Ding Huang demonstrates the art of paper cutting
Laura Reynolds looks at the habits of exam-weary students
James Tompkinson discusses the benefits of using Facebook for revision
Laura Reynolds provides some tips to help you save
I visited the Cantillon brewery in Brussels, the last traditional brewery in the Belgian capital, to give you a flavour of how it all comes together. This brewery produces lambic beer – so the process might differ a little from the tins of lager from the likes of Carlsberg.
To make beer the most important ingredients are usually yeast and sugar. Cantillon beer, however, doesn’t use any of this. The yeast involved comes from airborne wild yeast specific to the room the beer’s brewed in, and the sugar comes from the starch contained in the cereals used.
This means the beer is one with few ingredients – only wheat, malted barley, hops, water and of course lots of time.
Firstly the wheat and malted barley are crushed in the mashing tun. The malted barley is used because of the enzymes contained, converting starch into the all important sugars. The hops are added to this, boiling the hops. Much of the flavour of beer comes from the hops added.
After this, it is all cooled in a massive copper cooling tun before being left so that micro-organisms can cause spontaneous fermentation – the process where the wild airborne yeasts come into contact with the beer. Until 1860 all beers were made in this way. 1860 saw important discoveries about yeast, so traditional lambic beers are the only ones still made in this way.
The beer is then barrelled and left to mature – sometimes for years. When the brewer determines it is the right time the beer is bottled in wine style containers with both a cork and a crown cap. The beer is then left for at least six months, but matures with age.
That’s a brief outline of how one specific type of beer is made. Of course there are many other types of beer which are mainly made using controlled fermentation with yeast and sugar.
Feel ready to make your own? It’s substantially cheaper than buying professionally brewed produce – especially as there’s no duty on it if all the alcohol is fermented in your own home.
The first thing to do would be to buy a big bin. This is where most of the magic happens. The easiest way for a budding brewer to start up is by buying tinned ingredients – this saves buying huge cauldrons only to ruin them by staining them with hops. The mixture of ingredients can be bought for £5 - £10 and are enough to make forty pints of homebrew. Then you simply mix the contents of the tin with forty pints of warm water.
Unfortunately it’s unlikely there will be spontaneous fermentation, or the starch will be converted to sugar – so at this stage you’ll have to add a load of sugar and sprinkle some yeast on the top. If this mixture is covered with a tea towel and left in a warm place until the bubbles stop rising (about ten days) it should be ready to bottle.
The bottles have to be cleaned thoroughly and sterilised. Then a little sugar should be added to each bottle. This will ensure there’s a secondary fermentation in the bottle – making the beer carbonated. Siphon the brew from your bin into each bottle and close them all tightly and leave in a warm corner of your house for a few days – then the beer will be ready to be chilled and the last stage – drinking it!
Enjoy.
You must log in to submit a comment.
