From the ranks of three-metre high vessels in Brewster’s brewery, Grantham, the sweet scent of malted barley spills outside. Pacing between them, consulting clipboards and adding notes, is Sara Barton, one of Britain’s foremost independent brewers and the only female winner of the annual Brewer of the Year award, which she lifted in 2012.
In the 15 years since she set up Brewsters, Barton has witnessed the craft beer revolution and, with it, a resurgent interest in homebrewing, which last had its heyday in the 1970s. “When I first tried homebrewing, God, it was difficult. Back then you used to get a lot of the kit from Boots, and it was so limited. We were mackling up cooling coils from shower hoses, wrapping the beer in sleeping bags. It was laborious and unpredictable.”
The basic process of homebrewing has become much easier lately, for two main reasons. Firstly, the global online brewing community is now deeply rooted, providing discussion, instruction and advice in videos and message boards, and confirming Barton’s assertion that brewing is a “very friendly” area. Secondly, technological advance has allowed many of the homebrew obstacles to be ironed out. As Barton puts it, “there’s so many gadgets and gizmos that you don’t need to rely so much on pot luck.”
All-grain homebrewing is a delicate process, littered with jargon. First, partially-germinated (malted) barley must be mashed – soaked in warm water to activate enzymes and release sugars. The grain is then carefully “sparged”, which means rinsed and drained, and the resultant liquid, now called wort is transferred to a vessel known as a copper, where it is boiled with hops. The liquid is then cooled and transferred into a fermenting bucket, where yeast is added, or “pitched”, and fermentation begins. The beer’s temperature is regulated for a week or two before it can then be ”conditioned” and bottled.
Barton, who studied biochemistry, feels that a basic scientific understanding of the process helps the brewer “to understand why something’s going wrong.” She also advises caution to new brewers. “If I were starting again as a homebrewer I would start out with malt and hop extract – see which flavours I liked. You have to graduate to all-grain, it’s like the nirvana of homebrewing.”
Brewing at home successfully can result in good beer for as little as 20p per pint, but it is also, in Barton’s words “a really good hobby”. “I think it’s about the process as much as the product,” she says, drawing a cold glass of Helles lager from an enormous stainless steel tank, “and so all this extra gear is very appealing.”
Mini Keg (above)
brewuk.co.uk, £85, and
Easy Keg brewuk.co.uk, (right) £5.99
“The bigger of these two (pictured above) is a re-useable miniature keg. You can put your beer in, pressurise it, and then you’ve got nice carbonated beer to take to a party. Some people feel that ‘force carbonation’ is impure or somehow destructive to the beer, but we do it here with our lagers. The Easy Kegs are like little casks, and we use them ourselves – they sell very well at Christmas. They have a special seal on top, and a little tap tucked away inside. You can fill them with bright beer, which has been taken off the yeast, and then drink it within a day or so. Otherwise you can fill them with conditioned beer, where the yeast will continue to add carbon dioxide. If you do that and keep it sealed up you could keep it for a month. The only downside of these is you can’t re-use the Easy Kegs, which seems a shame. But even so, this can hold eight or nine pints. Bottles are expensive; cleaning, filling, labelling and capping them is a lengthy process; so you can save a lot of time and money with these.Blichmann Thru-mometer brewuk.co.uk, £21 This is a good idea. It’s an inline thermometer which you connect to the outlet from the copper and transfer it to the fermenter. At this point in the process, the temperature needs to cool from a hundred degrees to around twenty, and if you run it into the fermenter while it’s too warm you can’t really do anything about it. By monitoring the temperature as you go, you can tweak your chilling water up or down without having to dash back and forth with a stick thermometer. It’s very easy to read, it’s nice cleanable, sterile stainless steel, I like it. For the price, it’s a good little gadget.”
Speidel Braumeister
brewuk.co.uk, 20L model £1,275
“An ordinary homebrew setup has three vessels, one for mashing, one for boiling and one for fermenting. This machine (left) mashes, sparges and boils the wort, so it cuts out at least one vessel and regulates the temperature with a digital control box. It’s obviously quite expensive but if you’re a really enthusiastic whole grain homebrewer, and you don’t have an outhouse or a utility room or something, it’s a very neat, compact way to do it.
“The sparging and the mashing are the most impressive aspects, because there’s an inner cylinder that contains the grain and circulates the water — you don’t have to put it in a mash bag and go over it with a showerhead.
“It’s very simple, but a homebrewer might find it too clever — it helps too much. It’s almost like a mini microbrewery in itself, and you wouldn’t want to spend that amount of money if you weren’t sure about what you were doing. Otherwise it’s fantastic. If you can teach it to drink it for you you’d be laughing.”
OPTi Brew SG Digital Refractometer refractometershop.com, £295
“A refractometer is a clever toy. There’s a glass prism inside which uses the light to measure the density of sugar in the fluid. This one (left) looks nice, it feels nice, it works instantly and, combined with a hydrometer, it can give you a very accurate ABV [alcohol by volume] reading.
“That might be a very useful thing to have in the brewery, especially if it meant we didn’t have to send samples off to be distilled before submitting them to Revenue and Customs.
But it seems a bit complicated for homebrew. As a homebrewer you don’t need to know ABV for legal purposes, you just need to know roughly what percentage it is so you know whether it’s safe to drive the kids to school… Serious hobbyists, however, might be interested in something as professional as this.”
Better Brew Polycarbonate Heat Panel thehomebrewboat.co.uk, £37.50
“This (left) is for when you’ve got something like a demijohn or a bucket that you need to keep nice and warm while brewing in the spring and the winter during cold weather. I’ve measured it and it seems to heat up to about 29C. You want your whole brew to be at about 20C, so by the time you’ve sat your vessel on the panel it’s percolated throughout the liquid that temperature would probably be about right. It’s easy to wipe dry and it’s a nice solution to putting it in the airing cupboard and ruining all your clothes.
You still need to think about how to cool the beer before and after fermenting, so I wonder if the same company makes something to help the beer cool. Some people use an electric coil, but then you’re putting something into the beer, which is always a worry with sterility.”
StarSan no-rinse sanitiser
brewuk.co.uk, 8oz (227ml) bottle, £9.60
“Hygiene is one of the biggest problems for brewers. In the early days of homebrewing we sterilised things with metabisulfite — Campden tablets — that you had to swill around in all your kit. They have to be rinsed out after, so if your water’s not perfect you risk further infection. In the brewery we use peracetic acid as a sanitiser but that isn’t very practical for homebrewers; it’s quite volatile, noxious stuff, and if you get it on your fingers they go all white.
“This (below) is a last-step sanitiser made with phosphoric acid; you don’t have to rinse it off after using it. You dose it up into the little chamber, dilute it and use it; it’s quite nice. People make the mistake of thinking superficially clean is clean, but you have to make sure that nothing other than yeast will grow. A good amount of work goes into a brew and it’s painful when it goes rank and you have to pour it down the drain. It’s wise to have this.”
