Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Ella Braden June 22, 2011  UP598    cc >> 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 brought to you by a partnership with the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW Madison Biotechnology Center, with cooperation from Wisconsin Public Television. Tonight we welcome Ella Braden, a physicist who runs the Wonders of Physics outreach program. Ella obtained her BS in physics and astronomy from Whitman College and her MS in astronomy from UW Madison. While Ella does not claim to be a beer expert, she did grow up in the Pacific northwest where her parents did grow beer, or brewed beer. [LAUGHTER] If you can grow it, we'll grow it. And with that, in the Pacific Northwest is where we believe some of the tastiest hops are grown. 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. And like Kate said, I don't 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. 

Yesterday the summer solstice happened for us at about 11:00 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, I included the minute here. But all throughout history 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 about beer. So, why beer? Why, I mean I think I can say why we all drink beer. It tastes good. It's cooling. It's refreshing. We'll ignore all the horrible commercials about what beer can do. 

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 is called zymurgy which is just a fantastic word that you should throw out there next time you're 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 century BC in Sumerian tablets. Some of the very earliest writing known contains recipes for beer. It's actually the hymn to Ninkasi, which we will talk about a little bit more. And the earliest scientific dated evidence is from about 3,400 to 4,000 BC, and it was barley from Iran that showed it had undergone the boiling process that we'll talk about a little bit more, which is when malted barley becomes wort. And it's true that beer was probably invented in several locations because it's not that hard to have a liquid that has some carbohydrates in it, have some yeast settle on it, and fermentation take place. It's kind of hard for it not to happen if you've ever left an experiment sitting on your 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 didn't really have any written words, any written documents, people sang songs to carry on their oral tradition and to pass along knowledge from one person to the next and one generation to the next. And so beer brewing, an obviously important part of their society, became part of those hymns. 

It was a revered substance. It was said that the Pharaohs drank beer every single day and if you were a commoner, like most of us, I assume I have no Pharaoh descendants in the room, who was granted a privilege to pay a visit to a Pharaoh, a proper gift was to bring them some of the beer that you had brewed within your own home. 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 read more about it. The Egyptians may have passed some of their brewing methods along to the Greeks because of 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. And the monasteries experimented a lot. We owe lambics to Middle Age monasteries. 

We owe lagers to some of the local yeasts that are found only in Europe. And so this is where beer kind of became a thing of pubs, a thing of the traveler. And due to the experimentation that took place in the monasteries, we developed a lot 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 whether you knew it or not. But beer is safe. In the words of Charlie Papazian, this is equivalent to the joy of cooking for anyone who would like to start homebrewing. It's called "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing." Fantastic book. 

He's actually one of the founders of the American 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 brewers, as the people who were brewing at pubs in the European tradition. 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 Jefferson's estate brewing, and some of her recipes are still available to this day. A little bit about brewing in the US. 

So the pilgrims, landing in Plymouth Colony, they do have a reputation as the Puritans, as very staunch, as very stoic, but one of the first buildings they constructed was a communal 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. We tend to make beer from barley today, but corn is an additive that you will find. Lakefront Brewery makes a few corn beers. And brewing in Wisconsin, our home, 38 gallons per year. Who could really do without that? So the traditions were brought 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. They're starting to get into a few ales now. 

But the lager is a German beer. Like I said, we owe lagers to some native European yeast. And you can find the lager yeast, which I have the name for in a bit, in some of the regions in Germany just floating around in the air. There's yeast in the air all around us all the time. And each area tends to have its own specific bits of yeast. And the German immigrants brought their lager yeast with them. 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 this, but 160 is notable. And, as I said, the large breweries today remain lager breweries. But within the last 15 to 20 years there have been a lot of craft and microbreweries springing up in the state that are introducing other styles of beer. 

So we now have a bit more diversity in Wisconsin. And then, dunt-dunt-dunt, 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 beer" in the wording, but there was a clerical error and the 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. The first were actual founded before the legalization of homebrew after the end of prohibition. They're still going strong. If you guys are interested in homebrewing and not just here for the beer, they're great places to learn, to teach other people, 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? >> Water. >> You're drinking 90% water in a heavy beer. You're drinking probably about 95% water in your average beer. It's also starches. 

It's usually cereal grains. Like I mentioned, early American beer was largely made with corn. Today we use barley. Some breweries will use rice or more corn. But barley is the main one. Some wheat beers as well. Hops. Does anybody know what hops are? What are they? [INAUDIBLE] Bitter tasting. Flower. So the hops that we use in our beer, they're actually the female flower of a very, very vigorous growing vine. 

I have a picture in a little bit of some hop vines that are fairly young and they just take off. Yeast, yeast is where the magic happens. Yeast is where those cereal grains with their sugars turn into alcohol and CO2, and the CO2 is what gives us the head on the beer. The alcohol is why many people drink beer. You can look at the ratio of sales of nonalcoholic beer to alcoholic beer and infer your own conclusions. A lot of beers, maybe not a lot of beers, but a lot of 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 monasteries, they often incorporated fruits. So sometimes fruit sugars are introduced into the beer. So the basic process of beer making. You make a tea. 

A friend of mine was once trying to get me to describe to her what is beer. And I explained that it's essentially sweetened fermented tea. So you make something called a wort. And boiling your wort, somebody said I should have brought props and they are entirely right. 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. And if you don't take a big pot, you end up with a gigantic mess in the kitchen. So wort is this tea that you make by steeping malted barley and hops in water. 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. So wheat is the grain that we know in the US. Barley is kind of the bastard step-child that hides in the 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 you take your barley that's been dried and it's been harvested and you soak it in 156-degree water, which that has been found by trial and error over the centuries. And that 156-degree water seems to be the perfect temperature where the starch starts converting, sorry, the barley starts converting its starch into sugars in preparation for the sprouting process. Because what barley really is is it's a seed. It contains an embryonic plant and the starches that are going to be necessary to feed that plant as it sprouts and as it goes through its little first bit of growth before it can 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 is just pulverized malted barley. That's pulverized malted barley that's added to your shake to make it thicker. It's essentially another form of sugar. 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. So someone's lying to me somewhere along the process. 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 you have little nuggets of barley sugar, essentially. 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 is where you get those sugars out into the water. And you can do it several ways. I still, I admit, I'm not a total purist, I do what's called 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 most of the sugars out. And then you strain those grains out, and then I add some extract to that because the amounts of barley required to make a standard five gallon homebrew batch are fairly large for 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, and actually if you have some leftover, it is amazing on toast. So once you have this mashed barley, once you have this sugar water, you kind of want to do something more to it because if you just take sugar water, even if it's flavorful sugar water because you roasted your barley, you're not going to have what we think of as beer flavor in it. And there was a series of commercials about the time I was starting to be legal to drink that involved bitter beer face, if anyone remembers those. 

And that was kind of an over-characterization of this next part of making what I think is a good beer. So I mentioned that hops are the 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 in the past hops were carted by train around the state to the various small breweries and this is a fertile female flower and so when she bounces out of the top of a hopper car on the railroad tracks, you get some seeds. 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 taken in May from near my parent's place in eastern Washington, which, again, humbly, I think that some of the best hops in the world are grown there. When we're wrapping up kind of doing our sensory perception of beer, for those of you who do not wish to drink or who have gluten allergies or who are under 21, I brought along some hops candies because most candies require a little bit of fat to make them and hops have this lupulin oil in them. So I brought along both a Fuggles candy and a Cascade candy. And Fuggles is a German variety of hop, and Cascade is kind of the quintessential American northwest style hop. 

So what hops do is they contribute the flavor, which is what the candies have in them, and the bitterness to the beer. And those are actually two very separate processes. So how do hops affect your brew? What's actually going on that gives you this flavor and this aroma and this bitterness? When hops are added early, they're bittering resins. They're actually acids called alpha and beta acids that are fairly insoluble to water. So if you just take a handful of hop flowers, I should have 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, you'll actually see some of this resin rise to the top during the fermenting process. It's called -- at that point because it's combined with a lot of the bubbles. It forms a strange, almost sturdy structure. And as it bubbles out of the top of your carboy you can get kind of rivers that don't flow, they just kind of hang out on the sides of the carboy. So the bitterness of your hops is measured in international bittering units. Keep in mind these are beer brewers. 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 an idea of how bitter that beer is going to be. Because you can have a heavily hopped beer that's not very bitter or you can have a lightly 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 those in at the beginning of my 60-minute boil on my standard ESB, which is an extra special bitter brew, and I can talk about those terms in a bit, and this is one heck of a bitter beer. So I'm warning you anyone who chooses to try my IPA. It is an experience in Simcoe hops. If the hops are added late, 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. 

And those volatile oils, they're the same type of oils that make basil such a heavenly thrill of summer and kind of a disappointment if you dry it and pull it out of your cupboard in January. Because those volatile oils are what evaporate into the air and what we get into our senses as we drink the beer or as we eat the basil. Whatever we're doing that allows us to perceive these volatile oils, that is where the taste, 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. 

Thank you very much, it had fluttered out of my head. You start to get a lot of the tannins out. So you can think of tannins a lot like alpha acids and just the delicious flavor of a good tea. A lot like your finishing and your aroma hops in the lupulin. Dry hopping is a whole other thing. 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. And you can get a perception of bitterness without any of those acids actually being in the beer 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 because you don't want your boiled hops sitting in there 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 container that you see beer brewers use. And then you let that cool because high temperature above about 120 will kill your yeast or make them grow really, really slowly. And then you do what's called pitching your yeast. It's a fun word. 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 since you're coming to a talk entitled A Midsummer Night's 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 Sumeria and from China and from the Orkneys, the very ancient beers, were ales. I do not claim to be a microbiologist so I'm going to butcher this, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The Saccharomyces, if anyone here, I apologize, I'm going to do a bit of pointing. So the Saccharomyces does anyone recognize that word origin right there? >> Sugar. >> Sugar, sugar eater. Anyone recognize that word origin right there or are a Spanish speaker? >> Cerveza. 

>> Cerveza, beer. So it's a sugar-eater beer-maker, in essence. [LAUGHTER] That's your Latin name 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 notice, or that I notice as a homebrewer, is how it brews. 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, it means fluffy. During the fluffy period of your beer when the yeasts are very active, the -- is pushed out of your carboy and you don't have to worry about it at all. Lager beers, the Saccharomyces pastorianusis, are bottom fermenting beers. 

So all of your dead and living and eating yeast fall to the bottom of your beer. And the other main difference between them and one of the reasons why I'm fond of brewing ales is you'll notice here in my talk that I'm not going to talk much about specific gravities and alcohol contents and 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 fermenting, I bottle it. And I end up with some very drinkable beer. But the other reason, as I'm getting at with that, you might call me a lazy homebrewer, you might just call me a homebrewer who fits beer into my life as it works, ale ferments at room temperature. Ale yeast is happiest between about 62 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Lagers, they like to ferment at about oh, 35 to 45 degrees. So it either requires a very specific time of year on my porch or my garage during the basement or, sorry, or my garage in the basement during the winter. So I have made lagers, but I traditionally stick to ales. That's where my expertise will be if you choose to ask me questions about it. There are other strains of yeast that are actually not part of the Saccharomyces family, and they're the Dekkera yeast and the Brettanomyces yeast, 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 pass them by too much, but most beers that you drink will be either ales or lagers. A little bit more about yeast. As I said, it causes the fermentation. It eats the carbohydrates in 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 tastes. And it is actually possible to extract a strain from your favorite microbrews. You can take the sludge, which is at the bottom of a microbrew if you get it fairly fresh, and essentially inoculate that sludge like you would inoculate a yogurt culture or any other bacterium that you want to encourage. And through that, some people have managed to figure out, or not figure out, but to have the yeast that is used for Two Hearted Ale, which no one seems to know what it is. 

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 favorite references. As I mentioned before, "Complete Joy of Homebrewing," great, great book. There are recipes in here. There are tables in here that you can satisfy your homebrewing nerdom on and on. "B is for Beer," a wonderful romp. If you're interested in the history, we took a quick less than 10-minute whirlwind through it. The Wikipedia history of beer article is remarkably well-cited. It's as though a lot of people are very passionate about their beer. [LAUGHTER] The Wisconsin Historical Society has some pretty decent sections on brewing historically in Wisconsin. 

And the American Homebrewers Association website is a lot of fun. They take their beer seriously but not too seriously. "Relax, have a homebrew," is the motto. So with that, I would like to invite everybody to come up front and do kind of a sensory perception of beer, if you so choose. 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]