Brew Master Trond

Just kidding, we're only technically "brew apprentices" according to our instructor Håkon Eide. A couple weeks ago a group of us went to the brewing guild info meeting at the student center, which is a giant castle-looking building in the middle of the city called "Chateau Neuf". The Neuf houses all the student group's rooms, so pretty much its a combination of a giant office building that everyone parties at on the weekends (the basement is a giant bar concert hall). We were really attracted to this student group because if you pay a down payment of 350 Nok (about 40 dollars) and an occasional brew session, you get as much free beer as you want for the entire semester as well as access to the parties/hangouts that the guild throws. These guys were really fun to hang out with, and since I would spend about 50 kroner per beer at a bar anyway, this an unbelievable deal. So we signed up for an instructional course led my members of the guild to learn how to make some beer! Yesterday after class we headed over to the Neuf and met up with the rest of our class, which was a couple of German homies from Berlin. It was an awesome group to work with, plus our two instructors, Håkon and Eivind, were incredibly knowledgeable about brewing theory.

The main ingredients in most types of beer are water, malt, yeast, and hops. Its actually an pretty simple process, and Håkon told us multiple times that its super easy to make a good beer, but much harder to make a great beer. To make an excellent beer, you need to be very careful with regards to time, measurements, and cleanliness. Its pretty cheap to create as well, as most of the ingredients are pretty basic and easy to acquire. The only sizable costs are the equipment, but thats only around $100 which you quickly gain back from the beer money you save. Definitely going to do this this summer, and maybe in our off campus house next semester. I'll run through our brewing process to the best of my memory, I was able to take a few notes down but the amount of chemistry that Håkon shared with us was pretty large. So just giving the heads up if this is a bit inaccurate!

First thing we did was get our malts from the basement and bring them upstairs to crush into a fine powder. Malts are essentially just grains that have had a bit of water added to them. This causes the grain buds to start sprouting, which creates an essential sugary-enzyme in the grains. Any type of plant that has these sugar starches can technically be made into an alcoholic beverages, such as potatoes (vodka). There are a lot of different types of malt that brewers can make for beers. Usually beers have between 80-100% of the main light malt, and then between 0-20% of darker more flavorful malt. We were making an English porter, so we were using the max amount of flavorful dark malts, so 20%. I was pretty hyped at this cause this meant we were making a Guinness-y beer, which is a type of porter. We began by mixing and crushing up the malts in a grinder.

Then Trond slowly mixed the malts into a giant vat of water with a giant spoon. After this Håkon added some carbonate mixture which he called chalk into the mix, which altered the water properties of the mixture for boiling later in the process. We let this mixture sit for an hour, which allowed the malt sugars and flavors to seep into the warm water.

After this period we drained the sugar-beer-water from the bottom of the matt slowly while also adding water to the top, so the grains wouldn't get sucked into the sugar-beer-water. You can kind of imagine the main vat's level of liquid never fell because we were simultaneously draining and adding liquids. I don't really get how the water from the top didn't dilute the sugar mixture that we were trying to capture, but maybe thats cause the malts acted as a type of barrier and we added water to the top slowly enough so it didn't mix together. We then took that drained sugar-beer-water into another vat and boiled it slowly for another hour, which allowed the sugars to become more concentrated and broken down further. Håkon would check the sugar content often by using a fancy hydrometer. I had a sip of this sugar water beer mixture, and it tasted just like beer but it obviously had no alcohol yet (that comes from yeast) and no bitterness and it was absolutely amazing. It was like warm grain sugar tea.

During these steps there was a lot of down time, so Håkon and Eivind went through a ton of theory with us, which I tried my best to remember. Luckily writing it down here is a great way for me to remember it :) Two of these ingredients that he talked about the most were hops and yeast.

Hops come from a the cones of a vine-type plant that grow in places all around the world. Ages ago brewers used hops to preserve the beer; the more you added the longer it could stay fresh (no ice back then). This also gave beer a very bitter and distinct flavor, so nowadays people use hops to add different levels of both flavor as well as bitterness. Inside the hops are a chemical compound called alpha acids, which transform to bitterness when added to hot water. In the boiling phase brewers add hops in the beginning to focus on bitterness as well as the middle of the boil to focus on flavor/aroma. Right now New Zealand hops are very popular with brewers, as well as some from South Africa. England, America, and elsewhere in Europe are also known for their distinctive hops types. "Dank" is a type of hops being used in America right now that's growing in popularity for obvious reasons. Weed beer! So as we waited for the mixture to boil we added our two serving of English hops in at the correct times.

After this we used a cooling element to drop the temperature of the beer so we could add the last crucial ingredient: yeast. The yeast is a fungus that eats the sugar enzymes that we've been trying to capture in the mixture. They turn (most) of the sugars into alcohol through fermentation. Yeast also adds an element of flavor to a beer, and different amounts are used to create different types of beer. Its important to add the right amount of yeast; too little and not enough sugar will be turned into alcohol, too much and the yeast will be "shocked" into consuming too much sugar initially, rendering the rest of the yeast worthless. Most beers ferment for about a month, but darker and stronger beers can ferment for even longer. Sometimes more sugar is added to the beer after fermentation when it is bottled so any leftover active yeast can produce more flavor and alcohol. Back in our beer mixture, we dropped the temperature to about 20 degrees celsius, dumped it into white storage bins, and added our yeast from these giant glass beakers. We then pumped some pure oxygen into the bins and threw it into the freezer to ferment.

This whole time we had been drinking the various beers the guild had produced over the year. They have pretty much unlimited resources since they are partially funded through the school, so there is no shortage of brews happening throughout the semester. They often have the problem of not having enough kegs to put the beer into, so they encourage their members to throw a ton of parties so they can drink the currently kegged beer. So the eight of us performed our duty by getting pretty drunk after finishing our brew, which was a blast. Eivind told us about a huge party called the Galla that the guild and rest of the student groups throw the night before the Norwegian Independence day on May 17th. The goal is to stay up the whole night on the 16th with the group, and then keep partying and celebrating for the actual independence day. Pretty pumped I decided to join the group.

Theres a lot more specific stuff I didn't write down here, so if anyone wants to know some more stuff just send me a message!