The Naked Pint (3 page)

You’re probably already familiar with yeast. Maybe you have a packet of it in your cabinet right now. It’s that stuff that you sprinkle in your bread machine when it beeps, right? Well, yes and no. The yeast you’re probably used to is bread yeast, which has been specifically cultured to make bread and not beer. Beer yeast (scientific name
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
) is specifically cultured for the fermentation of beer. Some bread recipes do call for brewer’s yeast, but if you try to use bread yeast for beer, you will be disappointed with the results. And the brewer’s yeast that you can find at a health food store is inactive and is meant to be consumed for its high protein and vitamin B content. If you used either of these in beer making, fermentation would not take place, and there would be no alcohol. And that would be sad.

A
h, fermentation—it’s where the magic happens. Now that you know all of the basic ingredients in beer, you’re ready to learn about the birds and bees of beer. We’ve mentioned fermentation several times already when talking about the brewing process. We’re pretty sure that you understand that fermentation is when something becomes alcoholic, but if someone asked you to define fermentation, you might find yourself going numb, with crickets chirping and your pounding heart the only sounds you hear.

So, quickly, what is fermentation? In beer, it’s when yeast consumes the sugar provided by the malt and creates the byproducts alcohol (liquid courage) and CO
₂
(the bubbles, which produce the carbonation in beer). Thus, the fermentation process is what makes beer, well, beer.

Since we are really examining fermentation, let’s take a quick minute to explain carbonation. Of course, a carbonated beverage is one that has bubbles in it. Carbonation, technically, is CO
₂
dissolved in liquid. It’s what gives beer its bubbly effervescence and plays a big part in the balance of that beer (see Chapter 2). The head on a beer is just the CO
₂
being released from that beer. The carbonation bubbles become the vehicles in which the aromatics of the beer ride from the glass to your nose.

A
ll beers fall into one of two categories: ale or lager. We find that most people don’t know the difference between the two. They use the words interchangeably, guessing at the meaning, never realizing what they’re talking about. So we’re going to break it down for you here. (Please pass the information along to your friends.)

An ale is a beer that uses yeast that has been cultured to ferment at the top of the fermentation vessel at high temperatures (60°F to 75°F), resulting in a quick fermentation period (seven to eight days or less). Ale yeasts are generally known to produce fairly big flavors (there are exceptions). You’ll often get a lot of aromatics from the whiff of an ale. Ales tend to have more residual sugar, meaning sugar that has not been consumed by the yeast during the fermentation process.

The word
lager
comes from a German word meaning “to store.” A lager is a beer that uses yeast strains that are cultured to ferment at the bottom of the fermentation vessel at low temperatures (34°F to 50°F), resulting in a long fermentation time (weeks to months). Lager yeast produces fewer byproduct characters than does ale yeast, which tends to create a cleaner, crisper taste (there are exceptions).

 

 

Please remember (yes, we know we’re being drill sergeants about this), the color of a beer tells you nothing about whether the beer is an ale or a lager. The type of beer has everything to do with the process by which it was fermented. That’s it. You can have a very light colored, light alcohol content, nuanced, bright, and crisp ale (for example, Kölsch); likewise, you can have a very dark, high alcohol content, viscous, sweet, and malty lager (like Eisbock). One of the worst things you can do at a craft beer bar is to go up to the bar and order “an ale” or “a lager.” These general terms won’t get you any closer to a specific beer or to what flavors you crave but will make the bartender sigh.

T
here are several ways to see, taste, and feel malt in beer. First and foremost, malt is reflected in the color of the beer, but the malt can also give off different flavors. When you look at a very light-colored beer, you might determine that you’ll taste bready and biscuity qualities that exist in the very pale malts that were used during brewing. If you are looking at a very dark beer, you might expect chocolate, coffee, and roasty-toasty notes that are often present in very dark colored malts. (This does not mean you can judge a beer’s entire flavor profile by its color. The type of malt is a hint about the flavor notes you
may
taste but does not tell you about the yeast or hop aspect, so tasting is still important!)

Many people will describe certain beers as malty. What does that mean? Usually they are not referring to the qualities that come from the roasted malt. They are talking about the residual sugars and additional alcohol content that can remain in a beer when an especially large amount of malt is used in the brew. This results in a prominent sweetness of flavor and a viscosity and heat in the mouthfeel.

We’ve found that when people first start drinking beer, they are unexpectedly drawn to much darker, maltier styles than they could ever imagine themselves liking. They favor the sweet familiar flavors of chocolate, hazelnut, coffee, and toffee that these beers often impart on the palate, rather than the bitter styles that come from highly hopped beers, which are often an acquired taste. Which brings us to our next featured ingredient.

Unbeknownst to many, you cannot tell how bitter a beer is by looking at it, as hops are totally invisible in a finished beer (this is part of why you can’t determine a beer’s taste just by looking at it). After the hops’ qualities are extracted through boiling and steaming, the actual hop cones are strained out of the beer. You can detect hops, however, by tasting and smelling the beer. If a beer tastes in any way bitter, if a beer feels in any way dry, or if a beer causes you to feel astringency on your tongue, you are tasting the hops.

Hops contain a chemical compound called
tannin
that contributes to the puckery or cottony mouthfeel that we describe as being dry. You’ve probably heard of tannins with regard to wine. In wine, tannins come from the skin of the grape. If someone says, “This wine is very tannic,” he’s saying that he is getting a very dry mouthfeel from the wine. As true
dryness
in a beverage technically means having a lack of sugar, beer is not actually dry (sugar exists in the malt), but the tannins in hops can contribute a balancing dry feeling that is essential to great beer.

Hops also provide major aromatics in beer, and sometimes hops are added only to provide aromatics. These amazing aromas can range from pine tree, grass, citrus, herbs de Provence, and yes, its close relation—the pot. Hops also act as a preservative in beer, due to their antimicrobial properties, which help keep the beer stable (for more, see Chapter 6).

Some brewers like to go further than that balance and create a bold, hop-driven beer, in which the bitterness is dominant. This can often taste like licking a wet pine tree (What, you’ve never licked a wet pine tree?), married with notes of citrus. New beer drinkers are often initially turned off by this bitter, aggressive flavor, but as their palates grow, they find they crave that bite of hops, just as one craves a sharp shot of espresso. In fact, some people have become so addicted to the hop experience that they have sparked a movement in the craft beer world to push hop bitterness to the extreme. These “hop-heads” are on a beer-quest to find the most intense hop experience out there.

Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? If beer is liquid, then it has water in it. Water is water. Big deal, right? Well, friends, since beer is about 90% water, just as we are, its origin and makeup play a major role in a beer’s ultimate flavor and texture. Whether the water source for a beer is hard, containing a lot of minerals, or soft, containing fewer minerals, will greatly affect the character and the style of that beer. Minerals found in hard water, like calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, and sulfates, can play an important role in the brewing process and can enhance dry and sharp flavors. Soft water, however, lacks the minerals and is, therefore, generally better for beers with lighter, more nuanced flavors.

In the craft beer world, brewers are considered more honest if they use local water sources. Different regions have water with different mineral components. As a result, different regions are better suited to making certain types of beer. For example, Dublin has a type of hard water that is perfect for making the thick, chalky, dark stout for which the Irish are famous. Plzen (or Pilsen) in the Czech Republic has very soft water that produces a nuanced subtleness in a beer called Pilsner. Overall, there are over a dozen compounds found in water that are significant factors in what that final beer will taste like, so the source of water in each specific beer is of vital importance.

Have you ever looked at one of the crappy beers that you’ve had in the past and thought to yourself, “Well, at least it’s clear and shiny”? That’s because that beer has been filtered. In other words, the yeast has been physically or chemically taken out of that finished beer, leaving it sparkly and clear. This can be good for crisp, clean beer styles, because they benefit from a fine filtration process.

Some beer styles, however, are not served by having the yeast removed. For example, Belgian and German specialty wheat beers use specific types of yeast that impart very complex flavors. If you held those beers up to the light, you might not even be able to see through them. They would appear cloudy or misty. This is actually a good thing in these beers. Not only is there a fuller, rounder mouthfeel but the unfiltered yeast provides many additional flavors and aromatics in the form of esters.