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>> Kate Siemieniewski: Good evening. Welcome to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab. My name is Kate Siemieniewski from the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
Wednesday Nite at the Lab is
Biotechnology Center, with brought to you by a partnership with the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW Madison
cooperation from Wisconsin Public Television.
a physicist who runs the Wonders Tonight we welcome Ella Braden,
of Physics outreach program. Ella obtained her BS in physics and astronomy from Whitman
College and her MS in astronomy from UW Madison.
in the Pacific northwest where While Ella does not claim to be a beer expert, she did grow up
her parents did grow beer, or brewed beer. [LAUGHTER]
If you can grow it, we'll grow it.
some of the tastiest hops are grown. And with that, in the Pacific Northwest is where we believe
After moving to Wisconsin, she began to homebrew herself
and has found a deep
appreciation of the ingredients, the science, and the vast array of possibilities that can be
bottled.
Please join me in welcoming Ella Braden. [APPLAUSE]
Ella Braden: All right, well, welcome everybody.
Can I get a thumbs up from everyone in the back if the
sound is coming through okay. Excellent.
I am humbled, honored, and thrilled to see such an amazing
turnout for this, and I hope
I can do justice to one of our favorite subjects: beer.
claim to be a brewing expert, I just claim to be an enthusiast. So take this all with that in stride, and let's have a little
fun with this.
So I'm going to start out working with a new computer. There we go.
Why are we doing this tonight?
Tonight is June 22 and it is the day after the summer solstice.
happened for us at about 11:00 Yesterday the summer solstice
in the morning. And the summer solstice is the point in the year when the sun,
in its path through the stars where it goes northward and southward and northward and southward, reaches its northern
most extreme. And that's how we can define it down to actually the second,
But all throughout history I included the minute here.
midsummer's night, the night of the shortest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, has
been a time for celebration.
It has been a time for changing the calendars, turning the clocks, and tonight we're here
to celebrate with a little bit
why we all drink beer. about beer. So, why beer? Why, I mean I think I can say
We'll ignore all the horrible commercials about what beer can It's do.ling. But it is the third most popular
beverage in the world, after
water and tea, which tells you something about its ubiquity. The per capita consumption in
Wisconsin is about 38 gallons per person per year.
[LAUGHTER] That's a lot.
[APPLAUSE]
That is a lot of beer. We are sixth in the nation. Nevada is number one at about
44 gallons per person per year. So we have a lot of beer to catch up with Nevada. [LAUGHTER]
The study of beer, so what we will be doing this evening
throw out there next time you're is called zymurgy which is just a fantastic word that you should
in a conversation with someone to impress them with your great lexicon.
So we're going to start with a
historical whirlwind of beer. I'm not going to try to do justice to the complete history
of beer, but we're just going to
hit a few highlights, and maybe low lights, along the way. So recipes for beer were
recorded as early as the 6th
for beer. cenIt's actually the hymn tots. Ninkasi, which we will talk wriabout a little bit more.pes
And the earliest scientific dated evidence is from about
had undergone the boiling process that we'll talk about a little bit more, which is when barley from Iran that showed it
And it's true that beer was probably invented in several malted barley becomes wort.
some carbohydrates in it, have locations because it's not that hard to have a liquid that has
some yeast settle on it, and fermentation take place.
happen if you've ever left an experiment sitting on your It's kind of hard for it not to
kitchen counter. So there are recorded records of
it happening in China, in northern Scotland up in the Orkneys, and in Sumeria, all at about the same time, but Sumeria
has the oldest written records
and Iran has the oldest archeological evidence so they get kind of credit for the beer.
And seeing that they get the
credit for the beer, most of the historical evidence out there has centered around Egypt where
the historical connotations of
beer are really old. The instructions that I mentioned before to the goddess
Ninkasi as part of a hymn in a
society that was largely illiterate, a society that
words, any written documents, people sang songs to carry on their oral tradition and to pass didn't really have any written
to the next and one generation along knowledge from one person
to the next. And so beer brewing, an obviously important part of
their society, became part of those hymns.
drank beer every single day and if you were a commoner, like It was a revered substance. It was said that the Pharaohs
most of us, I assume I have no Pharaoh descendants in the room,
who was granted a privilege to
brewed within your own home. pay a visit to a Pharaoh, a proper gift was to bring them some of the beer that you had
And there is evidence from a few different places. I will give some of my citations
at the end if you want to go and
along to the Greeks because of read more about it. The Egyptians may have passed some of their brewing methods
some of the names of ancient Greek beers carry Egyptian town names along with them.
So moving to Europe, which is where most of Wisconsin's brewing tradition comes from, we owe a lot to the monks.
Monasteries tended to be the
first places where beer was produced on a large scale. Pilgrims, travelers, people who
were making visits to the monasteries, visits of faith, were given the local beer.
a lot. And the monasteries experimented
We owe lambics to Middle Age monasteries.
local yeasts that are found only We owe lagers to some of the
in Europe. And so this is where beer kind
a thing of the traveler. of became a thing of pubs,
And due to the experimentation that took place in the
of the styles that we have in the US today and the familiar beers that we know. Near and dear to my heart, let's
chat about woman as brewers.
So, I mentioned that during the Middle Ages beer kind of reached a point of that was what people
drunk.
You couldn't trust the safety of your water. It could be carrying all sorts
of nasties that might kill you
Papazian, this is equivalent to the joy of cooking for anyone who would like to start In thehomebrewing.arlie
It's called "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing."
founders of the American Fantastic book. He's actually one of the
Homebrew Association, which we'll talk a little bit about in a bit.
As he points out, there is
nothing that will grow in beer that will kill you. There are some things that might
not taste very good, but relax, have a home brew, you're safe.
So, during the Middle Ages the European monks had developed
many of the local styles, but woman took over as the local
tradition. brewers, as the people who were brewing at pubs in the European
And as we mentioned before, Ninkasi, who is a female goddess, was the Sumerian patron
goddess of brewing. She was the person to whom the
hymns were devoted surrounding brewing.
When brewing came to colonial America, it was largely a women's task. Women were in charge of the
brewing.
In fact, Martha Jefferson is the one who is responsible for
some of her recipes are still available to this day. Jefferson's estate brewing, and
So the pilgrims, landing in Plymouth Colony, they do have a reputation as the Puritans, as the US.
one of the first buildings they constructed was a communal very staunch, as very stoic, but
brewery. Beer is deeply engrained in kind
of the American persona of who
we are, culturally, and most of the brews that were made early on in America we probably
wouldn't recognize today as beer. They were corn beer.
today, but corn is an additive We tend to make beer from barley
And brewing in Wisconsin, our home, 38 gallons per year. Lakefront Brewery makes a few corn beers.
So the traditions were brought Who could really do without that?
to Wisconsin largely by German immigrants. Most of the beers that Wisconsin
is known for are lagers.
The big breweries in Wisconsin almost all produce lagers.
few ales now. But the lager is a German beer. Like I said, we owe lagers to Tsome native European yeast. a
And you can find the lager
yeast, which I have the name for in a bit, in some of the regions
in the air. There's yeast in the air all in Germany just floating around
own specific bits of yeast. And the German immigrants brought their lager yeast with And each area tends to have its
By the time of the Civil War, there were almost 160 breweries in Wisconsin which, considering the Wisconsin population by the
time of the Civil War, was
several breweries, I mean it was large per capita. I didn't figure out breweries
per capita pre-Civil War for
breweries. this, but 160 is notable. And, as I said, the large breweries today remain lager
But within the last 15 to 20 years there have been a lot of
springing up in the state that craft and microbreweries
diversity in Wisconsin. areAnd then, dunt-dunt-dunt, of prohibition came. In 1919, prohibition made
homebrewing illegal.
You weren't allowed to make your own beer at home anymore. That doesn't mean that no one
did.
But you weren't allowed to. But in 1933, prohibition was repealed but there was a
clerical error. Actually, the first drafts of the amendment included "and/or
was a clerical error and the beer" in the wording, but there
word "and/or beer" was dropped in its final recording. So it became legal for wine to
be made by a homebrewer but not beer. And it wasn't until 1979 that that was actually fixed.
In 1978 the amendment was introduced and in '79 it was
signed into law so it is now legal.
And there are a lot of homebrew clubs in the US.
homebrew after the end of prohibition. The first were actual founded before the legalization of
homebrewing and not just here for the beer, they're great places to learn, to teach other Ipeople, to pick up tips, and
just to enjoy your beer.
So, on to the science. What is beer? When you pick up a cold frosty
one, what are you drinking? Can anybody tell me?
a heavy beer. You're drinking probably about >> Water. >> You're drinking 90% water in
It's usually cereal grains. Like I mentioned, early American 95% water in your average beer. It's also starches.
beer was largely made with corn. Today we use barley.
Some breweries will use rice or more corn.
Hops. Does anybody know what hops are? But barley is the main one. Some wheat beers as well.
What are they? [INAUDIBLE]
Bitter tasting. Flower. So the hops that we use in our
female flower of a very, very vigorous growing vine. beer, they're actually the
I have a picture in a little bit of some hop vines that are
fairly young and they just take off.
Yeast is where those cereal grains with their sugars turn Yinto alcohol and CO2, and thec CO2 is what gives us the head on
the beer. The alcohol is why many people
sales of nonalcoholic beer to alcoholic beer and infer your own conclusions. You can look at the ratio of
of beers, but a lot of A lot of beers, maybe not a lot
microbreweries will try their hand at other sugars and other flavors in beer.
I mentioned lambics before, traditional Belgian ales that were usually made on
incorporated fruits. monasteries, they often
making. So someYou make a tea.ars are A friend of mine was once trying So the basic process of beer
what is beer. And I explained that it's essentially sweetened fermented to get me totea.cribe to her
So you make something called a
and they are entirely right. wort. And boiling your wort, somebody said I should have brought props
I should have brought all of my props. So, when a homebrewer goes to
make beer, you take a big pot.
You don't take a little pot, just enough to hold your water, because during this process you
will get some vigorous boiling
with the flowers floating on top of it.
you end up with a gigantic mess in the kitchen. So wort is this tea that you And if you don't take a big pot,
and hops in water. make by steeping malted barley
And then you give some yeast to the wort, and they eat the sugars and create alcohol.
There's our basic overview. And now we're going to jump into
the details. At this point, I actually had
the plan to make you guys all do
a little bit of fermentation on your laps. But there are enough of you that
I don't think that I am going to
go for that. If you guys would like to, we can set it up afterward.
But let's start with barley.
step-child that hides in the So wheat is the grain that we know in the US. Barley is kind of the bastard
corner and we don't know very much about, except for beer. 95%, at least, of beers are made
using only barley.
And it's usually malted. So, the malting process is where
dried and it's been harvested and you soak it in 156-degree water, which that has been found you take your barley that's been
centuries. by trial and error over the
converting, sorry, the barley Anstarts converting its starchs to be the perfect temperature where the starch starts
into sugars in preparation for the sprouting process.
Because what barley really is is it's a seed. It contains an embryonic plant
to be necessary to feed that and the starches that are going
photosynthesize its own food. So this 156 degrees is the best point to get that little bit of starch to turn into sugars.
And then after about two to three days, you drain the water off, you dry it, and that's called malted barley.
When you order a malt at malted milkshake, what that actually is
That's pulverized malted barley that's added to your shake to is jumake it thicker.lted barley.
sugar. It's essentially another form of
It's barley sugar. And in beer-making, that barley sugar is then usually roasted.
And the roasting determines the color and a lot of the flavor in
your beer. I brought along some homebrews
which we're going to do little
samples of because there are many of us. But the homebrews vary in the
roasts of the barley that I used
in them. If you use lighter barleys, you get a lighter bodied and a
lighter colored beer. If you darker roast barleys, it doesn't necessarily give your beer more body.
If I could figure out what
Guinness does to make their beer have so much body, you know the liquid bread of a pint of
Guinness, I don't know what it
is. It may be the water. There's a lot in water that
contributes to your beer in here. In Wisconsin we have fairly mineral heavy waters.
But the common lore out there is
that mineral heavy waters will give you a full bodied beer.
somewhere along the process. So someone's lying to me
But if you roast your barley quite dark, I have a brew which is unique to me, a friend
mentioned they had something
like it out at Rogue Brewery right off their tap in Newport, Oregon.
But when you roast your barley
darkly, I still like to add my hops. So I have a hopped stout along
with me or maybe a hopped porter
depending on your taste. So you get your barley malted so
barley sugar, essentially. you have little nuggets of
And then we go on to mashing. And mashing is the process where we get the sugars from the
malted barley into the water
because it's not a malted milkshake. We don't want to grind up our
malted barley and throw it into some water and have to actually chew on it. So we do what's called mashing.
And mashing, the mashing process
I still, I admit, I'm not a total purist, I do what's called out into the water. And you can do it several ways.
partial mashing which is where you take some of the malted
barley and you steep it in water
that's usually about 180 degrees for a few hours, and that gets
And then you strain those grains most of the sugars out.
out, and then I add some extract to that because the amounts of
standard five gallon homebrew batch are fairly large for a barley required to make a
small condominium. Extract mashing...
[LAUGHTER]
Extract mashing is something that is usually done by someone further up the line, kind of
a homebrew shop.
The Wine & Hop Shop on Monroe Street is the folks I get my extract from.
And what they will do is that same mashing process where you
soak the barley in water for quite some time, and then
they'll boil some of the water
off so it's kind of a thick, almost a molasses-like, syrup,
leftover, it is amazing on and actually if you have some
toast. So once you have this mashed
water, you kind of want to do something more to it because if you just take sugar water, even bif it's flavorful sugar waterar
because you roasted your barley,
you're not going to have what we think of as beer flavor in it.
commercials about the time I was And there was a series of
And that was kind of an over-characterization of this next part of making what I think if anyone remembers those.
So I mentioned that hops are the is a good beer.
female flower of Humulus lupulus, and the lupulus will come back in several more times
because there's actually an oil in them called lupulin. And hops are an extremely vigorous grower.
If any of you live out anywhere along the railroad tracks from
about where they cross University out west into
Middleton, go for a walk along
the tracks this time of year and you will see hops covering many of the trees and the bushes
along the sides of the path because in, not currently, but
various small breweries and this in the past hops were carted by train around the state to the
is a fertile female flower and so when she bounces out of the
railroad tracks, you get some seeds. top of a hopper car on the
And so we have lots of strains of wild hops running around
Madison.
They're very vigorous growers. Like I mentioned, the picture that you can see on the right up
there, that's actually a picture
humbly, I think that some of the taken in May from near my parent's place in eastern Washington, which, again,
best hops in the world are grown there.
doing our sensory perception of beer, for those of you who do not wish to drink or who have Wgluten allergies or who areof
under 21, I brought along some
this lupulin oil in them. So I brought along both a caFuggles candy and a Cascadeof fat to make candy.nd hops have
And Fuggles is a German variety of hop, and Cascade is kind of
So what hops do is they contribute the flavor, which is what the candies have in them, northwest style hop.
And those are actually two very separate processes. So how do hops affect your brew? and the bitterness to the beer.
gives you this flavor and this What's actually going on that
aroma and this bitterness? When hops are added early,
They're actually acids called alpha and beta acids that are fairly insoluble to water. they're bittering resins.
hop flowers, I should have So if you just take a handful of
brought props, I am sorry, if you just take a handful of hop flowers and you stick your nose
in them, you will smell your
beer but you don't get any of that bitter. Because these acids are not
volatile, meaning they don't
come up into the air very easily, and they're fairly insoluble in water.
If you just take your hops and
you throw them in a bunch of water, not much is going to happen.
So in the boiling process of the
wort you've got this sweet sugar water, you add your hops to it, and it's typically boiled
anywhere from 30 minutes up to a
couple of hours. There are a couple of breweries out there that are very proud of
themselves for making 120-minute
beers. And for my taste those are just too bitter because these resins,
which are insoluble at low
temperatures, as you heat them to boiling and hold it at boiling, you get isomerization,
which is the process by which the resins actually become
solid. They undergo a chemical change.
And so they're extracted and
they become part of the water. When you make your own beer,
resin rise to the top during the you'll actually see some of this
fermenting process. It's called -- at that point because it's combined with a lot
of the bubbles. It forms a strange, almost
of your carboy you can get kind of rivers that don't flow, they just kind of hang out on the And as it bubbles out of the top
So the bitterness of your hops sides of the carboy.
is measured in international bittering units.
brewers. Keep in mind these are beer
Not horribly creative people but we've got a sense of humor. And an IBU is defined as one
milligram of alpha acids per
liter of beer. So on some beer tasting menus you'll see a listing of the IBU
of beers, and that will give you
hopped beer that's not very bitter or you can have a lightly is going to be. Because you can have a heavily
hopped beer that is tremendously bitter.
I brought along an IPA that was an experiment for me because
some friends who live in Bend, Oregon, sent me a gift of some
Simcoe hops which are 12% alpha acid by volume. And I went ahead and I threw
60-minute boil on my standard ESB, which is an extra special those in at the beginning of my
this is one heck of a bitter bitter brew, and I can talk about those terms in a bit, and
It is an experience in Simcoe hops. SIf the hops are added late,o they're called finishing or
aroma hops. And this is where I love my hops. Most northwest style hops,
Cascades, Willamettes, Chinooks,
they don't tend to be very bitter. Their alpha acid content is not
really high, but they have a lot
of lupulin, they have a lot of oil in them.
the same type of oils that make basil such a heavenly thrill of summer and kind of a And those volatile oils, they're
pull it out of your cupboard in January. disappointment if you dry it and
what we get into our senses as Because those volatile oils are what evaporate into the air and
we drink the beer or as we eat the basil.
us to perceive these volatile oils, that is where the taste, Whatever we're doing that allows
to me, of beer comes from. Dry hopping is another process.
So I mentioned if you add it
early kind of so that it boils for 30-plus minutes, you'll get your alpha acids.
If you add it late within about the last 15 minutes, you can
think of that as kind of a tea brewing process.
It's like steeping your tea leaves in water.
You don't steep them for too long because at that point you
start to get a lot of the,
they're dark brown and they stain my teapot. >> Tannins.
Tannins.
tannins out. Thank you very much, it had fluttered out of my head. You start to get a lot of the
tea. So you can think of tannins a lot like alpha acids and just the delicious flavor of a good
thing. A lot like your finishing and your aroma hops in the lupulin. Dry hopping is a whole other
You can throw dry hops after you're done boiling your wort and after you've sparged it.
I'll go into that in just a few minutes.
You can throw some dry hops just into your carboy.
And you'll get the flavor and the aroma of the hops.
acids actually being in the beer And you can get a perception of bitterness without any of those
itself. So if you are reading a beer menu and it says that it is dry
hopped, if you find that you
have similar taste to me, go for it. And then our final process.
So we now have this sweet tea that we have made with barley sugar, usually, and with yeast. And the, not with yeast, with
hops. So you take the sweet tea and you strain it through a strainer
boiled hops sitting in there because you don't want your
mucking up your beer, into a carboy. And a carboy is kind of the
classic, I'm sorry I didn't bring props, giant glass
And then you let that cool container that you see beer brewers use.
because high temperature above about 120 will kill your yeast
slowly. And then you do what's called pitching your yeast. or make them grow really, really
You get to pitch. So you pitch your yeast and that's where the magic starts happening, as I mentioned
before. If anyone here has a sense of humor, and I imagine that you do
entitled A Midsummer Night's since you're coming to a talk
Brew, there is a really funny book that I recommend called "B is for Beer" by Tom Robbins.
It is a grown up book for children or a children's book for grownups. And I owe that phrase to him.
So the beer that came along from
I do not claim to be a Sumeria and from China and from the Orkneys, the very ancient beers, were ales.
microbiologist so I'm going to butcher this, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
The Saccharomyces, if anyone
recognize that word origin right here, I apologize, I'm going to do a bit of pointing. So the Saccharomyces does anyone
there? >> Sugar. >> Sugar, sugar eater.
Anyone recognize that word
origin right there or are a Spanish speaker? >> Cerveza.
Cerveza, beer.
That's your Latin name So it's a sugar-eater beer-maker, in essence. [LAUGHTER]
for this fungus is a sugar-eater beer-maker. And these are the top fermenting
beers that make ales and whether
something is an ale or lager does determine a bit of the taste of the beer, but more of
that is determined by your
ingredients. The main thing that you'll
homebrewer, is how it brews. notice, or that I notice as a
So ales are top fermenting beers which means that the dead yeast all rise to the top of the beer
and you get this layer of scum
sitting on the top of your beer at the top of your carboy. And the scum, the --, is pushed
out the top of the beer during
the flocculating period. I love that word, flocculence,
During the fluffy period of your it means fluffy.
to worry about it at all. Lager beers, the Saccharomyces active, the -- is pushed out of your carboy and you don't have
So all of your dead and living pastorianusis, are bottom fermenting beers.
and eating yeast fall to the bottom of your beer.
between them and one of the reasons why I'm fond of brewing ales is you'll notice here in my And the other main difference
much about specific gravities and alcohol contents and talk that I'm not going to talk
hygrometers. And if you are a homebrewer,
more power to you.
I honestly don't have the patience for it. So specific gravity
measures how much sugar is in your beer.
The more sugar in your beer, the more dense the liquid will be.
And you can float something in
your beer called a hygrometer. Depending on how high or low it floats, you can determine the
sugar content of your wort
before it starts fermenting. And then when you decide to bottle, you can once again
determine your sugar content. And the difference in your sugar
contents will give you the alcohol content of your beer.
I don't usually do that.
I let my beer ferment and when it looks like it is done
And I end up with some very drinkable beer. But the other reason, as I'm fermenting, I bottle it.
call me a lazy homebrewer, you getting at with that, you might
might just call me a homebrewer who fits beer into my life as it works, ale ferments at room
temperature.
Lagers, they like to ferment at Aabout oh, 35 to 45 degrees.n So it either requires a very Fahrenheit.
porch or my garage during the basement or, sorry, or my garage specific time of year on my
in the basement during the winter.
So I have made lagers, but I
traditionally stick to ales. That's where my expertise will
questions about it. There are other strains of yeast be if you choose to ask me
they're the Dekkera yeast and the Brettanomyces yeast, and that are actually not part of the Saccharomyces family, and
those are the ones that are used in the production of lambics and
many of the Belgian and central European specialty beers. So I wanted to mention them, not
beers that you drink will be pass them by too much, but most
either ales or lagers. A little bit more about yeast.
fermentation. It eats the carbohydrates in As I said, it causes the
your wort, turns them into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
That's where we get...
Pardon me, that's where we get our carbonation in the beer is it is one of the out-products
in the yeast. Different strains give different
extract a strain from your tastes. And it is actually possible to
favorite microbrews. You can take the sludge, which
if you get it fairly fresh, and essentially inoculate that is at the bottom of a microbrew
bacterium that you want to sludge like you would inoculate a yogurt culture or any other
encourage. And through that, some people have managed to figure out, or
not figure out, but to have the yeast that is used for
If you cruise homebrewers forums, no one can figure out what they use in Two Hearted, which I think is a very tasty
beer, but you can, as I said, extract the yeast yourself. And I want to give a few of my
As I mentioned before, favorite references.
"Complete Joy of Homebrewing," great, great book.
There are tables in here that you can satisfy your homebrewing There are recipes in here.
a wonderful romp. If you're interested in the history, we took a quick "B is for Beer,"
whirlwind through it. The Wikipedia history of beer article is remarkably lesswell-cited.nute
It's as though a lot of people
The Wisconsin Historical are very passionate about their beer. [LAUGHTER]
Society has some pretty decent sections on brewing historically
And the American Homebrewers in Wisconsin.
Association website is a lot of fun. They take their beer seriously
but not too seriously.
invite everybody to come up front and do kind of a sensory is the motto. So with that, I would like to
And if not, I hope you have enjoyed a little bit of the various sciences that go into beer and a little bit of the
history of beer,
and I thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]