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Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales & World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
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text Copyright 2004, Randy Mosher All rights reserved/
From
the Foreword, The Marvel of Mosher, by Michael
Jackson:
The world
desperately needs more Moshers. If only we had more Moshers, the Tasmanian
tiger might return from extinction. Mike Tyson at his peak would be able
to step into the ring with Muhammed Ali. We would be able to see and hear
the great performers who pre-dated the recording of sound. I might even
now be sipping a pre-Prohibition beer and checking whether Buddy Bolden
could be heard across Lake Ponchartrain. Or I might be sampling Harwood's
Porter in a London pub, or an India Pale Ale aboard a clipper heading
for Calcutta.
From
the Introduction:
We're taught
from childhood that what is good can't be fun. It's a lie. Homebrewing
combines good and fun into one sparkling amber liquid. We can all drink
to that.
Okay, so
it isn't saving-babies-in-Africa good, but American homebrewers have profoundly
changed the beer scene for the better. What we've accomplished, along
with making it pretty easy to get a palatable beer just about anywhere
in this country, is nothing less than keeping beer, a twelve thousand
year-old cultural treasure of humanity, from slipping into a coma of mechanized
industrial anonymity.
Beer is a
deep, wide river that flows through human culture. It appears along with
the earliest signs of civilization, and is enjoyed and venerated in nearly
every society with access to its makings. To think that might have been
subsumed into the drab one-size-fits-all world of the modern commerce
is an outrage, but we came very close. Fortunately, things are on a happier
track now.
From
Chapter 1, An Embellished History of Beer:
A Mostly
True Beer History Timeline
10,000
B.C.E. Glaciers melt, barley pops up everywhere. Neolithic people
take flat rocks and pound it into hearty nourishing gruel.
9999 B.C.E
Neolithic people sick of gruel. Wonder what else they can do with barley.
9998-9000
B.C.E. Tried everything: gruel loaf, gruel au jus, gruel fritters,
gruel pate, gruel in aspic. Charred meat is still by far the most popular
food.
8999 B.C.E.
Final contestant in barley cook-off comes up with a winner: crock-aged
festering sprouted barley-cake bisque with bitter herbs, actually much
more enjoyable than it sounds. Dubbed beer, it's much better than gruel.
The formerly neglected Goddess of Gruel becomes fashionable new Goddess
of Beer, now in big demand at parties everywhere across Fertile Crescent.
From
Chapter 3, An Overview of Brewing:
Brewing is
no more difficult than making lasagna. If you can whip up this noodley
melange, then you can make terrific beer. Limits on time, space, or money
need not stop you. All you really need is desire.
You will
start with an extract-plus-grain beer, using fresh hops and a little crystal
malt for flavor. The procedure is simple. It will take you a couple of
hours, plus about a month of waiting.
Some shops
will try to sell you a can of extract and 3 pounds of corn sugar. Run
for the door! This vile mixture will create a thin, screechy half-beer,
diluted with pure alcohol. If you want horrible beer, there's plenty on
the grocery store shelves; no point in brewing it. Malt, not sugar, gives
beer its flavor. Sugar has a place in brewing, as you will see. But not
like this.
From
Chapter 7, Basic Drinkers:
If
beers could talk, many of the blondest would sound like this: "Hi,
I'm like, oooh..you're so...heehee...giggle."
Poor
darlings. Cast off like orphans by thoughtless brewpubbers who fling them
in the tanks at the last minute "to make the partners happy,"
or to placate those pitiful customers who "don't know what good beer
is," blonde ales all too frequently are perceived to lack deep inner
beauty. This is a shame, because blonde beers can be as deeply soulful
as their brunette cousins, just as worthy of a lustful, longing well-informed
gaze. So, fellow homebrewers, it is up to us, as usual, to take things
into our own hands, and brew beer the way it is supposed to be.
From
Chapter 8, Lager On:
The stereotype
of Germany is of a country where everything fits into scrupulously tidy
compartments, utterly regulated, suiting the tastes of the residents like
a pair of custom- fitted lederhosen. I've heard brewers there bemoan the
situation that brewing a beer outside of well-established styles is not
only frowned upon, but in some cases simply not permitted.This is belied
by a strong interest in such Americana as free jazz and the artistic oeuvre
of David Hasselhoff. And if you look carefully, you might see an eccentric
beer that slips outside the carefully constructed framework of allowable
brews. Black, roasty, caramelly schwarzbier is such a product.
From
Chapter 10, Big Honkin Brews:
Dragon's
Milk: English October Beer
It's the
stuff of legend, the muse of poets, the nectar of the gents. Strong beer,
brilliant as topaz, sweet as dew, and dripping with the perfume of hops,
was for centuries a revered icon of English culture. In typical language-loving
English style these beers were nicknamed angel's-food, clamber-skull,
huffcap, and more.
October beer
was the most laudable product of country brewing, specifically country
house brewing. Beer wasn't a readily transportable product in the oxcart
era, so the maintenance of an estate, large or small, required beer to
be brewed on the premises.
From about
1600 to 1900, there were four classes of beers brewed on estates, although
not all kinds were brewed by every brewer. On the bottom was weak and
watery small beer, usually the last runnings of whatever was being brewed,
although occasionally brewed on its own in summer months. Next up the
scale in strength was "table" beer, what we today would regard
as ordinary strength, roughly in the 1.050 (12 P) (4.5-percent alcohol)
range. Next was March and October beer at about 1.080 (19 P), followed
by rarely brewed "double" beers, well over 1.100 (24 P) (9-percent
plus), and reserved for special occasions (see p 135).
From
Chapter 12, Hops Are Just Another Herb, Mon:
In the long,
broad history of beer, the hop is a relative newcomer. Hops began to be
used in beer about 1100 C.E. in Europe, and much later in the British
Isles. For a few centuries, herbed beers existed side-by-side with hopped
beers before they were superseded by more modern fashion and banned by
edicts such as the Reinheitsgebot.
Many lingered
on until fairly recently. During the nineteenth century, spiced beers
still lived, albeit in the margins. Heather ale was being brewed in the
hills of Scotland; an anise beer called "swankey" was made in
Pennsylvania; rustic spiced country brews were slowly winking out in England.
Some survive
to this day. A cloudy, delicately spiced Belgian wheat beer called "wit"
vanished for a few decades, then was resurrected. In Berlin, the local
wheat beer, a light, yogurty brew called weisse, is still commonly served
with a dash of syrup made from an herb called woodruff, while in the same
region other spiced white ales such as gose and kotbuss still linger.
North into Scandinavia, strong, juniper-tinged beers provide a delicious
link to the past for the enthusiastic cartetakers of the style.
From
Chapter 14, Bent Beers:
In violation
of one of the most sacred principles of quality homebrewing, I'm going
to recommend that you add that evil, dreaded bogeyman--sugar--to your
beer. Not just any sugar. High-performance sugar. This is the dark,
gooey crystallized sweetener that bears as much resemblance to the white
stuff as homebrew does to industrial beer--the other purified white stuff.
Specialty sugars with a variety of ethnic origins are available these
days, and contrary to what you might have been taught, they really can
add to a beer.
From
Chapter 17, Forward Into The Past:
A number
of different grains were available to ancient peoples, including two-,
four-, and six-row barleys; emmer and einkorn wheat; spelt; and various
types of millet. Some of these grains made pretty lousy bread, and were
undoubtedly used for brewing. There's a four-thousand-year-old cake of
coarse barley on display in the Oriental Institute in Chicago, so rough
it makes your gums bleed to look at it. Such cakes were a preliminary
step to brewing, thankfully, so the ancients wouldn't have had to pick
the husks from their teeth, and used a more tender grain for their daily
bread.
In addition
to fermentables from grain, other sources of fermentable sugars existed
in the form of dates, grapes, figs, palm sugar, honey, and other minor
sources.
On Danziger
Jopenbier:
First, a
thin white film of mold formed, then changed to bluish green, which accounted
for the first two weeks. Then, bubbling gas started coming up from the
wort and broke up the film, which, in turn, further sped up the fermentation.
This proceeded very vigorously for ten to fourteen days, and provisions
needed to be made to retain and return the overflow to the fermenter.
In the third phase, the yeast kind of settled out. Then another film formed
on the surface--white at first, then dark brown, then at last green, growing
and thickening, folding itself up into great ridges as it floated on the
surface.
From
Chapter 19, Save the Bees:
Many scholars
believe mead may have been the first fermented beverage. And the fact
that the same Indo-European root word, medhu, means "honey,"
"sweet," and "drunkenness" is further evidence for
this. Honey won't ferment in its natural concentrated form, but as soon
as it is diluted--when combs are washed out, for example--it starts to
ferment. There is, in fact, no ancient technology capable of stopping
it more than temporarily. With no cooking or crushing needed, it's the
simplest alcoholic beverage to make, and probably appeared just as soon
as humans created something to put it in. The rock art of one Neolithic
society, at Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria, prominently features a zoomorphic
"bee-man," which is suggestive of their familiarity with the
other sort of buzz that bees create. Never mind the fact that he is covered
head-to-toe with magic mushrooms as well.
This buzz
is not always simply from alcohol. Many plants with toxic and/or psychoactive
components exude them in their nectar, which is then concentrated by the
bees into a kind of narcotic honey that Pliny the Elder called meli
moenomenon, or "mad honey." Datura, belladonna, cannabis,
wild rosemary, rhododendron, and a large number of tropical plants are
capable of producing mind-altering honey, and the ethnobotanical connections
for many psychoactive honeys are well documented. Fortunately, such honeys
are rare, and pose little danger (or opportunity) for mad meadmakers.
From
Chapter 21, A few Words on Beer and Food:
One should
not overwhelm the other. Find beers of the same intensity as the food.
A salad obviously needs a lighter accompaniment than a steak.
Look for
resonance. See if you can find similar flavors in the food and beer that
can play off each other and add up to a greater whole--pairing a spicy
dunkelweizen with a delicately spiced gingerbread, for example. Or to
ramp it up, maybe a weizenbock with a sauerbraten in its traditional gingersnap
gravy. There are lots of possibilities: toasted savory flavors, buttery
richness, herbal or spicy aromas, creamy textures, smokiness, and roasted
chocolate flavors. The list goes on and on.
Do a balancing
act in your mouth. Everything's going to end up there anyway, so consider
the food and beer as one thing, not two. Once you match the intensity,
you can find foods and beers that will play off each other's eccentricities.
A remarkable example of this is to pair a sweet carrot cake with a crisply
bitter imperial India pale ale. They have a similar intensity, but one
is very sweet, the other intensely bitter. A mouthful of one demands a
swig of another, and on and on it goes.
More Information...
Publisher: Brewers Publications, 2004.
Soft Cover, 324 pages, 8 x 9.
Item #1340
Lavishly illustrated and filled with fascinating tidbits of brewing lore, this is a brewing book unlike any other. From the arcane to the exuberant, the ancient to the futuristic, RADICAL BREWING encompasses the passion and vitality that makes the contemporary American brewing scene the envy of the world. With over 90 complete recipes and an abundance of useful information for the novice as well as the grizzled veteran, this book puts you in touch with some of brewing's most exotic -- and delicious -- brews. After a concise introduction to beer and how to brew, RADICAL BREWING moves on to the secrets for the great session ales, lagers and easy-to-brew Belgian beers. Then, it moves on to the next level: strong beers, adjunct beers, fruits, spices, smoked beer and more. The challenging Belgain styles are next, followed by a tour through the vast repertoire of beer through the ages and an introduction to mead and honey beers. Chapters on group brews aand activities, equipment, and the art of enjoying beer & food complete the text. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Foreword by Michael Jackson Introduction: Changing the World One Glass at a Time 2 Chapter 1: An Embellished History of Beer 3 Chapter 2: What is This Thing Called Beer? 16
What Makes a Beer? 16
Body and Texture 17
Units of Measurement 18
Beer Flavor 19
Elements of Aroma 20
The Fine Art of drinking Beer 21 Chapter 3: An Overview of Brewing 24
Why Homebrew? 24
The Brewing Process in a Nutshell 26
Stuff 29
Get on With it: Your First Radical Brew 30
How Not to Screw It Up 34
Extract + Mini Mash Brewing 36
Mashing Made Easy 37
Basic Infusion Mashing 39
Mashing Made Difficult 39 Chapter 4: Basic Ingredients 42
Malt, Glorious Malt 42
Malt Types Chart 44
More Hops! 46
Hop Variety Chart 49
Is it or is it Not the Water? 54
Godisgood: The Mystery of Yeast 57 Chapter 5: How to Build a Beer 60
It's Art, I Tell You: Putting a Recipe Together 60
Cypherin': Calculating in the Brewery 61
On to a Recipe 64
It1s All About Process 65
Fermenting and Conditioning 66
About the Recipes in This Book 69
Recipe Worksheet 71 Chapter 6: Is it Any Good? 72
The Basics of Critical Tasting 72
Your Strange Brain 73
A Dirty Dozen of Off-Flavors 74 Chapter 7: Basic Drinkers 78
Extraordinary Ordinaries: British Bitter 78
(Not So Dumb) Blondes 80
A Flash of Brilliance: British Summer Ale 83
A Sparkle in Your Ale 84
Kick-Ass IPAs 88
Brown is Beautiful 92
Intire Butt: Porter 93
Twelve Ways to Improve a Stout 101 Chapter 8: Lager On! 104
A Perfect Pilsner 104
Decoctions: Are They Worth the Bother? 108
Munich Dunkel 111
Almost Porter: German Schwarzbier 112
Alternate Bocks 113 Chapter 9: Belgians are Easy 116
Belgian Pale Ales 116
Brews of Beelzebub; Strong Pale Ales 118
Saison: Beer of Heavenly Balance 119
Three Times the FunÜAbbey Beers 122 Chapter 10: Big Honkin' Brews 126
Big Things: the Demands of Big Beer 126
Dragon's Milk: English October Beer 129
Imperial Pale Ale 133
English Doble-Doble 135
Towards a Portlike Beer 136 Chapter 11: Beyond Barley 138
Wheat and Weizen 138
Adjunct Grain Chart 141
GoseBier of Jena 146
A Smattering of Adjunct Recipes 148 Chapter 12: Hops Are Just Another Herb, Mon 152
Using Herbs and Spices 153
Herb and Spice Chart 158
Wassail: Twelve Beers of Christmas 164
And More... 170 Chapter 13: Tooting your Fruit 172
Fruits for Brewing Chart 174
Techniques for Brewing With Fruit 176
Oranges and Other Citrus 178
Drink Your Vegetables 182
Hole Chipotle, It1s Chile Beer! 183
Shrooms, Man! 184 Chapter 14: Bent Beers 188
Taking Liberties with Styles 188
Smokin: Beers, That is 189
Historic Smoked Beer Styles 191
Sugar, Sugar 196
Radical Techniques 200
Just Plain Crazy 202 Chapter 15: Spooky Belgium 204
A Perfectly White Beer 204
Off-White 210
Oud Bruin: Flanders Sour Brown 212
Lambic 217 Chapter 16: Rolling Your Own 222
Going Organic 222
Malting Your Own Barley 223
Roasting Your Own 224
Growing Hops 226 Chapter 17: Forward into the Past 228
Historical Weights and Measures 230
Very Ancient Beers 235
The Age of Gruit 239
Heather Ale of Scotland 240
Old Ingredients and Quantities 243
Finnish Sahti 244
Devon White Ale 246
Kvass and other Russian Beers 247
Ales & Beers of Jolly Old England 249
Thick Gooey Beers 254
Outlaw Ales of Northern Germany 256
The Horrors of Colonial Ales 261 Chapter 18: Save the Bees! 266
A Bit About Honey 266
True Mead 269
Bragot and Beyond 272 Chapter 19: Don't Try This Alone 278
The Glory of Brew Clubs 278
Big Barrels O' Beer 280
Stone Beer 280
Get-Togethers and Beer Tastings 282
You Can Take it With You 285 Chapter 20: Building a Buckapound Brewery 288
Some Generalities 288
Raw Materials and How to Work Them 289
Automation 293
The Buckapound Brewery 294 Chapter 21: A Few Words on Beer & Food 296
What Goes With That? 296
Cooking With Beer 297
Cooking With Beer Ingredients 299 Chapter 22: What's Next? 300
So much to do 300
Going Pro 302 Appendix 306
Web Link 306
Brewing Organizations 306
List of Recipes 307
Bibliography 309
Index 313
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