ONCE I HAD finished planting and was back home in Kingston, I felt that I could switch my focus a little, leave farming behind and concentrate on honing my brewing chops. One of the things I had decided really early on in the project — in keeping with my whole making-my-ignorance-work-for-me approach — was to spend some time working with really serious brewers.
As a start, I had spent a morning in late April with Peter Snell at the Kingston Brewing Company. The oldest still-running pub in Ontario to brew its own beer (and the second to be licensed), the brewpub, as it is commonly called, is located in a red brick Victorian hulk that once housed the city’s telegraph office. The 1949 International Harvester red delivery truck parked outside makes it easy to spot. The pub is definitely worth a visit, if only to take in its incredible collection of “breweriana.” Pump handles, bar mats, give-away trays, bottle openers — almost anything that can carry a logo and a brand name — from breweries worldwide, both thriving and defunct, fill display cases, festoon the staircase and run up walls decorated with stenciled barley heads. Peter’s workplace, the brewery part of the brewpub, is a white-tiled room dominated by chest-high stainless steel vats and visible through the sliding glass doors behind the small bar. The brewery offers tours — a fact I find incredible, as the day I spent watching him at work we were constantly in each other’s way. You’d have to smear a party of six with butter to squeeze them all in. I’ve seen larger walk-in closets. It was an interesting way to spend a morning, but I didn’t learn all that much. Peter brews using malt extract. This practice was fairly standard for brewpubs back when the Kingston Brewing Company opened in the 1980s, but this sort of brewing has moved on a long way since then. Unfortunately, the brewpub’s equipment — and the cramped spaces that Peter has to work with — limits what he can do.
I CERTAINLY HAD a lot to learn about the how of brewing; I had already started thinking about the what. Assuming the barley came up and my hops flourished, what would I make from them? Yes, to be sure, I was brewing beer. But honestly? That isn’t all that different from some mad scientist saying he wants to create “life.” Okay, what kind of life? A blue whale or a head of lettuce? No matter how much it might seem like it when drinking more mainstream products, there is no generic beer, any more than there is generic life.
Right off I knew my beer would not be organic. It’s too bad that organic is such a binary thing — either you are or you aren’t — because I figured it could squeak in as “mostly” organic or “largely” organic. But my barley seed had been treated with a chemical fungicide, so I was out before I even got going. But organic is a mixed blessing. Not long after I planted, the Globe and Mail had an interesting piece about Mill Street Organic Lager. Founded in 2002, Mill Street is a cutting-edge craft brewery in Toronto that consistently wins awards for its beers. To create their organic lager and make it truly organic meant not just using organically grown ingredients but storing the malt in a dedicated hopper at the brewery and having the barley malted at a dedicated organic maltster. This requirement has some odd consequences. The only organic maltster in North America is in Washington State. The organic hops came all the way from New Zealand. My suspicion is that although the finished beer is in fact organic, its carbon footprint is horrendous — probably worse than sitting in an idling old Cadillac drinking a Coors Light.
One idea I did have was to try something historic. For a few reasons. One, I like old-fashioned beers. Two, I thought old-fashioned would be in some ways easier. Older beers were brewed using basic ingredients and simple equipment — a big open kitchen pot would do you just fine, along with a glass carboy to store the beer in. Precisely the kind of kit I had.
So what then? I got one potentially exciting idea from a fellow Kingstonian, Alan McLeod. Alan is a lawyer who works for the City of Kingston. An expansive man and an all-round food and drink enthusiast, he possesses one of the finest Boris Johnson hairdos on this side of the Atlantic. His witty and informative A Good Beer blog was one of the first beer blogs anywhere, and at one point was garnering more daily visitors than the Guinness website. (Alan is also a vintage baseball enthusiast. He and a group of like-minded individuals get together several times a summer to play baseball using the equipment and rules of the mid-nineteenth century. Eight balls and you walk.) From his website, I learned that Alan was involved in another historic endeavor: the Albany Ale Project. He had been researching and posting on Albany ale for years, and when I first read about it, I was very interested. I had been meaning to give him a copy of my last book, so when we met at our local brewpub, I got him to tell me more about this mythic beer.
As far back as the eighteenth century, Albany, New York, had been America’s first brewing capital, what Milwaukee or St. Louis would later become. Local brewers (including one Joshua Vassar, as in Vassar College) shipped beer throughout the thirteen colonies and even across the Atlantic to England. Plenty of people who first settled Kingston were Loyalists fleeing north from the Albany area. It was very possible that they not only knew Albany ale, but also continued to drink it once they arrived here, and perhaps even to make it.
The idea of a specific local beer made with local ingredients and in roughly our part of the world (Albany’s a three-hour drive from us) seemed too good to be true. It was. As I learned from following Alan’s blog and talking to him, and later from joining the Albany ale Facebook page, absolutely no one seemed to know what was in Albany ale. There were old ads and yellowed newspaper reports, ledger entries and bills of sale. A few years after this, Alan and his fellow enthusiasts managed find an actual recipe, but at this point no one had any idea what it was. At best, they had clues — it used hard well water pumped from far underground and may have been made with a single malt. I suppose I could have brewed anything and claimed it was Albany ale, but that didn’t seem right somehow.
To get more ideas, I e-mailed the noted Canadian beer historian Ian Bowering, telling him what I was up to. Ian replied that if I wanted to be really historic, I should forget malted barley and go with honey, maple syrup or spruce needles. Happily, he also sent me a list of the top beers in eastern Ontario at the time of Confederation in 1867, in order of popularity:
Dark ale
Porter
Pale ale
Amber pale ale
India pale ale
Cream ale
Double stout
Barley wine
Champagne ale
Mild beer
Scotch ale
Stout
It seemed lengthy, but going through the list actually made life easier. All the pale ales, I assumed, were probably offerings from nascent industrial brewers (industrial, in this case, being relative), because pale ales only became possible with indirect kilning of malt — not a step a farmhouse brewer in a remote corner of the valley could take back then. So I could put them aside. Ditto the cream ale, porter and stout. I didn’t know what to make of the mention of champagne ale. From what little I have gleaned, it seems to have been a beer fermented with champagne yeast and sometimes even stored like champagne, in bottles laid on their sides and carefully given quarter turns while fermenting. Could a part of the world where hogs still rooted in streets lined with board sidewalks have really made ale using champagne yeast? It seemed hard to credit.
That left me with three possible ales: dark, Scotch and mild. I thought I might try mild. It’s a venerable brew and, as its name suggests, low in alcohol — generally 4 percent by volume. So not too strong (beers today are typically about 5 percent alcohol by volume). As the name mild might also suggest, it’s not too hoppy. All in, it seemed the sort of ale that a humble artisan might have drunk at lunch way back when.
So by late May, I had my what, at least potentially, and I was starting to learn more about the how. My crops were doing their thing. It was just a case of keeping my head down and moving forward.
SCARCELY FOUR DAYS passed after planting before I could get back to the farm, but I fretted while I was away. If I’m honest, however, I have to admit that my presence wouldn’t have made much difference. Either it rained or it didn’t. The next time we rolled down the driveway was on May 26 — just in time for the perfect rain. It wasn’t hard; it just kept going and going and going. Never had I been so happy to be housebound.
All nine hop plants had taken, and most of them were sending out tendrils. I had been more worried about my barley. When we had left the previous Sunday afternoon, it had been spitting rain fitfully, and I don’t think all that much fell in the end. Or in the days after that. The ground in my barley field was looking pretty dry when we rolled past it. (I also noticed some seeds just lying on the ground along the edge of the road, which dismayed me. I don’t know if it did any good, but I buried them.) This was a good soaking rain, precisely what the barley needed. It rained during the night and kept going the next morning — perfect for germination. By the time we left the farm late Sunday, the barley was starting to come up, a tracery of the palest green, denser in some places than others, over the lumpy black soil. We’d been lucky. I read that weekend that only about 1 percent of Ontario’s cereal crop had even been planted by the end of May, forget having germinated. It had been too wet. The heavy equipment that commercial farmers use would have simply sunk into the mud. Harold mentioned he had a hell of a time disking our vegetable garden. Sometimes, a man with a wheelbarrow and a lawn seeder can get ahead of the big boys.
BEFORE I’D PLANTED, I started my second batch of beer. If you wanted to compare beer making to playing the harmonica, that first batch had been me wheezing my way through “Row, row, row your boat.” Now I had to step it up a little — to the level of Alanis Morissette or Bob Dylan, say.
My first beer had been a total kit concoction — wort (the name for the sticky fluid you get from adding malt to water) and an envelope of yeast. The next step up was to brew using malt extract. Now sometimes going this route isn’t much more complex than what we had done for our first brew. You get a big can of malt extract with the hops already added, a packet of yeast and maybe a small container filled with pellet hops (concentrated hops compressed into something resembling rabbit food) if the extract hasn’t been hopped already. You pour the extract into boiling water, stir it in, let it bubble a bit and then cool it before tossing in what are referred to as carbonation drops. I suspect these are the yeast combined with some sort of food. To be honest, you can make some halfway decent beer this way. You can play around with these kits a little, too.
Or you can try for something a little more complex and, flavor-wise, a little more interesting. Most home brew places sell something called pale malt extract, which is made from two-row barley and could be called a basic building block of craft beer. It’s sold as an intensely sticky and viscous syrup or as a dried powder that’s produced by extracting the sugars from malted barley. Either way, once you add it to water and heat it up, you get your basic wort or brewing fluid. What makes it a building block isn’t just its flavor: pale two-row malt also provides the yeast with an optimal diet, allowing it to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide very efficiently from the barley’s sugars. Starting with it, you can add different malts, grains, even fruit or vegetables, hops and the yeast of your choice and make pretty much any style of beer in the world.
Some people look down their noses at brewing with extract, and I think it’s fair to say that the home brewer’s dream is to make beer using only grain — that is, malted barley and other grains in their natural state — but plenty of really good home brews can be created from a base of malt extract. Still, I’ve heard one knowledgeable home brewer claim that beers made with extract always have a slightly caramelized flavor, from cooking down the malt solution. I am not so sure.
Get into making beer and one thing you quickly discover, in the words of the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Go back to the preindustrial era, and brewing beer was women’s work. Not now. There are women who brew, but not that many. I mention this only because of one thing: equipment. I suspect that if women made all the beer, they’d get by with whatever pots and pans they already had lying around in the kitchen. Not men. Men need gear. Visit a great home brewing store, shop online or check out the ads in Brew Your Own magazine (a valuable resource, by the way) and the selection is astounding: false-bottomed mash tuns and nitrogen kegging systems. Erlenmeyer flasks and refractometers (to this day, I have no idea what the hell either of these objects is or does). Two hundred and forty liter home fermentation tanks — just the ticket if you don’t have a wife or a job. One firm offers a bare-bones, two-propane burner home brewing system featuring stainless steel kegs and braided hose lines for a modest $1,999.95. The Iranians use a similar system to enrich uranium.
But all of that kit paled when I met Grayson, Dave and Randy. Technologically savvy amateur beer makers — at least one has a degree in electrical engineering — they had set up their brewing outfit in a disused creamery in the Northumberland Hills north of Lake Ontario. Charlie Papazian, the dean of home brewers, had described it as the most sophisticated amateur setup in North America. Entering it was like stepping into an ICU run by a Bond villain. Things that beeped, guys hovering over valves and dials, muttered consultations, an atmosphere of tense concentration dominated by a stainless steel mash tun (a “tun” being a fancy brewing word for big tank). When they were boiling the wort, they could hold it to within a quarter of a degree in temperature. Grayson, Dave and Randy brew in 350-liter lots. That’s something like three hundred bottles each. They will never run out and they will never need to buy beer again. Watching them brew was an awe-inspiring sight. But looking at all the gleaming modern equipment, I wondered how beer ever got made in the old days.
Probably in something closer to my more modest setup, I suspect. I planned to brew using the bare minimum: a large white plastic tub capable of holding twenty liters or about five gallons. A glass carboy of similar capacity. A rubber bung with an air lock. A long, hard, clear plastic tube with a bend in it called a racking cane, a section of clear plastic hose to stick on it and an end piece with a gravity lock — all needed for moving the brew from one container to another with minimal mess.
My hydrometer, for measuring specific gravity, would be an invaluable aid. Water’s specific gravity is 1.0000, and anything higher indicates that something is dissolved in the water. In the case of wort, specific gravity gives you a measure of how much sugar is dissolved in the starting brew, which is a guide to how strong the finished beer will be. The gravity will drop as the yeast turns the sugars into alcohol, which has a lower specific gravity than water, and carbon dioxide, which bubbles away. A beer might start with a gravity of 1.055 and end with one of, say, 1.012. (It will never end up at or below 1.000, because of lingering sugars and other dissolved stuff.) The last two digits give you a rough measure of the beer’s final strength — so the starting reading of 1.055 would translate to an alcohol content of 5.5 percent. The specific gravity also tells you when the beer has finished fermenting. When you get uniform readings day after day, it’s time to bottle.
I also had a thermometer — very important for brewing properly, especially when using whole grain. Speaking of which, I bought myself a grain mill, which resembled a meat grinder with a round plate stuck over the end where the hamburger would normally come out. Turns out, the company that made it also made my tortilla press. Talk about exploiting niche markets. I agonized about a five-gallon pot. I checked out a heavyweight beauty at a nearby kitchenware store but was put off by the price — seventy bucks. I went out and got one at Canadian Tire, one of those blue enamel jobs people use for making jam, which cost less than half that. A bit of a false economy, I later discovered.
Once I had my pot, though, I could start work on one essential piece of brewing gear that I wanted to make myself. A wort chiller.
If I were asked to explain what a wort chiller does, I’d say it deals with a paradox and an enemy. Here’s the paradox. When you brew, you bring your wort to the boil and keep it there for a long time, generally an hour. The next stage in the brewing process is pitching (adding) the yeast. Except high temperatures kill yeast. So you want the wort much cooler — around sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. You could of course just wait, but here’s where the enemy comes in. Bacteria could get into the beer and spoil it. The longer it sits, the more likely this is. (People weren’t aware of this in the old days, of course. One of the venerable brewing texts I consulted actually recommended leaving beer to cool in open vats — outdoors.) The wort gets cloudy, too, from sitting around. So you want hot wort cooled quickly.
Enter the wort chiller. I made mine from twenty-plus feet of coiled copper tubing by clamping plastic hoses on each end. When I finished boiling my wort, I’d take it off the heat, drop the coil — after sterilizing it — into my pot, hook it to the faucet and run cold water through it. This would drop the temperature quickly. The hose attached to the tap by means of a neat adapter I had rigged out of plumbing pieces. One fitting screwed onto the tap once I removed the aerator. Another fitting connected to this so that it could fit into a third, broader fitting, which in turn hooked to a fitting that then tapered down and was jammed into the tubing. (The knee bone’s connected to the . . . )
All was ready. I immediately began sweeping floors, wiping counters, emptying trash cans. That done, I got in the car and went to Toronto for a few days. My signature work habits (shirk habits, really), honed over decades of employment, were proving readily adaptable to the business of brewing.
I was anxious because this was a big step for me. Our first effort, the kit, had been almost foolproof (though we did our best). But I really could blow this one and end up with nothing to show for it. I was also a little nervous because I wasn’t sure exactly what I was making. I’d found three good mild ale recipes — one for a dark mild, one for a ruby and one for a gold. But because Kingston is a relatively small city with a relatively small number of home brewers, my local home brew place didn’t have all of the ingredients I needed for any one of them. So in the same way as I had been using my ignorance as a tool, I decided to make a virtue of necessity. Among my (few) other gifts is a facility at baking pies. In fact, I am sometimes referred to as the pie man. (By me, mostly. Others call me that, too, but you can almost see the little quote marks around it when they say it.) Anyway, one thing you learn about baking pies — peach, apple, cherry — they are generally the same. Sure, each one has its own little differences, but put in the right amount of fruit and the right amount of sugar, make a decent crust and bake it at the proper temperature and you won’t go far wrong. I was gambling that brewing is sort of like baking — it’s all about manipulating grain. What I was attempting would incorporate the do-able, if not the best, elements of all three recipes. But if I kept to the broad strokes, I’d be all right.
When it came time to brew, what I did was essentially the same as I would do for all my future brews.
First, I poured three gallons of well water into my pot. I used well water from the farm — chlorinated water can give beer harsh flavors, and our local tap water has a vaguely algae taste to it. While the water was heating on the cook top in our narrow little Kingston kitchen, I got busy with the grain mill that I’d clamped to a serving trolley stationed nearby. All three recipes called for very different types of grain. One wanted amber malt, another roasted barley, the third chocolate. And no two called for the same amounts. One called for two pounds, one for two and a bit, one for two pounds five ounces. I compromised with crystal malt, which usually makes for a slightly sweeter final beer. And I decided to add just over two pounds — another compromise — which I dumped into the mill and started grinding, taking care to adjust the plates so that the malt was broken up but not reduced to powder — a mess to clean up afterward. I then dumped the crystal malt into a cheesecloth bag, which I tied with a very long piece of heavy twine. When the water hit the right temperature, I tossed the bag in and put the lid on. My instructions said keep the brew at 165 degrees, which meant constantly lifting the lid to check my thermometer and turning the burner on and off. It was variously too hot or too cool. After thirty minutes, I pulled out the bag, splattering wort everywhere, and quickly tossed it in the sink.
Malt extract is amazingly viscous stuff. It’s quite sweet, and it looks a lot like honey. At this point, I lifted my pot off the burner and began adding the extract, scraping it out of its tub with a rubber spatula, then dipping the tub into the hot wort to rinse out as much of the extract as possible. After this, I put the pot back on the burner and brought it to a boil. Every beer recipe seems to require that you boil it for an hour. I have no idea why. The fact that beer was boiled was why in the old days people drank it instead of water, but it would have been just as sterile after ten minutes. The bulk of my time was spent making sure the wort didn’t boil over. Happily, that old wives’ tale about watched pots is true.
Fifteen minutes into said hour, I dropped in my first hops. Typically, you add three lots of hops to a brew. The first infusion is called bittering hops, and they give the brew its bitter taste. The second infusion, usually done near the end of the boil, is aroma hops. The third, generally added after the wort has been taken off the heat, is the finishing hops. Part of the magic of brewing is knowing which hops to use for which purpose. For my bittering hops, I was using Fuggles, in pellet form. I love Fuggles because it sounds like a British rock band from the 1960s — Meet the Fuggles. It is a mainstay of older English brewing styles.
At the hour mark, I lifted the pot off the burner and threw in half an ounce of Goldings hops (for aroma). Then I tossed in eight ounces of demerara sugar — for a nice dark color and to give the yeast something more to work with. I put the pot by the sink, dropped in my chiller and turned on the cold water tap — at which point parts two and three of the adapter I had created blew across the room. I stuck the hose onto the tap with metal tape instead. Twenty-five minutes later, I siphoned the cooled wort into my large white plastic tub and pitched my yeast. With that, I snapped on the lid and put my air lock in place.
The kitchen looked like it had been hit with a wort bomb from twenty thousand feet. Sticky brown syrup covered every counter and had dribbled down the fronts of all the cabinets — including one, oddly, above the stove, high over my head. My shoes stuck to the floor with each step. But my work was done; now it was up to the yeast.