pour if left in a warm place overnight, and 2 lb. jars are
more convenient than 14 lb. tins, but dearer. When pouring extract from a tin, wet the free
hand with cold water. The ribbon of malt can then be coaxed back into the tin without
sticking to the fingers.
Hops can, of course, be used alone in any of the recipes that suggest other herbs,
at the rate of 4-8 oz. to the 5-gallon brew. Compressed hops come in 8-oz. packets which
can easily be broken in half to save weighing. If loose hops are used, a good fistful may
be taken to weigh about an ounce.
Baker's yeast may be used, but it needs more skimming, and takes longer to clear.
Lager and Ale yeast cultures are best left for fancy brews.
The fermenting vessel should be large enough to hold the wort and allow for the
"head," say 7-gallon size. It is best made of polythene or stoneware.
Distinguish between stoneware and the old-fashioned red clay crocks which
usually have a lead glaze and poison the fermenting brew. Lead glazes are thick and
honey-coloured, whereas stoneware glazes are thin and colourless.
Stoneware rings clearly when struck, while lead-glaze vessels, being earthenware,
do not.
Beers, of course, can be made to any strength, and opposite we give in tabular
form a series of recipes which will enable you to select your own. One word of warning,
it is better to aim at beers of strengths equivalent to those obtaining commercially rather
than always producing high-gravity brews, which cause headaches when drunk in
quantity, as most beers are.
SUGGESTED RANGE OF HOME-BREWS
USING MALT EXTRACT
Recipe 1 2 3 4
Alcohol 3% 5% 7% 9%
Gravity at Start 30 45 60 30
Gravity at Finish 2 0 5 9
Recipe 1 2 3 4
Gallons Water 5 5 5 5
lbs. sugar 3 4 5 6
lbs. Malt Extract 1 2 3 4
Herbs 1 oz. 2oz. 4-6 oz. 6-8 oz.
Hops Hops Hops Hops
or Herbs 2oz.
Spruce
Extract
Price per pint 2 ½d. 3½d. 4½d. 6½d.
Days to clear 7 14 21 28
Keeps for Weeks Months Months Years
Use also in 1 Pkt. Dried Yeast, 1 Pkt. Yeast Food,
each case :
2 teaspoon salt, or water treatment as
instructed.
Juice of one lemon.
For Stout Boil up ½ lb. patent black malt grains
and 4 oz. flaked barley with the hops,
in Recipe 3 or 4.
PREPARATION
Bring a convenient quantity of water to the boil, 3 gallons if you have a 4-gallon
boiler. Add salt, then put in herbs and simmer for 45 minutes. When hops are used, some
of the fragrance is lost in the steam. So keep a handful back till the last five minutes of
the infusion. Allow to cool for a few minutes. This gives the herbs time to settle and
makes decanting easier.
Put the sugar and malt into the fermenting vessel. Strain the near-boiling infusion
of herbs into the vessel, and stir well till all is dissolved with a hardwood stick.
Make up to five gallons with boiled water. Allow to cool. Dissolve yeast food (if
used) and citric acid or lemon juice in a little of the brew, and stir in. Put the hydrometer
in and note the gravity.
FERMENTING
Sprinkle on the yeast. Tie a cloth or secure a sheet of polythene with elastic over
the vessel to keep out the flies. The ideal temperature is 65-75 degrees F., that is, about
the range of a room in summertime. Cooler temperatures mean slower fermentation. This
is no advantage in beer-making: it merely holds up regular production, so find a warm
corner for the brew, or else use some simple heater, in cold weather. A thick foam builds
up on the surface within 24 hours; skim this off. It contains impurities which may make
the beer slow to clear. Thereafter leave the brew in peace till the yeast has done its work.
With strong beers, however, it is advisable to add the sugar in two doses, or they
occasionally "stick" at 1020 or so.
Strong beers take about a week to ferment out, weaker ones three days or so. The
hydrometer will tell you the progress. But when the gravity gets low you cannot be sure at
what point it is merely telling you about unfermentable solids left in suspension. Your
aim is to decant the beer as soon as it is "flat," since the decanting while the ferment is
still on can lead to burst bottles. Best then, to watch the surface of the brew. Towards the
end of the ferment the bubbles collect in a ring at the centre. Then the surface, which is
cloudy while the yeast is till active, begins to clear. This means that the yeast has no more
sugar to work on, and is beginning to sink down. Then is the time to bottle.
BOTTLING
Having made your home-brew you then come to the satisfying job of bottling it.
Should it be bottles, or tap-jars? One four-gallon tap-jar takes no longer to clean
and sterilise than one bottle. It allows you to draw off your beer in half-pints, and that is
useful when brewing strong. But the drink will be "draught" in character, however lively
it may be, since all the gas is spent immediately in forming the head. A truly sparkling
drink can only be made in screw-top bottles.
Apart from looking good, and lightening a heavy brew, the sparkle sends the
alcohol to your head quicker. And a bottled drink will clear sooner, since the yeast has not
so far to fall. But the labour of cleaning and sterilising is multiplied thirty-fold. It is a
matter of choice.
This is the quickest way of cleaning: prepare a stock solution of potassium
metabisulphite, by dissolving ¼ lb. in a quart of hot water. Keep it handy in a stoppered
flagon. Take all the stoppers out of your bottles, and set aside those with perished
washers. Take off these washers. Stretch the new washers over the ends of all the
stoppers. Then take each one in turn and insert a spike (say the outside prong of an old
fork) between the washer and the stopper. Then, by turning the stopper round and round,
the washer can be worked down to its proper place.
Next take the bottles. Rinse each under the cold tap, emptying the water out by
holding upside down and swirling round with a vigorous rotary movement. This forms a
whirlpool inside, which allows the air to get in and the water to fly out. Take a jug and in
it mix two ounces of your stock sulphite solution in a pint of water. Pour this sterilizing
mixture through a polythene funnel from one bottle to the next. From the last bottle, pour
it back into the jug, and drop all the stoppers in. Next give the stoppers and each bottle a
quick rinse under the tap to remove any traces of sulphite.
Keep the remains of the sulphite solution handy for sterilizing the siphon before
and after use. You will find the whole job is made much easier by fitting to the cold tap a
length of hose-pipe equipped with a lever-spray nozzle. The bottles are now ready to fill.
SIPHONING
You want to have the suction end of the siphon just above the sediment at the bottom of
the fermenting vessel. The best way to do this is to have a length of glass tube (¼ in.
bore) with a U-bend at one end, to bring the lower opening of the tube some ¾ in. above
the bottom of the U. This tube, with your polythene piping fitted at the other end can be
pushed straight down into the vessel till the U-bend rests on the bottom. The opening will
then be sucking up the brew just above the level of the sediment. A chemist will do this
bit of glass-work. Failing that, you can buy a good adjustable siphon ready-made.
PRIMING
Put the empty bottles in their crates, and fill each in turn from the siphon, up to
the shoulder, and not beyond, or you may have trouble with foam when you come to
unscrew the stopper. When all are filled, "prime" each one with one level teaspoonful of
caster sugar. Use a funnel to get it down the neck cleanly, and tap the stem of the funnel
each time, to make sure the whole dose goes down.
This priming sugar starts a further slight fermentation, enough to give the
mature drink a good sparkle. If more sugar than this is put in, you may lose the beer
in foam, or burst the bottle.
The same is true if you bottle it before the fermentation in the first place has
finished. Wet the stoppers, to allow the washers to slip when you tighten them, screw
down hard, and give each bottle a good shake to dissolve the sugar. Store upright in a
cool dark place.
TAP JARS
In this case it is advisable to fill to the shoulder only (this gives you four gallons)
and put any surplus brew in bottles. The space left in the shoulder gives room for the gas
pressure to build up. Otherwise, you risk blowing out the tap, or bursting the jar.
To prime, make a syrup by dissolving 2 lb. of caster sugar in one pint of boiling
water. Allow to cool and keep stoppered up in a sterilized flagon. For a 4-gallon jar, take
3 oz. of this syrup and add to the brew in the jar while you are siphoning. This makes
enough gas to drive about half the contents out under pressure. You may experiment with
more, but it is hardly worth the risk, and with heavy beers it is as well to reduce the
priming sugar to 1-1½ lb. to the pint, or you may even have a jar burst. It will depend on
the strength of the jar, so we cannot hold ourselves responsible!
Once the jar is filled and primed, wet the rubber washer of the stopper, and screw
down tight. The washer should be seen to flatten and bulge. See that the tap is hammered
well home. When the gas pressure builds up the tap may leak a little. This usually stops
after a few days as the corks take up the moisture and swell. If they go on leaking, the
only cure is to change them. The cork shive is often hard to fit over the stem of a new tap.
Soak it, but not the tap, overnight in your sterilizing solution. It should then be soft
enough to coax up to the shoulder of the tap, where it must be before you try to drive the
tap home. If it will not go, then rasp off a little of the taper round the shoulder of the tap.
There is plenty of wood to spare at that point.
If the tap grows mould, and it is almost bound to, wash it off with a strong
sulphite solution.
When the pressure fails, and no more beer can be drawn off, unscrew the stopper,
reprime, and wait for the brew to clear. If you have only a gallon or less left in, better
draw it off into pint bottles, and prime as usual. When the tap jar is empty, clean out with
water, swill it around with sulphite solution, and refill, either with your next brew or with
water. If left empty, the tap and corks will dry out and become unusable.
CORRECT MASHING
Many people do not realise that when using malt, as distinct from malt extract,
one of the most important factors in the production of good quality home-brewed beer is
the correct "mashing," or extraction of maltose from the malt.
In this the temperature of the water plays a most important part. The operating
temperature of the first fermentation should be between 130 degrees and 150 degrees F. It
should never rise above 150 degrees F.
The amateur often has great difficulty in keeping to these temperatures but here is
a very simple and effective method.
Use a two-gallon polythene bucket or boiler with lid. Bring just under two gallons
of water to 150 degrees F., pour them in the bucket, and scatter in two pounds of crushed
malt (the extraction is much greater from the ground malt).
Then insert a 50-watt glass immersion heater, put the lid on the bucket, cover with
a blanket or thick cloth, and leave on overnight or for a period of eight hours. The
temperature with these quantities and with this type of heater will remain between 130
and 150 degrees F., and the extraction is first-rate.
Such a heater will last for years and is quite inexpensive —7/6 or so—and it is
quite unecessary to go to the length of using costly thermostatically controlled heaters.
Current consumption is negligible.
After the eight hours extraction the liquid should be strained off into a boiler and
two ounces of hops added. Make the total liquid up to three or even four gallons and boil
for an hour. Strain and add 2 lb. block invert sugar (all the breweries in this country use
"invert sugar, which is wholly fermentable) then allow the brew to cool to 75 degrees F.
before adding a packet of concentrated brewing yeast.
Fermentation as a rule takes three to four days and the brew may be siphoned into
bottles or jars.
It is just as well to let fermentation come to an end, and then prime each bottle or
jar with a little sugar syrup. This gives a nice gentle secondary fermentation, gives sparkle
and head to the brew, and avoids burst bottles.
This makes a really excellent brew.
The brewers of home-made wines are privileged people. They feel it every time
they open a bottle of their own vintage. But there is one thing they miss, and that is the
privilege of drinking freely, carelessly, thirstily, and above all, daily. A daily drink must
be quick to make and to mature, its fermentation must be certain and its materials cheap.
And it must be free from that sort of connoisseurship that leads to odious comparisons
with classical vintages, and robs the amateur of his carefree approach.
Malt liquors satisfy all these conditions. At their simplest, they can be prepared
within a couple of hours, fermented within a week, and drunk within a fortnight. And the
finest compliment the maker will be paid is when old men say they have not tasted such a
drink since they were youngsters.
In the April 1963 Budget, Mr. Reginald Maudling, the then Chancellor of the
Exchequer (whose name shall remain blessed) removed the restrictions upon the home
brewing of beer and ruled that henceforth no duty need be paid. So you are free to brew as
much duty-free beer at home as you please. But NOT A DROP OF IT MUST BE SOLD,
or you are breaking the law.
A home-brewed beer can hardly fail to be better than anything offered for sale
over the bar, and it is incomparably cheaper. The foaming head of a good brew, and its
amber or garnet lights, will rival any wine for the pleasures of the eye. If you are
impatient and cannot wait for it to clear, no matter; it is only yeast you are drinking, and
you would pay dearly for that at a chemist's. If you do not like the idea of long drinks,
swilled down by the pint on hot days, then make yourself a short one. After all beer can
be brewed without difficulty up to 10% alcohol content, that is, the strength of a
Frenchman's vin ordinaire; and a wineglassful of this on a winter's day will do the work
of tankards of your summer brew.
There is a flavour and a strength of beer for every occasion: with meals, or
between meals, or in meals. Strong ale can be used on almost every occasion where a
cooking recipe calls for wine, and on many others, such as cooking hams, stews, Welsh
rarebits, and so on. To have at your command the whole splendid range of malt liquors
you need only understand how to vary the three principal ingredients: fee malt, the herbs
employed to give the dominant flavourings, and the sugar, which will decide the alcohol
content.
Malt
Malt serves the brewer in three ways; it provides a form of sugar that can be
turned into alcohol by the yeast; it nourishes the yeast in the course of its work, and
ensures that it does it well; and it likewise nourishes the man who drinks the brew, since
it contains a fair amount of unfermentable solids, rich in food value, which survive in the
finished drink to give it flavour and body. The hydrometer reading of a finished beer is
proof of this: it will not, like a dry wine, fall to zero or below, but stick at between 2 (for
a light ale) and 8 (for a heavy stout). In a wine this would normally indicate the presence
of unfermented sugar. In a beer it is not sweetness but food that remains behind.
Malted barley grains, like coffee, can be roasted light or dark, and are sold as
"Crystal" malt or "Patent Black." Crystal malt gives light and nutty flavours, and colours
varying from pale amber to rich brown. Black malt brings a burnt and rather woody taste,
and the liquor appears to be black, until you see the garnet-coloured lights in it.
There are several ways of getting the good out of the malted grain. You can
"mash" the malt yourself., steeping it in water in a temperature of 130-150 degrees for not
less than four hours before straining off the "wort" from the grain, and then boiling it up
with hops, or whatever herb you choose. In this method you have the pleasure of handling
a raw material no less mysterious than the grape, and you get on the whole a drink of
cleaner flavour. Or you can save yourself the trouble (this is important if you are brewing
for a daily drink), and buy the malt already extracted. This extract is simply dissolved by
pouring over it the boiling infusion of herbs. Malt extract makes excellent light ales with
a minimum of work. It also brings within the home-brewer's grasp really strong drinks of
the Barley Wine and Audit Ale type, without the cost being in any way excessive. Such
heavily malted drinks would be far too dear to form part of one's daily fare, were
extraction done at home.
Herbs
Whichever method you use for extracting the good from the malt, the result is the same:
the more the malt, the more the body imparted to the finished drink. And the more the
body the drink has, the more it will need some bitter herb added to it to counteract the
heaviness and keep the palate clean. The vintner is not troubled in this way. Nothing need
be added to grape juice, since it contains both acid and tannin which gives wine a natural
astringency—but malt contains neither, and so has to have an astringent flavouring added
by the brewer. From the beer-drinker's point of view this is an asset. The acidity of
grape-wine may well be counteracted in warm countries by the richness of the food
served with it. But with plain fare, and in a cold climate, an acid drink does not always lie
easily on the stomach. It is not only the high food-value of stout that makes it a good
drink for nursing mothers, but its lack of acidity.
You can use what herb you like, so long as it does what you want in the finished
drink. The hop has earned first place as partner to malt, throughout its whole range of
strengths and flavours, ever since it was brought to England three centuries ago. It is a
good preservative. Its flavour when used in small amounts is delicate, fresh and subtle,
while in large quantities its bitterness is never disagreeable. Further, it is a gentle
soporific. Sleep follows easily on hopped beer, and an age addicted to tranquillizers
should welcome this.
Since no other herb by itself can command all the virtues of hop, experiments
with other flavours should not be allowed to displace the hops altogether from your
recipe. Spruce oil combines well with hops. It too is a good preservative, but unlike hop,
it will tend to clear the head of drowsiness. This, combined with its remarkable cleanness
of flavour, makes a drink that will challenge any conventional beer as a refresher. Spruce
beer goes back a couple of centuries into English history, and deserves a revival. It is still
drunk in Scandinavia, and in Greece even grape-wines are "resinated" as a matter of
course, partly to preserve them, partly to give that fresh, resinous tang that is so welcome
in a land where flavours are strong, fish plentifully eaten, and much garlic chewed.
Wormwood, the "mugwort" of old country brewers, provided the bitters in beer
before the advent of hops. It can still be used to make a good drink, and is most
conveniently found in "Heath and Heather's" or those from other suppliers. Here you find
a nicely blended mixture including hops and wormwood, and though intended for a
non-alcoholic drink, they are all the better used in a more powerful brew. This beer is a
fine summertime quencher of thirst, something like a long Vermouth.
Liquorice is used in medicine for soothing rough throats. In beer it gives the
illusion of having added body and sweetness, apart from its own peculiar pungency. In
fact, it has done no more than coat the tongue. For this reason, those who like a clean
taste should avoid liquorice. But it can be useful for taking the edge off a harsh stout,
since you cannot (as in winemaking) sweeten a bitter brew with sugar. This will merely
renew the fermentation, unless the yeast has been killed by pasteurization, or has already
made all the alcohol it can manage. This latter condition is unlikely to be met with in
brewing beer, though common enough in winemaking.
Like liquorice, nettle was traditionally used in stouts. An infusion of nettle is
faintly salty, like a consomme, and if added to a beer it will certainly need plenty of hops,
or the roughness of black malt to give it an "edge" and make it palatable. Salt has the
effect of giving "roundness" of flavour, and should in any case be added in small
quantities to a brew of beer. But as soon as the salty taste is perceptible, it comes as a
disagreeable surprise, and the clean after-taste characteristic of good beer is lost.
The use of old-fashioned flavourings: ginger, dandelion, burdock or sarsaparilla,
must be adapted to suit each brewer's taste. Once the principle of balancing bitter against
sweet is understood, then there is no reason why these flavours should not make
stimulating variations on the original theme of hops.
Sugar
Malt by itself contains enough fermentable sugar to make an alcoholic drink. In
fact German law refuses to recognize a malt liquor brewed with added sugar as "beer" at
all. But the home brewer is not a purist. He cannot afford to be, with malt the price it is.
By adding sugar he can make his beer much stronger than is normally sold over the bar;
he can make it keep better; and he has a wide range of new flavours to play with, since
each type of sugar will add its own particular fragrance.
Honey is the oldest form of sugar to be used in beer, and is still thought by some
to be the best. Nowadays it is a luxury if added in any quantity, and the drink would rank
rather as a hop-flavoured Mead. As in Mead-making, the honey should be boiled 10-15
minutes in part of the water going into the brew, to kill unwanted bacteria which would
otherwise turn the beer sour.
Then there are the various types of cane-sugar. Of these, white sugar contributes
nothing noticeable to the flavour of the drink. Demerara, though dearest, is best,
especially for pale, light-bodied beers. Brown moist is cheapest, and makes a darker beer,
heavier in body, but not necessarily more alcoholic, since it contains more unfermentable
matter. Invert sugar, used commercially in English beers, ferments out quickest of all, and
most completely. It makes a good, dry beer, with a slightly cider-like taste. Golden syrup
for some reason takes much longer than the other sugars to clear, and tastes faintly of
grapefruit. Black treacle or molasses are best kept for medicinal stouts. Its flavour is not
clean on the tongue, and needs the roughness of black malt, and plenty of hops, to
counteract it.
A whole range of beers can be produced by using malt extract and our table shows
four excellent recipes for home brewers to produce beers of varying strength.
These are quite simple, and anyone can produce an excellent, strong beer fully as
satisfying as any which can be purchased at "the local."
Five gallons is the most a man can lift conveniently. If women brew, they had
better halve the quantities and make 2 ½ gallons at a time. Round figures are used. There
is no need for precision, but a hydrometer is worth getting, to let you know what type and
strength of beer to expect. Use tap-water. Galvanised wash-boilers are quite safe for
boiling up the infusion of herbs; there is no acid formed at this stage, and so no risk of
metal poisoning arises. Use Demerara or invert sugar for the lighter brews, brown for the
heavier.
The Extract is easier to pour if left in a warm place overnight, and 2 lb. jars are
more convenient than 14 lb. tins, but dearer. When pouring extract from a tin, wet the free
hand with cold water. The ribbon of malt can then be coaxed back into the tin without
sticking to the fingers.
Hops can, of course, be used alone in any of the recipes that suggest other herbs,
at the rate of 4-8 oz. to the 5-gallon brew. Compressed hops come in 8-oz. packets which
can easily be broken in half to save weighing. If loose hops are used, a good fistful may
be taken to weigh about an ounce.
Baker's yeast may be used, but it needs more skimming, and takes longer to clear.
Lager and Ale yeast cultures are best left for fancy brews.
The fermenting vessel should be large enough to hold the wort and allow for the
"head," say 7-gallon size. It is best made of polythene or stoneware.
Distinguish between stoneware and the old-fashioned red clay crocks which
usually have a lead glaze and poison the fermenting brew. Lead glazes are thick and
honey-coloured, whereas stoneware glazes are thin and colourless.
Stoneware rings clearly when struck, while lead-glaze vessels, being earthenware,
do not.
Beers, of course, can be made to any strength, and opposite we give in tabular
form a series of recipes which will enable you to select your own. One word of warning,
it is better to aim at beers of strengths equivalent to those obtaining commercially rather
than always producing high-gravity brews, which cause headaches when drunk in
quantity, as most beers are.
SUGGESTED RANGE OF HOME-BREWS
USING MALT EXTRACT
Recipe 1 2 3 4
Alcohol 3% 5% 7% 9%
Gravity at Start 30 45 60 30
Gravity at Finish 2 0 5 9
Recipe 1 2 3 4
Gallons Water 5 5 5 5
lbs. sugar 3 4 5 6
lbs. Malt Extract 1 2 3 4
Herbs 1 oz. 2oz. 4-6 oz. 6-8 oz.
Hops Hops Hops Hops
or Herbs 2oz.
Spruce
Extract
Price per pint 2 ½d. 3½d. 4½d. 6½d.
Days to clear 7 14 21 28
Keeps for Weeks Months Months Years
Use also in 1 Pkt. Dried Yeast, 1 Pkt. Yeast Food,
each case :
2 teaspoon salt, or water treatment as
instructed.
Juice of one lemon.
For Stout Boil up ½ lb. patent black malt grains
and 4 oz. flaked barley with the hops,
in Recipe 3 or 4.
PREPARATION
Bring a convenient quantity of water to the boil, 3 gallons if you have a 4-gallon
boiler. Add salt, then put in herbs and simmer for 45 minutes. When hops are used, some
of the fragrance is lost in the steam. So keep a handful back till the last five minutes of
the infusion. Allow to cool for a few minutes. This gives the herbs time to settle and
makes decanting easier.
Put the sugar and malt into the fermenting vessel. Strain the near-boiling infusion
of herbs into the vessel, and stir well till all is dissolved with a hardwood stick.
Make up to five gallons with boiled water. Allow to cool. Dissolve yeast food (if
used) and citric acid or lemon juice in a little of the brew, and stir in. Put the hydrometer
in and note the gravity.
FERMENTING
Sprinkle on the yeast. Tie a cloth or secure a sheet of polythene with elastic over
the vessel to keep out the flies. The ideal temperature is 65-75 degrees F., that is, about
the range of a room in summertime. Cooler temperatures mean slower fermentation. This
is no advantage in beer-making: it merely holds up regular production, so find a warm
corner for the brew, or else use some simple heater, in cold weather. A thick foam builds
up on the surface within 24 hours; skim this off. It contains impurities which may make
the beer slow to clear. Thereafter leave the brew in peace till the yeast has done its work.
With strong beers, however, it is advisable to add the sugar in two doses, or they
occasionally "stick" at 1020 or so.
Strong beers take about a week to ferment out, weaker ones three days or so. The
hydrometer will tell you the progress. But when the gravity gets low you cannot be sure at
what point it is merely telling you about unfermentable solids left in suspension. Your
aim is to decant the beer as soon as it is "flat," since the decanting while the ferment is
still on can lead to burst bottles. Best then, to watch the surface of the brew. Towards the
end of the ferment the bubbles collect in a ring at the centre. Then the surface, which is
cloudy while the yeast is till active, begins to clear. This means that the yeast has no more
sugar to work on, and is beginning to sink down. Then is the time to bottle.
BOTTLING
Having made your home-brew you then come to the satisfying job of bottling it.
Should it be bottles, or tap-jars? One four-gallon tap-jar takes no longer to clean
and sterilise than one bottle. It allows you to draw off your beer in half-pints, and that is
useful when brewing strong. But the drink will be "draught" in character, however lively
it may be, since all the gas is spent immediately in forming the head. A truly sparkling
drink can only be made in screw-top bottles.
Apart from looking good, and lightening a heavy brew, the sparkle sends the
alcohol to your head quicker. And a bottled drink will clear sooner, since the yeast has not
so far to fall. But the labour of cleaning and sterilising is multiplied thirty-fold. It is a
matter of choice.
This is the quickest way of cleaning: prepare a stock solution of potassium
metabisulphite, by dissolving ¼ lb. in a quart of hot water. Keep it handy in a stoppered
flagon. Take all the stoppers out of your bottles, and set aside those with perished
washers. Take off these washers. Stretch the new washers over the ends of all the
stoppers. Then take each one in turn and insert a spike (say the outside prong of an old
fork) between the washer and the stopper. Then, by turning the stopper round and round,
the washer can be worked down to its proper place.
Next take the bottles. Rinse each under the cold tap, emptying the water out by
holding upside down and swirling round with a vigorous rotary movement. This forms a
whirlpool inside, which allows the air to get in and the water to fly out. Take a jug and in
it mix two ounces of your stock sulphite solution in a pint of water. Pour this sterilizing
mixture through a polythene funnel from one bottle to the next. From the last bottle, pour
it back into the jug, and drop all the stoppers in. Next give the stoppers and each bottle a
quick rinse under the tap to remove any traces of sulphite.
Keep the remains of the sulphite solution handy for sterilizing the siphon before
and after use. You will find the whole job is made much easier by fitting to the cold tap a
length of hose-pipe equipped with a lever-spray nozzle. The bottles are now ready to fill.
SIPHONING
You want to have the suction end of the siphon just above the sediment at the bottom of
the fermenting vessel. The best way to do this is to have a length of glass tube (¼ in.
bore) with a U-bend at one end, to bring the lower opening of the tube some ¾ in. above
the bottom of the U. This tube, with your polythene piping fitted at the other end can be
pushed straight down into the vessel till the U-bend rests on the bottom. The opening will
then be sucking up the brew just above the level of the sediment. A chemist will do this
bit of glass-work. Failing that, you can buy a good adjustable siphon ready-made.
PRIMING
Put the empty bottles in their crates, and fill each in turn from the siphon, up to
the shoulder, and not beyond, or you may have trouble with foam when you come to
unscrew the stopper. When all are filled, "prime" each one with one level teaspoonful of
caster sugar. Use a funnel to get it down the neck cleanly, and tap the stem of the funnel
each time, to make sure the whole dose goes down.
This priming sugar starts a further slight fermentation, enough to give the
mature drink a good sparkle. If more sugar than this is put in, you may lose the beer
in foam, or burst the bottle.
The same is true if you bottle it before the fermentation in the first place has
finished. Wet the stoppers, to allow the washers to slip when you tighten them, screw
down hard, and give each bottle a good shake to dissolve the sugar. Store upright in a
cool dark place.
TAP JARS
In this case it is advisable to fill to the shoulder only (this gives you four gallons)
and put any surplus brew in bottles. The space left in the shoulder gives room for the gas
pressure to build up. Otherwise, you risk blowing out the tap, or bursting the jar.
To prime, make a syrup by dissolving 2 lb. of caster sugar in one pint of boiling
water. Allow to cool and keep stoppered up in a sterilized flagon. For a 4-gallon jar, take
3 oz. of this syrup and add to the brew in the jar while you are siphoning. This makes
enough gas to drive about half the contents out under pressure. You may experiment with
more, but it is hardly worth the risk, and with heavy beers it is as well to reduce the
priming sugar to 1-1½ lb. to the pint, or you may even have a jar burst. It will depend on
the strength of the jar, so we cannot hold ourselves responsible!
Once the jar is filled and primed, wet the rubber washer of the stopper, and screw
down tight. The washer should be seen to flatten and bulge. See that the tap is hammered
well home. When the gas pressure builds up the tap may leak a little. This usually stops
after a few days as the corks take up the moisture and swell. If they go on leaking, the
only cure is to change them. The cork shive is often hard to fit over the stem of a new tap.
Soak it, but not the tap, overnight in your sterilizing solution. It should then be soft
enough to coax up to the shoulder of the tap, where it must be before you try to drive the
tap home. If it will not go, then rasp off a little of the taper round the shoulder of the tap.
There is plenty of wood to spare at that point.
If the tap grows mould, and it is almost bound to, wash it off with a strong
sulphite solution.
When the pressure fails, and no more beer can be drawn off, unscrew the stopper,
reprime, and wait for the brew to clear. If you have only a gallon or less left in, better
draw it off into pint bottles, and prime as usual. When the tap jar is empty, clean out with
water, swill it around with sulphite solution, and refill, either with your next brew or with
water. If left empty, the tap and corks will dry out and become unusable.
CORRECT MASHING
Many people do not realise that when using malt, as distinct from malt extract,
one of the most important factors in the production of good quality home-brewed beer is
the correct "mashing," or extraction of maltose from the malt.
In this the temperature of the water plays a most important part. The operating
temperature of the first fermentation should be between 130 degrees and 150 degrees F. It
should never rise above 150 degrees F.
The amateur often has great difficulty in keeping to these temperatures but here is
a very simple and effective method.
Use a two-gallon polythene bucket or boiler with lid. Bring just under two gallons
of water to 150 degrees F., pour them in the bucket, and scatter in two pounds of crushed
malt (the extraction is much greater from the ground malt).
Then insert a 50-watt glass immersion heater, put the lid on the bucket, cover with
a blanket or thick cloth, and leave on overnight or for a period of eight hours. The
temperature with these quantities and with this type of heater will remain between 130
and 150 degrees F., and the extraction is first-rate.
Such a heater will last for years and is quite inexpensive —7/6 or so—and it is
quite unecessary to go to the length of using costly thermostatically controlled heaters.
Current consumption is negligible.
After the eight hours extraction the liquid should be strained off into a boiler and
two ounces of hops added. Make the total liquid up to three or even four gallons and boil
for an hour. Strain and add 2 lb. block invert sugar (all the breweries in this country use
"invert sugar, which is wholly fermentable) then allow the brew to cool to 75 degrees F.
before adding a packet of concentrated brewing yeast.
Fermentation as a rule takes three to four days and the brew may be siphoned into
bottles or jars.
It is just as well to let fermentation come to an end, and then prime each bottle or
jar with a little sugar syrup. This gives a nice gentle secondary fermentation, gives sparkle
and head to the brew, and avoids burst bottles.
This makes a really excellent brew.
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