Home Brew Beer

Budweiser and several other classic American beers are losing sales to other brands. But not, as fans of real beer might hope, to craft beers.

They’re losing ground to low-calorie beers.

Most of the beers whose sales declined that much have one thing in common — they are “full-calorie” beers, or about 145 calories a can. Instead, beer drinkers have turned to “light beers,” which have 100 calories a can, and “ultra-lights,” which are closer to 90 calories.

See The Eight Beers Americans No Longer Drink

Now I’m not one of these guys who rails against Budweiser. I think it’s a fine beer for what it is — a light, American-style pilsner. I don’t particularly like that style, but it’s certainly a quality product, and if you offer me a Budweiser or a coke, I’ll take the Bud, thank you very much.

With the success of serious breweries like Sam Adams, and with the amazing craft beer revolution, you’d think maybe Americans are starting to develop a taste for serious beer.

Some are, but apparently not the majority. Americans still have a taste for things with little taste. These already tasteless beers are losing ground to beers that have even less taste.

Okay. That doesn’t bother me, so long these 90-calorie beers don’t get between me and the beers I like.

I’m reading What Would Google Do? Generally speaking, and to over-simplify, it’s about the new relationship between producers and consumers, and how consumers are in charge. Companies that allow their customers, clients and partners to do what they want to do will succeed. And if at all possible, companies should strive to make their products free.

It’s a good perspective and I agree with a lot of it, although sometimes I think this approach is overblown.

Anyway, it’s all well and good thinking about these things in terms of internet content and services, but it’s another thing to apply these concepts to something tangible. Like beer.

So I tried, and this is what I came up with.

An old-school approach to brewing would be to pick a demographic, try to find out what kind of beer they like, brew something like that, and then get your marketing team to convince your chosen demographic that this is really the beer for them.

There’s nothing wrong with that approach, except that people’s tastes vary considerably. Just go the local mega-beer store and look at all the styles and varieties of beer that are available.

The WWGD approach might ask how you can put the customer in charge of the brewing process?

So what would that mean? To oversimplify things, imagine that beer can be …

+ more or less malty,
+ more or less bitter, and
+ have more or less hop aroma

Now imagine that the customer is at a tap with three dials, one for each characteristic, and he can dial it up or down to suit his tastes.

Then, when he picks his perfect blend, he can order a case made to his own specifications.

That seems like step 1. But there’s more to “putting the customer in charge” than just allowing the customer to define the product. The customer also needs to be able to mix your product with other things.

A snakebite is a mixture of beer and cider, and there are various kinds of shandies and other drinks out there that mix beer with ginger ale or what have you.

The next step would be allowing people to share their particular recipes and discuss / review them, or bring their own mash-up with them to the bar.

(Re-posted from here.)

Some people say it takes a whole lot of heather to make any difference in a beer, but it seems that’s only true if you put it in the boil. If you add it to the fermenter — like dry hopping, but with heather — you can get a very interesting flavor.

I did an experiment recently where I made 10 gallons of brown ale and split the batch into two fermenters. One I “dry hopped” with two ounces of heather and the other I didn’t.

The heather was quite noticeable. It imparts an interesting flavor. Kinda “earthy.” I like it a lot.

My buddy with the Mr. Beer kit asked another question. He was looking at the instructions for one of their kits — Cascadia Pale Ale — and noticed that it didn’t call for any boiling.

I’d like to try one of these Mr. Beer recipes at some point. Check out the brewing instructions. No boiling the wort even when adding the hop pellets (in muslin bags). This is the case with all of their recipes. What do you think? Looking at the readers comments some mention that they did boil the hops.

Generally speaking, there are four reasons to boil the wort.

• Sterilization
• Hop utilization
• Flavor (e.g., caramelization of wort)
• Modification of the wort (some weird things happen when you boil it)

I suspect that they’ve already done all that stuff. Obviously the cans are sterile. The wort in the cans is already hopped. They’ve already boiled it to get the flavor they want and whatever modification is necessary.

So basically they’ve already done a lot of your work for you.

What they’re adding in this recipe is some additional aroma hops. You don’t want to boil those. The boiled hops are already in the extract. Remember, generally speaking there are three hop additions — bittering (60 minutes), flavor (20 minutes) aroma (0 to 5 minutes).

So if the price of the kit doesn’t bother you, go for it. The directions look sensible to me. Just be sure to keep it at the right temperature so the yeast gets a good start.

I have a friend who is interested in homebrewing and he got a “Mr. Beer” kit for Christmas. He’s been asking me a bunch of questions, so I thought I might as well post them here.

Q: Hey, how come this thing doesn’t have a place for CO2 to escape? I thought the fermentation process creates lots of CO2.

It absolutely does. If you tried to make beer in a sealed container you’d make a bomb.

The Mr. Beer (we discovered after contacting their customer support line) has grooves in the screw-on lid that allow CO2 to escape. That doesn’t sound like the greatest design to me, but it’s probably good enough.

After his first batch, which was made from the kit that came with the Mr. Beer machine, he said …

Q: My beer is sweet and flat. What did I do wrong?

If it’s too sweet, that means the yeast wasn’t able to ferment enough of the sugar. There could be several causes for that. The most likely are (1) you fermented at the wrong temperature, or (2) the yeast got “stuck” before it finished.

Later I learned that instead of using the recommended 2.5 teaspoons per liter of bottling sugar, he used 2.5 tablespoons. That had me worried. I was imaginging exploding bottles in his basement. (Hey, Charlie Papazian is right about relaxing, not worrying and having a homebrew. But exploding bottles are no joke.)

By my calculations, 2 teaspoons per liter is better. (2 tsp / liter corresponds to 3/4 cup in a traditional 5 gallon batch.)

But anyway — what was the problem? Clearly the excess of bottling sugar would have contributed to sweetness, but why was it flat? Why didn’t he get gushers?

Clearly the yeast didn’t ferment all the sugars. The yeast might not have had enough oxygen at the start of fermentation, but I didn’t consider that too likely. Probably the beer was simply too cold and the yeast never really got going. I recommended that he move the bottles to a warmer spot and keep an eye on them — e.g., open one every couple days to see if they’re getting too carbonated.

Of course it’s better to take a specific gravity reading before you bottle to ensure fermentation is done, but he’s just starting and doesn’t have a way to measure specific gravity. The Mr. Beer instructions have you wait two weeks and then bottle — which is good enough in most cases.

He moved the bottles to a warmer place and he did eventually end up with gushers. I was trying to come up with a solution to that, but he simply poured out the rest of the batch and chalked it up to experience.

On a subsequent attempt we decided to do a batch together. We did a little more than a double batch, and we just siphoned 2 gallons into his Mr. Beer. This time things were off to a better start.

The side of the Mr. Beer is brown, but transparent, so you can see how much foam you’ve got on top of your beer. On his first batch, there wasn’t much foam (supporting the idea that the yeast never had a fighting chance).

My foamy head is now just a small patch of foam floating in the center. Does that sound about right? Can I bottle on Friday?

Ah. Now we have a good fermentation going on. We aerated it well when we siphoned it into his Mr. Beer, and he was using a very good yeast — a whole packet of Safale 05 in a 2-gallon container. If anything’s gonna start a fermentation, that will.

I am looking for a 8 qt. stainless steel pot. The Paula Dean pot is $50, Sears has one for $8. What do I need to spend? Is that big enough? My plan is to boil 5 or 6 quarts then add enough cold water to the keg for the 2 gallons.

Some people recommend a full wort boil — even for an extract batch — but that’s for another day, especially since he’d have to get a wort chiller to make that worthwhile. For now, boiling part of the wort is just fine, and topping off with tap water helps to ensure the beer is oxygenated.

I think 12 or even 16 quarts is the better bet, even if you’re only boiling part of a 2-gallon batch. Boiling wort really foams up, and it’s good to have a little room to expand if he ever wants to make larger batches.

You can get big cooking pots pretty cheap at food stores that cater to Hispanics. They tend to have a pretty good selection of pots at pretty cheap prices. Get stainless steel.

If the fermentation process is done when the yeast consumes all of the sugar then how is more CO2 produced when you add sugar during the bottling process?

The fermentation is done, but the yeast is still there — dormant — waiting for more food. When you add sugar at bottling time the yeast wakes up and ferments that sugar too, creating the CO2 in the bottles.

Some recipes call for adding sugar to the boil. What’s up with that?

Sugar is less expensive than malt, so brewers have often added various kinds of sugar to the boil to get more fermentables at a lower cost. Adding sugar can make a cidery taste, but some styles rely on sugar (like some Belgian beers).

Generally speaking it’s better to use malt extract and skip the sugar, but it’s no crime to add some. Brown sugar or molasses can add an interesting flavor to a beer.

Hey — homebrewing is all about experimentation.