Beer 101

a quick overview

Beer is made using malted barley, hops, water and yeast. To those ingredients, depending on the style of the beer, you can add rice, corn, malted and unmalted wheat, different sorts of sugars, and even fruits. For instance the big Belgian high-alcohol style of beer often uses candy sugar to add to its flavour profile, and again in Belgium they add fruit to a special brew called a lambic to create a fruit-driven effervescent beer. Essentially you will find that your friendly boutique micro-brewer is sticking to the traditional method of using just the four main ingredients I mentioned first.

To make a beer you steep malted barley (grain) in warm water for about an hour – this is known as the ‘mash’. The temperature of the water will affect the body quality and mouth-feel of the finished beer. During the mash the starches in the grain are converted into fermentable and non-fermentable sugars. Once this conversion has happened, the grain is rinsed (or ‘sparged’, in brewing talk) so that all the sugars in the grain are rinsed out, and the sparging liquid (now called ‘wort’ – pronounced wert) is then transferred to a kettle. (The spent grain from the mash is often picked up by farmers, who feed it to their cows.) The wort is boiled vigorously for about an hour, to get rid of any undesirables in the liquid that can cause problems with the beer later on. At various times throughout the boil, hops are added. Hops do several things for beer – they add aroma and flavour; they add bitterness; and they help to preserve the beer. There are more than seventy varieties of hops grown around the world, with more being developed every year. Each has its own distinctive flavour and character.

Once the wort has boiled for an hour and the hop additions have been made, the liquid is pumped through a chiller into a fermenter, where the yeast is added. The yeast’s sole function is to eat the fermentable sugars in the wort. During this process the yeast produces vital by-products, excreting (for want of a better term) carbon dioxide and alcohol – this process is called fermentation and usually takes five to seven days depending on the beer you are making. Once fermentation is finished, the beer may or may not be filtered and pasteurised, depending on the brewery and the style of the beer, and then it is either bottled or put in kegs and is ready to drink.

Simple?

Well, not really. The brewing process is fairly straightforward, but when you realise that the brewer has to choose between the seventy-plus different hops, an equal amount of various malts and manufacturers and more than fifty-five different yeast strains, it becomes clear that making a good beer is not so simple. Juggling all those flavours is an art in itself.

The very large commercial breweries produce a fine product that is collectively known as mega-swill, meaning it is for the masses. To produce such a beer the big breweries take all sorts of measures (some might say shortcuts) to produce a beer that tastes the same with every brew and is cost efficient. To do this they add all sorts of adjuncts that don’t really improve the flavour of the beer. Nor does the high proportion of cane sugar – up to 40 per cent and possibly more – which they often use. Among other things – as in the case of high-gravity brewing – they add the hops when they bottle! This to me is like serving the salt, pepper, carrots, celery and herbs for your stew on the side when you serve up. They also add rice, corn and other ingredients to give mouth-feel and to help with such things as head retention and colour. The result is a consistent and cost-effective brew – and personally I cannot stand it. Put simply, mega-swill is not suitable to cook with as it is not going to add complexity, subtlety, flavour or any unique nuance to your dish. You will get a beery character but nothing else. For this reason I recommend that you do not cook with mega-swill, or for that matter with light beer.

So what beer should you cook with? Well, there are only two types of beer in the world – some would say good ones and bad ones, which I would agree with, although that is a very subjective and personal appraisal. In fact the two types of beer are lager and ale. All beer styles fall under these two headings. So under lagers you have lager, pilsner, bock, dunkel, schwarzbier and others, and under the umbrella of ale there are ale, pale ale, bitter, India pale ale, brown, stout, porter, wheat beers, lambics and others. There are more ale styles than lager styles – don’t ask me why, although I suspect it is because ales have been around for a lot longer than lagers.

The difference between the two is how they are brewed. Lager is brewed with a yeast – often referred to as a lager yeast – that prefers a colder environment. The effect of this is to make a beer that is quite clean and uncomplicated. A lager may be brewed using one malt style and one hop style. Lagers are quite clear or bright, although they can vary from crystal clear to very dark. Because they are brewed at low temperatures they do not develop fruity characters but rather are clean, crisp, uncomplicated beers. Ales, on the other hand, are brewed at warmer temperatures with an ale yeast, which encourages the development of fruity esters. This gives ales a bigger mouth-feel and a more fruity character. Ales are also more complex beers, often using several malts and hop varieties in the one brew, which again gives them a much bigger profile in terms of mouth-feel, residual sugars, flavour, bitterness and aroma. For this reason I use ales in my cooking far more often than lagers.

My favourite style to cook with is wheat beer. To me it contributes a lovely silkiness to the flavour profile of a dish and the beers themselves have lots of unique character. The Belgian wit style is a wheat beer brewed with an addition of coriander (cilantro) and orange peel, while the traditional German hefeweizen wheat beers have strong hints of banana and cloves that come from the yeast. Both styles of beer are great in a diverse range of dishes from seafood risotto to chicken casseroles to all sorts of cakes.

I also love cooking with the big Belgian ale styles, which normally have a rather high alcohol content. In the same way that fat is flavour, so too is alcohol. To get a high alcohol content you need to use lots more malt, and in doing so the brewer needs to think much more carefully about balancing the beer out with hops and perhaps other adjuncts such as candy sugar. The resulting beer is magnificent and unique – the perfect late-night tipple with some farmhouse cheese, and even better as a brilliant component in a slow-cooked osso bucco or a dense and fragrant fruit cake.

The beers I have used for the recipes in this book are those that I love, I drink and I stand by as great beers which work well in the recipes – but importantly, they’re those I can buy. There are other beers I’ve had that I would have loved to use in this book, brewed by award-winning breweries in Western Australia, New South Wales, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and other places, but I couldn’t get them. There are great beers brewed all around the world and we are lucky that the large liquor chains and some boutique smaller ones are stocking a great selection of them, but sometimes the beer that tastes the best is being brewed just around the corner.

In these recipes I have given the beer style I have used in the dish and also the name of the beer I have used, with some possible alternatives, but really this is just a guide for you. I hope you will explore and use the beers lovingly brewed by your local micro-brewers.