POSTING #106

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Homebrew in Harrogate

You may have read about the Obamas serving homebrew at their Super Bowl party, a Honey Ale made by their chefs using honey collected from a beehive on the south lawn of the White House. Guests had a choice of commercial beers from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin---home states of the competing Super Bowl teams---or the White House Honey Ale.

I know which I would have chosen.

It makes me thirsty, just thinking about.

And it all reminded me of my first venture into the making of homebrew.

It was 1962 and we were living in a small, two hundred year old Georgian cottage in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

I was exploring and enjoying the tastes of British bitters and ales, so different from the bland Labatt's and Molson brews that we drank at university, but I kept running into people who told me that the commercial products couldn't compare with the 'real thing', homebrewed British beer.

Factory-made beer, they argued, was homogenized, pasteurized and otherwise stripped of its British character.

There were many beer-makers in Britain at the time, some of them getting very scientific with precise analysis of the ingredients, and careful control of sugar content and of things like the exact temperature of mashing and fermentation. Their recipes all called for the use of a hydrometer---more about that later on.

It all sounded a lot like  a chemistry class.

I opted instead for a beer recipe I found in an ancient Yorkshire  cookbook. I would be producing a true Yorkshire beer, the kind that for centuries had sustained that county's  hardworking coal miners and farm labourers.

Soon I had my first brew fermenting away in a plastic dustbin (translation: a brand-new, white garbage pail). As the beer fermented, I scrounged a collection of  20 quart beer bottles of the kind in use in Britain at the time, heavy brown bottles with a screw-in top (click here for a picture of  one of those bottles  

One of the joys---and frustrations---of old recipes is their damnable imprecision. They use expressions like,  "a pinch of this', "butter the size of an egg", "beat until thick", "bake until done", and so on.

My beer recipe said that I should bottle the beer when "the fermentation has finished'. There was a warning that I shouldn't leave the bottling too long or the beer would "go off'.

The problem is that beer is a living thing and fermentation doesn't totally stop at some point in time, leaving a placid, calm surface---there is always some activity, some bubbles. I found it hard to gauge when the fermentation was sufficiently complete to permit bottling.

Finally, I made an executive decision that the time had come to bottle the beer. I carefully added a spoonful of sugar syrup to each bottle to provide the food for a little fermentation in the bottle that would provide for a good head when the beer was poured. Then I siphoned the beer into the bottles, tightly screwed in the tops and placed the bottles on shelves in a little pantry off our kitchen.

And started to wait for the two or three weeks until the beer in the bottles was clear and  ready to drink.

Then, in the middle of one night there was a suspicious noise from the kitchen. Pat was pregnant at the time and needed her sleep so I quietly put on some clothes and went down to investigate.

I was met by foaming beer running along the stone floor of the kitchen with shards of glass everywhere.

Oh, oh!

After I cleaned up the mess, I sat down and tried to think what to do.

It was clear that I had bottled the beer too soon, that there was sugar that hadn't been converted to alcohol and in adding sugar syrup I had created the conditions for a lethal pressure of carbon dioxide in the bottles.

That's where a hydrometer comes in.

I am sure you used an hydrometer in high school science classes but just to refresh your memory, it is a glass cylinder with a bulb at the bottom weighted down with mercury or lead. The cylinder floats in a beaker of liquid and measures its specific gravity.

It is not to be confused with a hygrometer---but let's not go there.

In beer making, the hydrometer tells whether the sugar has all been converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide. And whether it is safe to bottle.

So I had 19 bottles of over-pressurized beer sitting on the shelves in the pantry. Or in today's parlance, nineteen IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices), or perhaps, more accurately, 19 UED's (Unimprovised Explosive Devices).

How to disarm them?

I decided that the only thing to do was to take each bottle gingerly---very gingerly---to the kitchen sink, unscrew the top and let the beer flow out, and down the drain.

But I would need to wear some protective gear, just in case one of the bottles decided to go 'kaboom'.

My improvised anti-explosion equipment consisted of a hat, sunglasses, leather gloves and my leather Arthur Tigers Hockey Team jacket, which I wore back to front. (While in high school, I had played as a left winger with the Tigers and after a particularly successful season there had been enough box-office money left to buy us all jackets.)

I wish I had a picture of that outfit!

One-by-one, I took the bottles to the sink, loosened the tops, turned my head to the side as beer sprayed  every which way,  and once the pressure was released,  poured the beer down the sink.

There were no explosions but for a while the kitchen smelled like an old Ontario beer parlour (without the cigarette smoke, of course!).

After that experience I decided that I would turn my back on old Yorkshire recipes and follow more modern recipes. The taste might be a little lacking in character but the process would be a whole lot safer with the new hydrometer I had bought and learned to use.

I continued brewing beer and using the screw-in top bottles during the rest of our stay in Britain and for many years in Canada (I brought a good number of the beer bottles home with us.)

With the large number of excellent craft breweries in Ontario one no longer needs to 'brew it yourself' to get a beer that has the authentic taste of pungent hops and rich malt. 

I got rid of my bottles, and my hydrometer.

I am no longer a home-brewer, but the article about the White House ale started me thinking.

My brother, Jim, and his wife, Fannie, raise bees and produce a superb honey.

Doesn't "Hunter Honey Ale" have a nice ring to it?

But I would have to buy a hydrometer.

And I'm really busy at the moment.

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See you on March 20th for Posting #107 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.