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Category: Brewing Techniques
Tags: brewingchemistryhopstastingyeast
Entities: Augustina monksDoppelbockESBFullersMaillard reaction
00:00
I actually had my first beer when I was in a high school German trip trying beer for the first time. And and I was just like, "Oh, this is a great experience." Uh but then of course after, you know, about, you know, 3 weeks, I had to go back home and be a normal 16-year-old.
And then I couldn't have beer again
00:15
until I was in college. Was actually in one of my German classes, and we had to give a presentation.
But I had a classmate whose topic in his German presentation was how to brew beer. And he had, you know, one of these, you know, homebrew kits.
He brought us beer to class and so we all got to drink his
00:32
beer. I remember it being amazing beer, but I was like, he made this and it's like that's pretty much all chemistry.
I can do this. You know, for me, a cool thing about it was understanding the science behind it.
And you know, the coolest things about beer uh is in malt. The thing is like
00:48
what's malt? You know, what makes it not just barley anymore, right?
And so there's a whole process referred to as the molting process. And what that really involves is taking that barley corn, that seed, and then germinating it.
So they get it wet and they blow air
01:06
through it. There's a whole, you know, modern method of doing it.
So they get really good results all the time. But the key thing is, you know, that it has to germinate and you get those little rootletits and then you basically it gets killed and so it gets heated up and they knock the little rootlets off and they heat it up.
It's like why do they
01:21
do all of this? We k it or mulsters kill it.
I don't the monsters kill it and so that kind basically stops everything. It kind of puts it almost into suspended animation.
What happens though is it's expressed all of these enzymes. All right, these enzymes the most important ones are called amaes.
Uh and so these
01:39
amaes can break down starches. So these have like you know millions of enzymes inside of them that can then as soon as I you know activate them and how do we activate them is you know we do something called a mash.
And so we grind this up. We're not making a flour.
We
01:54
just kind of crack the grain, get little pieces of it, but you can literally do it in your mouth. If you crack it and you chew it, you're actually starting to mash the grain.
But the whole thing is these enzymes are now active. They're breaking down to simple sugars.
And those simple sugars are ultimately what
02:10
the yeast is going to convert into ethanol. That's just one type of malt.
And most beers are more complex than that. Many have other types of kil malts.
And so this is like a chocolate malt in here. So if you imagine a porter or stout, this is basically malt that's just been killed longer, right?
This was
02:25
just kiln long enough to kind of lock in those enzymes, but this is brought up to higher temperatures. Well, what happens?
It's more chemistry, right? We get a process called the mayard reaction.
It's the same kind of browning you get like if you're cooking a steak. The idea is you want to get a nice sear on the steak and you get the brown color, the flavor
02:42
in beer, right? What makes that rich porter, rich stout in there is that mayard reaction.
And so it's really it's simple sugars reacting with amino acids. It's more chemistry.
When I brew now it's like I'm like, okay, how can I manipulate things? How can I understand the chemistry better?
Um, and that
02:58
really got me interested in hop chemistry as well. I actually grow my own hops.
And these are actually dried hops that I grew at my house. You can see inside there's this yellow particulate matter, this resin, right?
And so this is what contains most of the oils that give you that aroma, but also
03:14
what gives beards bitterness. Because if you didn't have hops in beer, it would be too sweet.
And in addition to that, to get even more aroma, people will actually get hops after the boil. So, they've already fermented the beer.
They do a process called dry hopping. When I brew, I'm often I'm usually adding hops
03:30
at at least three places, if not four. I I love hoppy beers.
And so, I love to bre cuz the hoppy beers are a great place to experiment because there's so many hops out there. I could probably get a hundred different hop varieties if I wanted to spend the money and all the different combinations of them too because there's, you know, this idea of
03:45
where, you know, one plus one does not always equal two, right? Where you're combining them.
Um, and then getting back to chemistry is something when you add those dry hops or you add them while the beer's fermenting, yeast can actually transform some of those essential oils and compounds into something different. And so you have
04:02
chemistry going on during fermentation besides just making alcohol and consuming that sugar. And then of course I haven't really talked about yeast very much but you know different yeast is another place to really you know um experiment as well because you know we have not just alle yeast and logger
04:18
yeast but there's there's you know I'm trying to remember how many different alle yeast strains I could get now if I wanted to but you know in even commercial operations there's probably 50 or 60 different ale strains and um you know at least half as many logger strains that are in use and they're all
04:34
going to be a little bit different two different beers here. Um, and actually one of these beers I I made, they're both fairly recent.
Uh, this one is basically like a Fullers inspired ESB. And I just made these labels for fun.
Um, we give I give them as gifts to
04:51
our seniors um in the chemistry department. Uh, extra special bitter is what Fullers is.
Um, and I didn't want students to be scared of bitter because it's actually not that bitter. And I can open that one um first, but and then this one's called the graduator.
Uh, and it's a Doppel box. And many of the
05:07
doppel box originally ended in a first one is actually called like Salvator or Salvatore, uh, like St. Vtor.
Uh, and so, um, it was a beer the monks, um, that made it, the Augustina monks would drink during Lent. They would fast from food, but they could still drink beer.
05:24
Um, but it's a doppel box, so this is actually a really strong uh, malty beer. All right.
So, and I always leave a little bit in the bottom of the bottle for home brew because the ye there's yeast in the bottom of the bottle and so
05:39
you don't want to get that into the beer. >> Um, and so it it's got a little bit um a little bit of haze to this last beer at the bottom of there, but it's got a nice golden color.
Uh, and so an ESB despite the bitter that's the part of that from Fullers is that it was just the name is
05:56
more historic that bitter is meant with more bitter than was called an English mild. Um, and so it should have a very like top of those esters.
So those kind of like that fruiness you're getting, that's those esters that the yeast produces. And so I actually use the Fuller's yeast um in this beer.
And so
06:13
it's giving that kind of fruiness, that almost marmalade kind of aroma. That's all coming from the yeast.
Um, and I use the same molsters malt um, in the beer as they did. So, I wasn't doing a clone so much as an homage uh to their beer,
06:28
but it's got a nice kind of clean uh flavor. You definitely get that there is a little bit of bitterness at the finish, but it's not like an overpowering IPA.
So when I'm teaching students either my beer class or some of the chemistry majors that are, you know,
06:44
having beer for, you know, a good beer for maybe some of the first times is make sure you're drinking beer out of ideally a glass or at least a cup. Don't drink it straight from the bottle.
You know, look at the color. You know, is that you know, is is that a golden color?
Is that a copper color? Is that
06:59
an amber color? When you taste it, don't just drink it.
Like take a second, right? And evaluate it.
What are you picking up on flavor-wise? And as you understand the aromomas, the flavors as well, you can kind of get, well, what is that?
You know, and so I can be like, oh, that's a fruity esester. Well, what is what does that mean?
Well, you know,
07:16
if a student's ask me that in class, I can draw it out on the board. Uh, right.
We can look at that the chemical structure. If you can really learn to appreciate it, it can really, you know, expand your pallet and not just in beer, but you can expand your pallet into wine, into spirits, into fine foods,
07:32
right? to really like I mean you know some people are like oh I really didn't I've never really tried um you know a lot of different cheeses and they'll have beers and pair them with cheeses and like how do those flavors melt and come together and it really you know you have this kind of you know um symbiosis
07:48
of different flavors uh and and pairing things together that just kind of you know gets into more cool biochemistry and you know understanding how our sense of smell and taste really work.