Brew it yourself No5

Stout

Now stouts can be a little trickier to brew, especially if you’re planning on adding in lots of oats to give you a lovely creamy mouthfeel. The reason they can be a bit more difficult is due to the mash. When dark malts such as chocolate malt or black malt are made, they are heavily roasted which breaks down the husk into brittle fragments, which then don’t act as well as a filter bed throughout the mash, making the mash stickier. 

Dark malts will also add a roasted and sometimes astringent character to your beer, a drying puckering that can be unpleasant. This is similar to burned coffee or tea that was steeped for far too long, which can unbalance the profile of your beer. Dark roasted malts also lower the pH of the wort substantially; in a commercial brewery this can be controlled, but on a small scale the drop in pH is likely to be more pronounced, reducing the efficiency of the enzymes in your mash, and leading to poor extraction, and a much weaker beer than you anticipated. 

One solution to this is to not mash in your dark malts (you’re not going to get any fermentable sugar out of them anyway) and to simply add them on top of the mash bed during sparging (when you add hop water on the top of the mash bed), or steep them to add back later. The steeping method seems to be very popular, and you simply steep the dark grains in cold water overnight (like cold brew coffee), and add the dark liquid to the end of the boil. You need to double up the grains for this method, but it avoids some of the mashing and flavour problems you otherwise encounter. So, while stouts aren’t the easiest starter homebrew, you can make them well at home with some simple adjustments. 

Lager

We’ve discussed lager yeast before and how it usually ferments at a colder temperature than ales, which means when you’re trying to replicate your favourite crispy boi at home some temperature control may be needed.

Some homebrewers have old fridges set up to keep their lagers at a constant 12-14°C, but this is beyond the reach of most people as they take up a significant amount of space. 

If you have the money to spare then there are homebrewing chillers available, these pump glycol around the outside of your fermenters through a removable jacket and allow you to control the temperature of your fermenters in almost the exact same way as professional brewers. These come in at about £800, however, so for most the best solution is to ferment in the coldest part of the house, sometimes with a wet towel wrapped around the fermenter to keep the worst of the heat at bay. I have fermented in garages, sheds and underneath the stairs, and had reasonable results when making lagers. While it’s not perfect, there’s still a good chance you can make a crisp and clean lager at home, and it’s certainly not impossible.

If there’s nowhere cold enough, then rethinking what kind of lager you want to make can mean you can still get that lager flavour without a complex set up. Steam beers are brewed with a lager yeast fermented warm, and Anchor Brewing in California made Anchor Steam beer for over a century. 

Farmhouse Ales

When thinking about what to brew at home, looking at beers designed to be made at home can offer some serious inspiration. For most of human history beer wasn’t brewed in giant factories or on freezing industrial estates, it was made in the home, and “farmhouse” styles are still popular. 

The French Bière de Garde style is a true farmhouse beer, that was brewed during the colder months to have a relatively slow and steady fermentation and then stored to be drunk later in the year. 

Farmhouse styles tend to be a little spicier, tarter and less hopped than other styles, but they’re very refreshing and easy to brew. Bière de Garde, Saison and Grisette yeasts are all available from commercial yeast providers and allow quite a lot of experimentation for adventurous homebrewers. Saison especially, with its spicy and yeast forward character stands up well to fruit and spice additions, and things like black pepper and elderflower can really elevate a saison. Saison yeasts tend to slowly ferment (or have been known to stall altogether) so patience is needed with these beers, but you will be rewarded.

Kviek

One yeast that doesn’t need patience and arguably can be used to brew pretty much whatever you fancy, is kviek. Kviek is a farmhouse ale from western Norway, but kviek yeast is thermotolerant, meaning it will still ferment at high temperatures that other yeast strains would not survive in. Kviek is becoming increasingly popular with professional brewers who like that they can go home one evening and come back to a nearly fully fermented beer the next morning. For homebrewers kviek yeast is helpful as it will ferment no matter where you can keep your fermenter, and it will do it very fast. 

All of these styles and yeasts come with their own challenges, but one of the joys of homebrewing is being able to be creative and work with what you have. With homebrewing, even if it’s not the most perfectly to style example of a beer, you can still enjoy it and be proud of what you’ve created. When a brew goes wrong, it can just go down the drain. The one piece of advice I’d give when trying new styles to brew is to keep on going, try again, learn from the previous batch, and don’t get disheartened when you don’t perfectly recreate your favourite beer. Just sanitise that fermenter and mash in again.