Brewmaster Answers Beer Questions From Twitter

The brewmaster, of course, is a magical person.

[laughs]

Hi, I'm Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster's Table

and brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery.

But today, I am here to answer your questions on Twitter,

because this is Beer Support.

[upbeat music]

@dogsandbaseball, love that, asks, What are hops?

And no, I'm not Googling it.

I just want someone to just tell me.

It's like, okay, I'm the guy to just tell you.

So these are hops.

The hop is a green pine cone-shaped flower.

It grows on a vine, in this country,

largely in the Pacific Northwest.

And when that hop cone, that little flower grows out,

that is where you're going to develop

all your flavors and aromas.

Now, here's an interesting fact.

The hop is the nearest botanical relative to cannabis.

This hop flower, you have resins,

and those residents are giving you bitterness.

They're giving you flavor.

They're giving you aromas

Hops are varietal, like wine grapes.

There are about 100 varieties

of hops available on the market right now.

Some of them taste floral.

Some of them smell like citrus.

Some of them smell kinda dank.

There used to be a lot of spices used in beer,

but the hop became often the only spice in beer

because it also acts to retard the growth of bacteria,

and bacteria can spoil your beer.

And so, people started to notice, the more hops you add,

the longer the beer was going to last.

And so, hops became really the focal point

for bitter beer flavors.

@James24147374 asks,

How do you make beer without yeast?

Sorry, James, you can't.

You have to have yeast in there

to ferment your sugar into alcohol

and to make all the flavors that we associate with beer.

You can use other things besides yeast,

like bacterial strains, etc.,

but you gotta have yeast to get the job done.

@adzierman asks, Is beer chemistry?

Hmm.

Well, beer is chemistry.

Beer is also biology.

Beer is also art.

Wine is easy, right?

You got some grapes, grapes have sugar.

You stomp on 'em, whatever else.

They might start fermenting by themselves.

And you have wine.

Beer is tougher.

We're starting with this.

There's no sugar in barley malt.

You have to break down the starch in this into sugars,

which you do in a porridge called the mash.

The natural enzymes that are in the malt

break the starches down to sugar.

Then you have a formulation.

Is it gonna be dark?

Is it going to be red 'cause it has fruit in it?

Is it gonna be kind of a caramel color like that?

And that's a bit more art.

And then you have biology because you're going to add yeast,

which is then going to consume those sugars

and give off carbon dioxide, flavors,

and of course, alcohol.

There's also a lot of cleaning, a lot of plumbing.

So you have to be ready to wear a lot of hats

if you wanna be a brewmaster.

So @YoffYackson asked, How do you become a brewmaster,

because I feel that's an awesome job?

#dreamjob.

The brewmaster is essentially the chef of the brewery.

There are two main ways you can learn to be a brewmaster.

One is you take classes, sometimes for years,

or you can do it the old-fashioned way,

which is the apprenticeship.

You basically attach yourself to another brewmaster,

usually for years, and you slowly learn on the job.

There are many, many jobs in each brewery,

but in each brewery there's only one brewmaster,

the same way that there are a lot of cooks in a kitchen,

but there's only one chef.

@TheSmarmySwami asks,

Does Jamaican Viagra really equal

Guinness plus peanuts mixed in a blender?

I don't think that would make me very frisky.

I prefer my Guinness and peanuts separately.

I don't know why you'd wanna put them in a blender,

but Guinness does have a reputation in the Caribbean

and in Africa for giving people extra potency.

I don't know if there's any truth to this.

I just think it tastes pretty good.

But there is a thing, especially with the stronger versions,

the Guinness Foreign Extra Stout at about 8%,

that's supposed to be really good for you.

They think that it's an aphrodisiac

and it's gonna give them special powers.

I'm not sure.

I just think it tastes good.

@biophilius asks, And is home brewing illegal?

No, but it was.

So after prohibition, people were really worried

that there were gonna be all these people

fermenting at home and they were not gonna be paying taxes.

My grandfather was one of them during prohibition,

who was making his own beer at home.

In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation

making home brewing legal in the United States.

You can brew your own beer at home

and you can drink it and you can bring it to your friends.

The thing you can't do is sell it.

You gotta pay taxes, you need licenses, etc., etc.

So yes, you can brew legally at home,

but no, you can't sell it to all your pals.

@susanorlean asks, Is there such a thing as a boxed beer,

and if not, why not?

No, and the why not is because carbonation.

You need to hold the pressure in your container

and a box doesn't really hold pressure.

@sparklyyjoon asked, How do you make your own beer?

Well, it's kinda like asking,

how do you make your own pancakes, right?

You can get a box mix, just add water, just add milk.

Or you can make pancakes from scratch.

Kinda the same thing with beer.

You can start off with a kit,

but if you wanna have more control,

you're gonna start here with the original grains.

You're going to crush them.

You mix them with hot water at very specific temperatures,

about 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

Activate the enzymes.

You're gonna break all those starches down into sugars.

You're gonna strain those sugars out.

Bring it to a boil.

Now you have a liquid called the wort, W-O-R-T.

You bring that to a boil.

You add your hops.

You cool the whole thing down and you add the yeast.

The yeast, then it's going to eat the sugars,

give off carbon dioxide, give off flavors

and give off, of course, alcohol.

Within a few days, you've got beer.

I was an amateur brewer for years.

We're going way back.

I am 400 years old.

I didn't like the offering of beer that we had

in the mid-80s at that time.

So I started making my own beer at home

and it turned out, my beer was better.

@redditbeer asked, Hey Reddit beer,

what is the weirdest beer you've ever had?

I've had all kinds of beers.

One of the greatest beer experiences I've had,

but the strangest in flavor was drinking

the traditional South African beer, umqombothi,

out of a communally passed, sort of galvanized steel bucket

outside of Cape Town, South Africa.

And it was sour.

It was funky.

It had all sorts of stuff going on.

It was made from sorghum,

but this is a really traditional beer style.

Beer was invented probably about 10,000 years ago.

By the time you got to Ancient Egypt, they had everything.

They had beer styles, they had names, they had advertising.

Old Egyptian cities like Thebes

were actually built on beer money.

The pyramids were built on beer money.

So beer goes way, way back,

starting in Africa and then spreading all over the world.

@GregMerseyexile asked, Question for Beer Twitter.

Why do Belgian, German and a French brewers

predominantly use glass, but in the UK,

most craft and microbreweries use cans?

Is it a case of cost versus tradition?

In the old days, the only people who could afford

a canning machine were the big brewers.

So if you wanted to buy a canner,

it cost over $1 million.

As the craft beer movement started to take off,

people making canning technology said,

we should make some stuff for these guys, too.

And they started to make canners smaller.

And the canning technology got better.

It didn't affect beer flavor the way that it used to.

The beer can eventually became,

from a technological point of view,

equal to the glass bottle.

A lot of people feel that the can

is more ecologically friendly.

It goes more places that might not allow glass,

like, say, a stadium.

The Belgians don't use many cans,

but in the UK and the United States,

the can is really taking over.

If we're using bottles, we put beer in a brown bottle.

Why?

Because a brown bottle is going to block

a lot of the light coming in,

but it can't block all of it.

A can, however, can block all the light.

And that is one way in which a can

is actually superior to a bottle.

These days, when run properly,

both packages are pretty much equally good,

even though I kinda feel better

about a bottle in a certain way,

but that's because I'm 400 years old.

I'm a traditionalist.

@_lammm asks, How do you make beer from pumpkins?

You cook the pumpkins.

You mash them up.

You mix them together with the grain in your mash.

The enzymes from the grain

break down the starch of the pumpkins into sugars.

And you ferment the whole thing together.

Often, people will add some pumpkin spice

because people like pumpkin spice,

but pumpkin beer is actually hundreds of years old.

@HedwigGraymalk says, remember last year

when the Republicans were crying that if Biden won,

he'd make them drink plant-based beer?

Well, my beer was always plant-based.

So that's one of those weird things,

like gluten-free vodka.

Like, vodka doesn't have any gluten in it.

@delboy1978uk asks, How do beer makers

keep their yeast going?

How do you grow yeast?

Yeast is one of the most important elements in beer.

It is the agent that actually takes

this sweet liquid called wort

and transforms it, almost magically, into beer.

And there are various types of yeast.

The main one that we're using in beer

is called saccharomyces, and saccharomyces

means the sugar yeast or the sugar fungus.

It consumes sugar, gives off alcohol.

And that's the thing that it does.

It does it everywhere in the natural world,

including in our beer.

But when you add the yeast, it starts to reproduce,

and it reproduces by budding.

So you have like one yeast cell here

and another one starts to grow out of it.

And this happens over and over again

until you have a full population of yeast.

Now, when the fermentation is finished,

usually we'll cool the tank down

and the yeast will drop to the bottom.

At that point, you can remove the yeast

and store it for later use.

You can't store it forever,

but you can easily store it for a week or more.

And you gotta keep 'em healthy because basically,

when you're a brewer, that yeast is your partner.

We like to joke that we're just basically here

working for the yeast.

It's the yeast that are actually doing all the work.

They make the beer, we make the wort,

and together we get it all done.

@Dadman_Walking asked,

What's the better coffee for Sunday morning,

a stout or a wheat beer?

The best coffee for Sunday morning is coffee.

[laughs]

However, wheat beer is gonna be better with breakfast.

@Rambo_Cowboy asked, Any good seafood and beer pairings?

My first book, The Brewmaster's Table,

was about beer and food pairings.

And I can tell you,

there are a lots of good beer and seafood pairings.

My favorite though probably is Belgian-style witbier

and a really nice salmon in like a lemon butter sauce.

I have memories of sitting on canals in Amsterdam,

drinking that beer and eating that food.

And it's just so spectacular.

But seafood and beer, absolutely.

@t_Guinn asks, How do beer people

taste the difference in IPAs?

I had a mango and an orange

and I couldn't taste anything different.

IPA means India pale ale.

India pale ale was the most rigidly defined beer style

virtually of all times.

This was a type of beer that was brewed in England

and sent to colonists in India.

Beer was not an entertainment.

It was a staple food product.

Many people drank it from the time

they got up in the morning until they went to bed.

Water could kill you, but beer was always safe.

And these days, it doesn't mean that much.

It usually means that the beer

at least has some real hop aroma

and it has some, at least reasonable, bitterness.

Somebody can put mango or orange in the beer too,

that happens, but you wanna check the label

'cause you never know.

@drink_mysocial asks, Pale ale, IPA.

What's the difference between an IPA and a pale ale?

Short version, intensity.

So you're talking about pale ales, usually 5% to 6%.

Traditionally, IPA was stronger, more bitter,

drier, and more aromatic with hops,

but really, you can almost think of IPA

as an intensified version of pale ale.

@gamequotesapp asked, Ale or mead?

Wonder Boy in Monster Land arcade.

It's gonna have to be ale for me.

There are two main kinds of beers, ales and lagers.

Ales are warm-fermented, lagers are cold-fermented.

There are two different species of yeast.

They have slightly different flavors.

Ales tend to be more fruity and more complex.

Mead is fermented honey.

You add some water, you ferment it with yeast,

and you end up with mead.

First time I ever actually got a buzz in my whole life,

right after high school,

it was legal back then to drink right after high school,

mead at a Renaissance fair.

I admit it.

Both those things happened.

I drank mead at a Renaissance festival,

and I'm wearing this jacket.

I am not ashamed.

@LosTacos314 asks, What makes an IPA New England style?

Basically, haze.

Haze and a big, fruity, tropical flavor

is something that really came out of New England

about 10 years ago.

@Orboros_ asks, Shopping for beer.

How many different ways can you mix wheat and hops?

WTF.

Here's the thing, there's not just wheat

and barley and hops and spelt and emmer,

and all the other grains that you could use.

You can also roast them very lightly,

roast them until they are dark, like coffee beans.

You can caramelize them.

You can flavor them in different ways.

You can then decide you're going to add spices.

So not only hops, suppose you want to add ginger.

You could add fruit.

When we judge beer at the Great American Beer Festival,

we actually judge beer in over 100 different styles.

So if you're looking at the wheat and the barley,

and you're saying to yourself,

how many ways can this really be recombined?

These beers must be the same.

Not true.

They can all be really different.

I can mix them infinite ways.

@Carolinaoncrack asks, Is the craft beer

and spirits movement threatening big brands?

The short answer is, yes.

But there's no reason for you to be threatened.

Big brands make their kind of beer and that's all great.

But there used to be all kinds of beer.

We had one of the most vibrant beer cultures

in the United States in the entire world,

but then prohibition kinda squashed everything.

Until maybe the late 70s, early 80s,

we had a monoculture,

essentially one kind of beer with different names on it.

So now, our beer culture is super creative

and it's drawing from Belgium, it's drawing from Germany,

it's drawing from the UK,

and also from our own homegrown traditions.

So you are living in a nirvana of beer today,

but remember that we always had good beer

in the United States.

We just forgot for a little while.

Andy Hank asks, Anybody else climb in a mash tun today?

Thankfully, no, I did not climb in a mash tun today.

A mash tun is basically, you crush this,

you mix it with hot water, you make the porridge.

That's gonna break down your starch into sugars.

That vessel is called a mash tun.

A tun is like a pot.

And I didn't climb into one today,

but I used to climb into them a lot when I was younger.

It was pretty mucky work.

@madnessnut asks, So, British pubs lost lots of money

for having to dump barrels of outdated beer.

Sad.

Yes, the traditional British style of beer

actually finishes its fermentation in the cask.

It's called cask-conditioned beer,

and you need to serve it out within three or four days

once you've breached it.

If you don't serve it out that fast,

it can turn sour and flat.

And nobody likes that.

So it is a thing.

If you don't take care of your beer,

you might have to toss them out.

@JhoiraArtificer asked, Are hazy IPAs

just beer for people who would rather be drinking juice,

but wanna say they love IPAs?

Hmm, yes.

Basically, if you don't like big bitter beers,

you could still go for the hazy juicy style

and have your fruitiness, but not so much bitterness.

@rwilliams3 asked, With FDA laws so tough,

how do beer, wine, liquor makers

get away with not listing the ingredients?

What's really in my adult beverage?

That is a good question.

The answer to that is that we are not allowed to tell you

what is in the beer, to a certain extent.

It is strangely not legal in the United States

for us to publish, for example, nutritional information,

even if it's 100% true,

people worry that in the alcohol context,

you might try to gain advantage

by saying that your beer is, say, full of vitamins,

even if it is.

One of those things that's just a weird thing

about United States laws.

If you go to some other countries,

you might be required to actually

put those things on the label.

And I think it would be a pretty good idea.

@pattonsmith says, these anti-IPA tweets peaked in 2015.

Who even makes super-hop-forward IPAs anymore?

Everything is hazy, fruity, citrus.

Log off Twitter and learn about beer, nerds.

I think we might learn to be

a little bit more inclusive here.

There are a lot of people who like

the hazy, fruity, juicy, modern version,

and people who like the traditional sharp version.

Drink what you like.

That's the most important part of beer.

We're here to have fun.

[upbeat music]

It's pretty good stuff.