Brewer's Apprentice

Koch, Greg; Allyn, Matt

 
9781592537310: Brewer's Apprentice

Synopsis

Drink up and pay homage to your favorite hobby—craft brewing beer, ciders, and meads—alongside the legends, innovators, and rising stars of the beer world!

In The Brewer’s Apprentice, you get incomparable behind-the-scenes access to the craft brewing world, along with tutorials on everything from mastering the perfect pour to designing a world-class IPA. This illustrated handbook escorts you through the steps of the brewing process and offers a unique curriculum that supports and enhances your knowledge of brewing basics.

Inside, you'll find:

- 18 world-class brewers, including Vinnie Cilurzo (Russian River), Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head) and Ken Grossman (Sierra Nevada) as they share their expertise in vivid, engaging interviews

- Advice on sourcing the best hops, barley, wheat, and more; farm-to-table and seasonal brewing

- Strategies for setting up your homebrewing workshop to master brewing chemistry 101

- Methods for tinkering with nontraditional ingredients and extreme brews

- Techniques for brewing mead, sour ales, and cider

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À propos de l?auteur

Greg Koch is co-founder and CEO of Stone Brewing Co. (www.stonebrew.com) in Escondido, California. Since Greg started the company with his partner, Steve Wagner, in 1996, Stone has become one of the fastest-growing and highest-rated breweries in the world. Brewing 115,000 barrels in 2010, Stone is the fourteenth-largest craft brewery in the United States, and the largest American-owned brewery in the southwestern United States, a position it achieved without advertising, discounting, or giving away freebies. Greg passionately believes that environmental and social sustainability goes hand-in-hand with brewing mind-blowing beer, and he frequently speaks on topics ranging from craft beer to business to food to marketing, bringing a bold, entertaining, and often humorous approach to public speaking engagements.

Matt Allyn is a freelance writer living, drinking, and brewing in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He’s a certified, card-carrying beer judge, and has been homebrewing award-winning beers for six years. His writing has been published in Men’s Health, Draft, Zymurgy, Runner’s World, and Bicycling. And while he doesn’t have a favorite beer, he prefers whatever is fresh, seasonal, and in his hand. Visit his website at www.mattallyn.com.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Interview with Ken Grossman: Owner, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, California, U.S.

With a legendary craft beer to his name, an owner could Be complacent and coast, watching the profits roll in. But Ken is a beer geek first and foremost. After more than three decades in the business, he’s still relentlessly chasing a better beer.

What were the biggest challenges when you first opened in 1980?

There wasn’t a place to buy brewing equipment on the budget or scale we had. I couldn’t have afforded something from Germany or England. But I was lucky that UC-Davis was down the road, and they had a pretty extensive brewing library. I went back into books from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and saw how technology was handled in simpler times.

A lot of the articles I read and copied were on older methods of brewing. We tried to mimic simplified brewing systems with nonpressurized fermentation tanks or heated mash tuns that we now have the luxury of owning.

But how did you handle the equipment?

I built my first malt mill myself. We built a mash tun out of an old cheese vat I found, and I milled a false bottom myself. I used a lot of fundamental, but simplistic, equipment designs, but it was enough to get us into business.

Building your own malt mill seems incomprehensible.

I purchased well casing pipes, welded in end plates, put bearings together, and pieced together a functioning, but crude, malt mill that got us started. Those kind of skills were something I thought I needed, so I went back to junior college and took many classes in fabrication, machining, refrigeration, and so on.

It took a year and a half to put all the pieces together to make our first batch of beer, the building included. I did the carpentry, Sheetrock, painting, and all the plumbing and electrical.

I think Sierra Nevada has a reputation for being the best example of the art and technical.

A lot of the small brewers that opened in the years before and after us are all gone. And part of their downfall was a lack of consistency, quality control, and getting a handle on brewing science. It’s certainly an art, but there’s science involved.

And you’ve been head of the technical committee for the Brewers Association.

It was great; my passion is the science of making beer. I’m boring and read brewing journals in the evening.

So how did that science manifest itself?

We studied iron pickup in beer kegs and from water. A little bit of iron is not detectable by most palates, but 40 or 50 parts per billion of iron from natural sources or kegs severely impacts the flavor stability of beer. The consumer will experience a lessthan- ideal beer down the road. It’s those subtle things that contribute to the overall long-term enjoyment of the product.

What sort of other things have you found improve flavor stability?

We blanket our mill with nitrogen, deaereate our brewing water, and we invest in analytical equipment that can look at ppb or lower of iron or other minerals. Not one of these things makes a huge impact by itself, but all these little bits can improve the consumers’ experience. That’s a core value: We always know we can do a little better here or there.

That makes me think of your switch to pry-off bottle caps.

We’ve done a lot of research on bottle cap liner materials and are still working with European manufactures to find the Holy Grail of bottle cap liners. That’ll have benefits for us as well as the rest of the industry. Bottle caps are an inherent detractor from beer flavor stability.

We studied leaving twist-offs for many years. There was certainly the convenience factor, an

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