From the lab to the bottle
A new brewing guide has substance with froth!
Considering beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world, there are still precious few books on the subject.
Guides to breweries and their beers - technical tomes aimed at the advanced home brewer or craft-brewer market, are growing in number, as well as the usual jokey, blokey beer-themed books that arrive in time for Father’s Day each year.
Wine has spawned its own publishing industry but beer seems to be somewhat neglected in the ”general interest” category.
Froth! The Science of Beer goes some way to filling that void. Written by ‘’semi-retired” physicist and home brewer Mark Denny, it aims to combine maths and beer, which might sound about as incompatible as ”garlic and ice-cream”, the author warns.
And while it will certainly appeal to the beer geeks among us, it also works on enough levels for some broader appeal, with general beer history mixed with quirky scientific data.
The mathematical equations scattered through the text were pretty well impenetrable for the likes of me, who seems to have misplaced the necessary data files acquired from distant lessons.
However, Denny suggests you can skip over these doodlings without missing much, or stay along for the mathematical ride and then reward yourself with a beer at chapter’s end.
The chapter sub-heading ”From Mass Production to Macroswill” signals the author’s allegiances, and throughout the book he champions the cause of home brewing, real ale and craft beer at the expense of ”macrobreweries”.
For a scientist, Denny’s approach to home brewing is delightfully down to earth, or ”minimal”, as he describes it in the chapter entitled ”How to Make Good Beer at Home”.
A couple of his idiosyncratic suggestions swim against the tide of prevailing instructions - he suggests allowing the hot wort (or unfermented beer) to cool down naturally over a six-hour-plus period, before pitching double the supplied dose of dried yeast while the wort is still warm.
The author assures us his methods are proved but it would have been useful to know the appropriate temperature range on Vancouver Island, Canada, where he lives.
Having softened up the reader with a couple of fairly basic and light-hearted chapters on the history and making of beer, Denny wheels in the scientific juggernaut.
The physicist - or should that be ”fizz-icist” - emerges to take us through detailed descriptions of yeast population dynamics, brewing thermodynamics and the formation of bubbles.
The latter is of great interest to macrobreweries, he tells us, because the presentation of a consistent collar of foam may be their beer’s best selling point.
Apparently, boffins everywhere are writing papers dedicated to the most obscure areas of bubble science and Denny breaks down beer pouring into sub-categories: bubble generation, beading and disproportionation, also known, gloriously, as ”Ostwald ripening”, whereby bubbles exchange gas with other bubbles. Denny also identifies ”anti-bubbles”, which he says are common in Belgian beers.
Did you know that the average batch of home brew produces 35 billion bubbles, or that the world’s beer production accounts for about 100 billion billion bubbles annually?
How beer gets from the brewery to drinkers’ mouths is the subject of the ”Fluid Flow” chapter, which includes some interesting trivia, such as when the hand-pump beer engine was invented (1785), when the crown seal cap first appeared (1892).
Froth! The Science of Beer by Mark Denny
Article from TheAge.com.au
Filed under: Articles on October 16th, 2009
