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WHAT IS SIMPLICITY?
“In all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh
THE INHERENT SIMPLICITY OF BEER
Awise man once said, “Malted barley wants to become beer.” But, as with all human endeavors, we’ve complicated that effort to the point of losing sight of the central truth, which is simplicity in all things.
We’re here to help you make your brew day simpler, more efficient, more effective, and more fun without sacrificing quality. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never brewed or if you’ve been brewing since the Sumerians discovered beer’s fundamental awesomeness, there’s always a new avenue to explore in making great beer.
Stop and look at the process for virtually any other fermented drink. The only drink more complicated to make than beer is sake. Go look at the “simple” instructions for making sake and you’ll weep fortunate tears for being a brewer (unless you’re a special variety of odd). Look at those same simple instructions for mead, wine, and cider and you’ll really feel like they get to cheat. In other words, as brewers, we’re already starting with a complicated process, so let’s not muck it up any further! We should also realize that we can learn a thing or two from meadmakers, vintners, and cidermakers.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A PRAGMATIC FOCUS, OR A BOOK’S MANIFESTO IN THREE LINES
Maybe it’s a character flaw particular to Denny, but long ago he decided that work wasn’t fun. Sure, the payoff from the work could be fun, but he has never liked the work part itself. On the other hand, Denny likes making beer and he likes beer that doesn’t suck … kinda like most people! So, Denny has learned that some work is a necessary evil if you want good beer and he has no problem doing the work if he knows the payoff is going to be better beer.
Denny’s pragmatism has driven him to explore which parts of the homebrewing process are essential and which are just work. That’s the attitude we’re going to share with you in this book, along with the specific discoveries we’ve made where the payoff is better beer and having more fun when you make it. We’ll help you assess your own processes so you can decide for yourself what’s working and what isn’t. By cutting out the stuff that isn’t working for you, you can simplify your process and increase your brew day joy. And that leads us into the mantra for this book …
Brew the Best Beer Possible,
With the Least Effort Possible,
While Having the Most Fun Possible.
Figure 1.1. Found here in it’s native habitat, a group of beers remain wary of mighty predators, known as brewers.
Who can argue with that? This is a hobby, and part of the reward is the fun you have. Sure, there’s beer too, but isn’t beer all about fun? And do you know what the absolute best part is? It’s that YOU get to decide what counts as work and what doesn’t, what is fun and what isn’t, and set your own goals. For some people that might mean one-gallon brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) batches in their kitchen. For others it might mean a gleaming, totally automated stainless steel beast out in the garage, which has also been converted to a taproom/sports viewing center. (For the record, if you’ve created your own taproom brewer’s cave with a big-screen TV, feel free to invite us over for a tasty beverage. Denny prefers movies; Drew likes all Boston sports.)
Isn’t that a kick? You get to decide how to do things and what you want to do when you brew your beer. We’ll be right here to give you ideas and guidance, but ultimately it’s up to you to decide how you’re going to brew your own beer. If you’ve never brewed before, we’ll show you a variety of options to get you started.
So, here’s a story to contemplate. We’ve already gotten into mantras, so why not a little Zen to round things out?
A Japanese master named Nan-in received a visitor. The visitor was a university professor who had come to learn about Zen. Nan-in served the visitor tea, but when the cup was full Nan-in kept pouring. The visitor protested, “The cup is full! No more will go in!” Nan-in replied “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
Like the professor, if you approach simplicity with an attitude of already knowing what things are and how to do them you will get nothing out of this book. If, on the other hand, you are an empty cup and open to new ideas, then this book can be your tea.
Maybe not all of the ideas presented here are things that fit your brewing style, but by being open you may come away with a tidbit of knowledge, an inkling of an idea that may set you on a new course for your homebrewing; a sip of tea, if you will. And if you’re a beginner, you’re already an empty cup waiting for that first pour of tea. That’s why we’re here—we’re gonna fill your cup!
Also, if tea isn’t your thing, just change the tea to a pint of cask ale, or a long-forgotten farmhouse ale. No matter how full you are of certitude, no matter how much knowledge you’ve consumed (along with pints, naturally), there’s something lurking out there. Some technique, some style, something you don’t know. Odds are good you probably don’t need it, but, hey, how will you know unless you try? What have you got to lose?
THE EFFICIENCY OF SIMPLICITY
If you’ve been brewing for a while, you might read “simplicity” and think that’s for beginners. Maybe you’re one of those homebrewers who aspires to have a home brewery that looks like a scaled down version of what a major brewery would look like. Hey, that’s fine with us! That’s your decision. But we can guarantee you that commercial breweries don’t aspire to do things in the most complicated way they can think of. They simplify for the sake of efficiency. Efficiency is the goal, not the simplicity itself. But those breweries make sure they don’t simplify to the point where things become ineffective, which can happen if you cut out processes just to simplify. Which brings us to the other half of our mantra. (We’re reformed hippies, we love mantras. “Oooommmmmmmm.”)
Do Everything Necessary to Make Great Beer, But Make Sure It Pays Off in Better Beer and More Fun.
See, we’re not just trying to do the least amount of work—we’re trying to do the least amount of work that it takes to make great beer and have a great time doing it. We’re not about cutting corners, because that can lead to bad beer. We’re about evaluating what works and what doesn’t, and focusing on doing what needs to be done in the most efficient way possible. When you eliminate unnecessary effort, you build in more fun.
Here’s an example of what we’re talking about. When we started homebrewing many years ago, the accepted technique for sparging was what is called continuous sparging, or fly sparging (if you don’t know what sparging involves, don’t worry, we talk about the process in chapter 4). Fly sparging is a process of rinsing more sugar from the grain that usually takes over an hour and requires near constant attention if you don’t have specialized equipment for it.
Denny heard a mention of something called “batch sparging” (see chapter 4) that was a much faster method of getting the sugar from the grain into solution and draining it out rather than rinsing it. It used inexpensive, commonly available parts to make the equipment. Denny tried out batch sparging and found it worked every bit as well as fly sparging, but also saved him a lot of time and effort. He started talking it up and it is now the most popular way to homebrew all-grain beer. That’s a perfect example of a simplified process that saves you time without compromising your beer quality. Saving time on the brewing means you have more time for sampling your beer or brewing another batch!
We’ll talk a little later in the book about preventing brewing demotivation, a dishearteningly common occurrence among long-term brewers, but simplification can help here as well. To overcome the massive inertia that can build up prior to a brew day, Drew’s taken a page from his engineering training—namely, break the process down into simple, easy to execute, easy to build on tasks:
- • Make your yeast starters ahead of time. Having the yeast on hand puts a ticking freshness clock in your head. You’ll only need to start a day prior to brewing, but it makes a difference. We’ll tell you why and how to make starters in chapter 10. For now, what you need to know is that a starter is like a very small batch of unhopped beer that allows the yeast cells to build up to an amount sufficient to ferment your beer. And yeah, it’s easier than it sounds!
- • Crush your grain ahead of time and seal it in a bucket. We’ve done experiments that show pre-crushed grain works just fine when stored in a bucket, even a month later.
- • Clean your fermentors, chillers, and other equipment.
- • Set up your water the night before.
Completing these tasks the day before will simplify your brew day. You can just get up in the morning, light a burner and get your brew day on.
If Drew decides he’s going to brew the next day and needs to get some yeast ready for it, all he has to do is grab a jar of premade starter wort and dump his yeast into it. By the time he’s ready to make the wort, the yeast is ready to make beer. Efficiency—don’t discount the power of having yeast-ready wort on the shelf! (To find out more about “jars of wort,” wait until chapter 10 on yeast.)
Figure 1.2. Look at all these lovely jars of wort, safely canned and stored, ready for use in beer making. Now imagine the same sight, just with jars filled with alcohol and spices; those are your tinctures.
Another example is Drew’s process of making flavor tinctures for his beer ahead of time. He has shelves in his garage full of alcohol-based tinctures of various ingredients. If Drew gets a wild idea while he’s brewing (and we guarantee you that he does), he simply has to grab one of his tinctures to quickly and easily add the flavor he’s thinking of.
Simplicity and efficiency are the keys to some brewing equipment. New systems, such as the PicoBrew Zymatic® or Bevie’s The Grainfather, are all-in-one brewing solutions that make your brew day easy and efficient. No need to pull your equipment out of storage and set it up. No need for constant attention during the brewing process. Although each of the systems out there functions a bit differently and requires different amounts of attention, they all have one thing in common—their goal is to simplify homebrewing. Yeah, all-in-one brewing systems do cost more than gathering some pots from your kitchen and using those for brewing, but that trade-off is just the right thing for some homebrewers. We’ll take a closer look at some of these systems in chapter 5.
What we’re trying to do in this book is look at the various parts of the homebrewing process and break them down into steps, showing you what each part is contributing to your brewing. We’ll give you guidance through our opinions and ideas, but the ultimate decisions will be up to you. Once you have a few brews under your belt, you’ll start seeing the synergy and flow in the process and how various parts of it relate to each other. Once that lightbulb clicks on for you, you can start defining your own process.
A WORD ON PROCESS
You’ll notice in the previous section we didn’t say that we are going to dictate a process to you. We intend to help you find your process, and we guarantee it’s going to be different than ours. In the course of writing Homebrew All-Stars,1 we had the opportunity to interview 25 of the world’s best homebrewers (if you include us). We walked through each homebrewer’s brew day and looked at their way of brewing, and we found that they all brewed differently and they all had a sort of muscle memory for their brew day setup. Some of the crazier brewers had a few procedures specific to what they were brewing, but those were almost always just branches off their existing process.
If you’ve never homebrewed before, we recommend you pick up a book for beginning homebrewers like John Palmer’s How to Brew (mentioned in the introduction).2 We want to help you make all the instructions and details work better for the way you brew. But whether or not you’ve brewed before, it’s a good idea to break the process down to the basics. Then you can build it back up to be your own customized process. For example, let’s try this with the all-grain brewing process.
Simplified All Grain Brewing Process
- 1. Crush your grain.
- 2. Treat your water (if necessary).
- 3. Add your grain to the strike water (strike the mash).
- 4. Batch sparge.
- 5. Boil your proto-beer (a.k.a. wort).
- 6. Add your hops.
- 7. Cool your wort.
- 8. Pitch your yeast starter.
- 9. Ferment your wort/beer.
- 10. Rack your beer.
- a. If bottling, add priming sugar, then siphon to bottles and cap. Leave at room temperature for 1–2 weeks to carbonate.
- b. If kegging, force carbonate.
- 11. Chill your packaged beer.
- 12. Serve. (Don’t forget to enjoy it.)
Figure 1.3. Cornelius kegs at the ready for beer transfer and force carbonation.
There are other ways to do this. You could use multiple mash steps. You could partially chill the wort and add hops for more aroma, etc. No matter what though, the rest of the deal stays basically the same. We may change the mash regimen based on what we need, but everything works the same general way. We make wort, we boil wort, we cool wort, we ferment wort, we package beer, we drink beer. Some things don’t change, because we’re comfortable with what we’ve developed. We always rack the same way, we always carbonate the same way, we always <blank> the same way. It’s what we do.
Notice that we talk about kegging the beer rather than bottling it. Almost all new brewers bottle their beer, and that makes sense when you don’t know if you’ll stay with the hobby long enough to commit to the expense of a keg system. But once you decide you’re a homebrewer, you should look into getting some used soda kegs for your beer. The time and effort you save might just make the difference between giving up brewing or staying with it.
There are pros and cons for every method of doing something. Sometimes a method will be traditional because it is the best way, and other times it will be simply because no one has taken the time or effort to come up with something better.
For example, for the first several years he was homebrewing, Denny bottled by putting the bucket of beer on a counter and siphoning into bottles on the floor while he knelt down to fill them. Why? Because that’s the way it’s shown in Charlie Papazian’s great book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.3 The method was effective, but by the time Denny was done he could hardly stand up because his knees were so sore.
One day Denny was bottling at his friend Kevin’s house. Kevin put the bucket of beer on the counter, then brought out two chairs. He put a sheet pan on one chair and sat down in the other. The bottle to be filled was put on the sheet pan to catch spills. It was a revelation for Denny—he could actually stand up after bottling without grunting in pain!
Denny had managed to get away from his painful “tradition” and discover a new, more efficient way to bottle. By watching someone else do the same process in a different way, he broke through his “I’ve always done it this way” wall and simplified his process.
But, That’s Not How the Pros Do It
In their attempts to perfect their process, a common refrain we hear from homebrewers when we advocate for simplicity or breaking from tradition is, “Hey, that’s not how the big breweries do it!”
Let’s get real for a moment. For all of our flights of fancy—our dreams of manning the giant kettles to supply supreme suds to society—we aren’t pros. (And, for the record, neither of us have any desire to turn pro.) While we strive for a certain level of efficiency like professional brewers do, what we do at home is fundamentally different from what any commercial brewery does. Breweries are often trying to solve problems that we, as homebrewers, don’t have. We shouldn’t expect our techniques and needs to be the same. You don’t cook meals for a restaurant full of customers the same way you make dinner for your family. They are radically different. It’s the same with brewing. When it comes to quality, there’s less difference between what we make at home and what you get from a professional brewery than what we see between home cooking and a multi-Michelin-starred restaurant. Yes, we have echoes of the same processes and the same basic techniques, but it’s far less important for us to emulate the pros to get great results than if you’re trying to match, say, James Beard award winner Thomas Keller’s food.
If cooking’s not your thing, how about these examples: you wouldn’t build a car at home in the same way an auto factory does; you wouldn’t build a chair the same way a factory producing a hundred thousand units would. We can go on. The truth is that everything changes when you scale and when your goal is to produce the same beer over and over and over again. Drew can make a pretty damn fine Pilsner at home without needing to obsess over a mashing detail like “endosperm mashing” a la Trümer Brauerei in their Austrian and Californian breweries.
Homebrewers can use more malt and sparge less to reduce tannins because we’re not trying to shave every penny we can from our costs. We can go brew a massive beer and give it endless amounts of time to ferment and age, because, hey, if we need a new fermentor we can just go get a new bucket, carboy, or whatever. Try doing that with a commercially sized stainless tank. Alternative processes, like BIAB and no-chill brewing (where brewers skip the post-boil chill step in favor of a gradual overnight chill), work because our scale is smaller, weights are less, and the thermodynamics are more forgiving.
Seriously, we have so much freedom, it’s not even funny. Every brew can be a new idea, every batch can be an experiment. Try doing that when your batches are your profits. We don’t have the moral dilemma that comes from dumping a bad batch down the drain, because it’s only a few dollars, not a few thousand. That’s another reason why the battle cry, “But that’s not what X does,” is terrible. Almost all of that beloved research that people love to wave around about various magical reactions that can make or break your brew was done at the behest of massive lager corporations for their specific needs: the lowest cost, highest shelf stability, a longer sales period, and shorter fermentation time.
We’re now in a time of science-minded homebrewers and craft brewers who are tackling brewing in their own way to efficiently produce flavorful and quality beers. The technical precision needed to make a great IPA is looser than an industrial lager, but there are new questions not answered by existing lager-powered research. We are finding out that we can be less rigid, less formal, and still produce great beer. That’s because once you know what the science is and how it works, you can decide what applies to you in your own home brewery and how you want to implement it. Ain’t life grand?
WHAT ISN’T SIMPLICITY?
The real key to simplicity and efficiency is an understanding of the brewing process. It goes back to the saying, “Learn the rules so you know which ones you can break.” By understanding the core processes in homebrewing, as well as a bit of the science behind it, you can decide which things matter to you and which don’t. We’ll show you how to combine some processes to save time and energy as well as eliminate others because they don’t have a payoff. We are going to break down some of the complex ideas and processes into core components, and you can decide what works for you. Don’t worry, it isn’t as intense as it may sound! We promise to make the science in this book as painless as possible.
But, before we get going, let’s define what simplicity isn’t. (You’ve got to explore the negation, man.) Spontaneity is not simplicity. Brewing by the seat of your pants is not simplicity. Not being prepared on your brew day is not simplicity. Without thinking through what you’re going to be doing, you may end up running around your kitchen or garage looking for that one piece of equipment that you really need right now! Meanwhile, your kettle is boiling over or you miss the timing for a hop addition.
It’s tempting to say that simplicity is a brewing process that doesn’t require a lot of hands-on time, but that’s not exactly true. Sometimes, by simplifying the tools and equipment you use, you find yourself actually having to pay more attention to the process itself. But again, that’s a tradeoff for you to decide. We’re here to share various methods and systems and then you get to put it together into a process that fits what you want to do and the time you have available to do it. Denny’s “Cheap ’n’ Easy” system (see chapter 4) requires more hands-on time than an automated system, but the saving in cost is the tradeoff he decided on in exchange for having to spend a bit more hands-on time during brewing.
On the other hand, when Denny uses an automated all-in-one system, he can get it started and then monitor the brewing on his phone while he cleans the house, does the laundry, or writes a chapter of this book! He’s trading money for his time and effort.
The recipes at the end of the profile on Doug King demonstrate both sides of simplicity.4 Doug’s equipment was about as basic as you can get and he brewed in his kitchen rather than a fancy outdoor setup. But Doug’s process was as old-school as you can get. For Doug, his extensive process was part of the fun he was looking for when he brewed.
We would be extremely unlikely to ever do a complicated mash, but we both use more complicated brewing systems to simplify our brew days. Both ways show that simplicity is a personal evaluation. And both ways can make great beer while you have a great time doing it.
That’s what the rest of this book is about: discovering your version of simplicity to make the brew day more enjoyable and worthwhile.
PROFILES IN SIMPLICITY: DOUG KING
Doug’s primary obsession when it came to homebrew was the oft-maligned American lager. Yup, good ol’ Budweiser. Fortunately for Doug, our club is located in the backyard of Budweiser’s second-largest brewing facility. He became close friends with the brewers and learned their secrets.
He got skilled enough at making his Dougweiser (“Beer of the King”) that he won the California State Homebrew Competition. Once, on a lark, Doug asked Anheuser Busch to analyze a few of his bottles. He nailed their specifications. That’s impressive. What’s more impressive, he did it by mashing on his stove top and lautering in a classic Zap Pap setup. (What’s a Zap Pap? It’s Charlie P’s old-fashioned, about-as-cheap-as-it-gets setup of two plastic buckets sitting inside each other with a bunch of holes in the bottom of the top one.) So much for needing stupendously expensive computer-controlled systems to make a delicate beer.
There’s also the legend of Dougfoot, a simple extension to Dougweiser that was created on the spur of the moment from the first runnings of the Dougweiser recipe. As the story was told years later, Doug loved the idea and hated the execution … until he gave it time to age and smooth out. Dougfoot became a club staple. (A few folks still know the magic and make it in remembrance.)
But Doug wasn’t just a lager guy—he made everything. He wanted to try as much as he could. He also had a homebrewer’s appreciation for recycling and using whatever was on hand. Leftover corn tortillas went into the mash and made Cornweiser; potatoes became Spudweiser; chocolate cake went into his Cakeweiser stout; and on and on it went.
Dougweiser (Drew’s Simple Version)
a.k.a. The hardest simple recipe you’ll ever make
In the spirit of simplicity, Drew utilized flaked rice instead of a traditional cereal mash. We’re going to give you both ways to make this pair of beers: the complicated full-throated version with an American cereal mash, and the simple version with flaked rice. I’m fairly certain Doug would grumble about the latter, but I think it works pretty well! Doug also simplified his brew life by maintaining a rigorous fermentation schedule that was always the same and allowed him to know just what to do. For Dougfoot, increase the grain bill by 30% and only use the first runnings.
Batch volume: 5.0 US gal. (19 L)
Original gravity: 1.048 (11.9°P)
Final gravity: 1.010 (2.6°P)
Color: 2.3 SRM
Bitterness: 14 IBU
Malt
- • 6.0 lb. (2.7 kg) American two-row
- • 0.25 lb. (115 g) Carapils®
- • 3.0 lb. (1.36 kg) whole rice, coarsely ground (or use flaked rice for an easier time and skip the cereal mash)
Cereal Mash
- • Gelatinize: Add 1.75 gal. (6.6 L) of boiling water to the coarsely ground whole rice. Stir and keep heat on rice mash; always stir while it is boiling!
- • Saccharification: Add 0.75 gal. (2.8 L) of cold water and 1 lb. (450 g) of the two-row malt to bring the temperature down to 150-155°F. Rest for 3 minutes and begin the main mash.
- • Boil: Return the rice and grain mix to boil for 15 minutes, then add to the main mash.
Main Mash
- • 5 lb. two-row and 0.25 lb. Carapils. If using flaked rice, use all the malt here.
- • Protein rest: 122°F (50°C) for 30 minutes (no rice, unless using flaked rice)
- • Saccharification: 148–150°F (64–66°C) for 60 min. If doing the cereal mash, raise the main mash temperature with the rice infusion.
Hops
- • 0.33 oz. (10 g) Willamette, Nugget, or Perle
Water
- • Use low-mineral water. Our brewers recommend a 50:50 mix of distilled and tap water.
Yeast
- • Wyeast 2007 Pilsen Lager Yeast or Wyeast 2035 American Lager Yeast
Fermentation
- • Pitch yeast into 48°F (9°C) wort.
- • Ferment for 2–4 weeks at 50°F (10°C).
- • Rack to secondary and lower the temperature by 1°F (0.5–0.6°C) every day until you reach 33°F (0.5°C). Hold for 1–2 weeks before packaging.
Don’t tell Doug, but we’d both simplify this recipe to a single rest! (Note the fermentation schedule is the same as Dougweiser though.) Schutzen Lite Lager was Doug’s final brew on our club’s then tiny brew system (the current capacity is about five times what it was for this recipe). You’ll notice that Doug continued to have his affinity for multi-step mashes, which tells of his lager-headed background, but notice the simple design of the beer. The recipe is mostly Pilsner malt with a few Reinheitsgebot-approved additions (and one non-Reinheitsgebot addition, lactic acid), which yields a light-colored, unboring beer.
Batch volume: 5 US gal. (19 L)
Original gravity: 1.064 (15.7°P)
Final gravity: 1.015 (3.8°P)
Color: 4.5 SRM
Bitterness: 29.4 IBU
ABV: 6.5%
Malt
- • 10.0 lb. (4.54 kg) Weyermann® Pilsner Malt
- • 0.25 lb. (115 g) Weyermann Melanoidin Malt
- • 2.0 oz. (56 g) Weyermann Acidulated Malt
Mash
- • Strike at 105°F (40.5°C) with 3.1 gal. (11.7 L) water for 30 min.
- • Saccharification rest at 155°F (68.5°C) for 75 min.
- • Saccharification rest at 158°F (70°C) for 15 min.
Hops
- • 1.25 oz. (35 g) Hallertauer Mittelfrüher 4.5% AA @ 60 min.
- • 1.33 oz. (38 g) Hallertauer Mittelfrüher 4.5% AA @ 10 min.
Yeast
- • WLP800 Pilsner or Wyeast 2565 Kolsch (for the ale brewers)
Extras
- • 2 tsp. (10 mL) lactic acid, added to the hot liquor tank for pH adjustment
Fermentation
- • Pitch wort at 48°F (9°C).
- • Ferment for 2–4 weeks at 50°F (10°C).
- • Rack to secondary and lower the temperature by 1°F (0.5–0.6°C) every day until you reach 33°F (0.5°C). Hold for 1–2 weeks before packaging.
1 Beechum and Conn, Homebrew All-Stars: Top Homebrewers Share Their Best Techniques and Recipes (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2016).
2 Palmer, How to Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Great Beer Every Time, 4th ed. (Boulder: Brewers Publications, 2017).
3 Charlie Papazian, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing (New York: Avon Books, 1984).