Boteler - The Gourmets Guide to Cooking with Beer: How to Use Beer to Take Simple Recipes from Ordinary to Extraordinary

How to Use Beer to Take Simple Recipes from Ordinary to Extraordinary

ALISON BOTELER

BEVERLY MASSACHUSETTS

etc.

In heaven there is no beer, thats why we drink it here!... Or so goes the old polka song. Beer has certainly come a long way in its long, many-storied evolution!

These days, beer is chic: brewpubs, microbreweries, and fine restaurants have elevated beer tastings to the status of wine tastings. Some might argue that beer is a more intuitive pairing for many foods. There are fewer rules to abide by when drinking beer than for wine. Ask any beer aficionado and he or she will tell you that a Newcastle Ale goes great with fish n chips. An ice-cold Corona takes the heat out of a fiery chiles con queso dip, since beer usually complements spicy dishes better than wine does. Its not hard to understand that a Blue Moon wheat beer goes well with seafood or to decide that a sweet stout tastes great with chocolate cake.

What Is Beer?

At its simplest, beer is an alcoholic beverage made from grain or another starch, such as wheat. Most beers are made from four ingredients: malted barley, hops, yeast, and water. How these ingredients are combined defines the many diverse types of beer. Their unique character begins during the brewing process.

THE BREWING PROCESS

Beer is usually made from barley, but sometimes it may be comprised part or in total of wheat or other grains, including millet, maize, and cassava in Africa; sorghum in Asia; potato in Brazil; and agave in Mexico. When the grain is soaked in water, the enzymes break them down into sugars that are then fermented with yeast. The fermenting sugars produce the alcohol. The entire fermentation varies according to the process used. (See Fermentation.) The brewing process can be broken down into five categories: mashing, sparging, boiling, fermentation, and packaging.

Mashing

In the mashing step, the starch source is soaked in water at controlled temperatures so enzymes in the starch break down into sugars that can be fermented. Most mashes are made from malted barley. The barley grains are allowed to sprout and are dried in a kiln to make the malt, the sprouted part that contains the enzymes. The longer the malted barley is cooked, the darker the beer.

Sparging

The mashing process creates sugary liquid call wort. In sparging, also called lautering, the brewer separates the wort from the mash using a strainerlike gadget called a lauter tun. The brewer may rinse the mash to wash off extra sugars for the wort. The mash is either discarded or the brewer might try to reuse it, but doing so would result in a weaker and weaker wort.

Boiling

When all the wort has been gathered, the brewer begins boiling it down in a process that concentrates the sugar and also sterilizes the wort. At this point, hops are added during the boiling stage. Hops balance the sweetness of the malt.

Fermentation

The resulting mixture is then combined with yeast, the familiar fungus that is also essential for making bread. Yeast is used to initiate fermentation. These little micro-organisms consist of single oval cells that reproduce by budding and are capable of converting sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Depending on the type of beer being brewed, the brewer may add quick- or slow-fermenting yeast in a process that can take from a week to months. During fermentation, yeast multiplies five- to eightfold and generates heat. The temperature is allowed to rise until it reaches 68F to 74F (20C to 23C) for ale and 54F to 63F (12C to 17C) for lager. At that point the fermentation is cooled to 59F (15C) for ale and 39F (4C) for lager, considerably slowing the yeast action. The yeast is then removed and the green beer, which contains about 500,000 yeast cells per milliliter, is then transferred to a conditioning or maturation vessel. At this point, a secondary fermentation may take place. Traditionally, the primary stage of fermentation used to take seven days for ale and three weeks or more for lager. These times have been shortened to 2 to 4 days and 7 to 10 days, respectively, by modern practices and techniques that use more efficient fermentation vessels. As the fermentation proceeds, the yeast settles to the bottom, leaving a clear liquid that may be subjected to further fermentation or made ready for consumption.

Packaging

The fermented beer is packaged in cans, bottles, or kegs. It may be artificially carbonated or it may be packaged with a small amount of yeast and sugar still in it, to produce a natural carbonation. Home-brewed beer is naturally carbonated but most commercial beer is carbonated (with some exceptions).

BEER TRIVIA

Throughout history, beerinsomuch that it is a beverage derived from fermented grainwas invented independently by many cultures. The first known civilization to make beer were the Sumerians. It is mentioned in their epic Gilgamesh, dating from the third century BC . After the fall of the Sumerian civilization, the Babylonians picked up where they left off, bringing brewing technology to new heights. Excavated clay tablets show that the Babylonians brewed as many as twenty different kinds of beer.

HOME BREWING BEER

For centuries, home brewing (as with most hobbies and food production) was the norm, before the advent of commercial breweries. In the United States, it came to an end for the same reasons that commercial brewing was almost wiped out: Prohibition. After 1920, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution forbade the making of alcoholic liquids for beverage purposes. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 did not affect home brewing, as a clerical error did not include beer in the definition of beverages that could be produced noncommercially.

In 1978, Congress repealed federal restrictions on home brewing. A number of books quickly appeared, including The Big Book of Home Brewing by Dave Line and The Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian.

The process of home brewing mirrors that of commercial production, with a few important differences. First, home-brewed beer is not pasteurized. The pasteurization process requires the beer to be cooked, which kills the yeast and destroys the natural carbonation. Home brews, by contrast, contain live yeast and continue to undergo changes as they age naturally. Commercial brews have to have the carbonation added after they have been pasteurized.