Welcome back to respecting the beer. My name is Gary Arndt and with me as usual is brewer, Bobby Fleschman and Alison McCoy Fleschman. How are you guys doing?

Doing great.

Great. We've talked about kind of the origin superhero story of you guys, how you got into beer, how you started the brewery and why anyone wants to do this is probably crazy. Now we want to start getting into beer and talking about beer. And I am reminded of something that was said in a Supreme court decision by justice, Stuart Potter. It was a court case on pornography. And he basically said, I don't know if I can define it, but I know it when I see it. And that has been the working definition of pornography by the Supreme court ever since with beer, most people would identify a beer if they were served a beer. But if you were to ask people what beer is, I don't know if most people could do it. So. The question then is what's beer?

What is beer?

That's funny. We, uh, beer porn exists in my life. So you can grab that together. That's the title of the

folder for all of the beer photos. We have is the beer, the good photos is the beer porn.

Have I mentioned, we have a tank on display showing beer happen in real time. Anyway, I digress.

What is beer?

What is beer?

There are four ingredients in beer.

Well, without going into a deep dive of the thousands and thousands and thousands of years prior to beer or whatever, what is going on is fermentation, right? And if you go back in time, that might have been grapes, it might have been honey, it eventually became beer. Cultivated malt or barley that was malted and that became beer. We'll go into all of that, but fermentation happens everywhere in nature. I think there are primates that get drunk on fruits that naturally ferment. And

just for the kids who didn't pay attention in science class. Fermentation

is what? Fermentation. Uh, not

fun at all. It's when he's pooped out alcohol. It's quite lovely,

right? Yeah. There's a lot of ways that we could take that yeast pooping out alcohol. That's one really carbon

dioxide and some other things.

Yeah. The, the yeast that brewers work with is what I know best, but I've had some nights where I would be defined as yeast,

you know, that's yep. Okay.

So yeah, taking glucose. which is a simple sugar and turning it into alcohol and carbon dioxide is the process that I'm most familiar with. And, and that's, that's what brewers think about. There are lots of. Parallel processes that create the flavors of what we call beer. But that is the very most basic way to describe what's happening. We take fungus from nature that we call yeast, single cell fungus, and that they, they then are fed sugar and we give them the right conditions. They make alcohol for us from, from barley that has been prepared for them. And Alison's shaking. She wants to go back or I'm just, I'm

just in terms of a, um, There's a very general idea of what is beer. We often joke that it's liquid bread. And so the ingredients in bread, you've got your flour, you've got your yeast, you've probably got some other additives and such. But beer really is grain, water, yeast, and hops. Those four simple things come together. Now, granted the coming together is where you just dove right into. Um, but you know, it's, it's

kind of what is fermentation. Well, that's what makes a beer. Yeah.

Um, so is that the question then? Is it, what point does it become a beer?

Well, yeah. And that, that's why I asked the question because it really is

something that, that, that

most people probably, you know, again, they know when they see it, but what is it? Yeah. Wine undergoes

fermentation.

There are other beverages that do as well. We don't recognize those as beer.

I think one of the disconnects might be is that you'll drink pre fermented wine as in just grape juice, but you normally don't drink pre fermented beer, which is the word. It's the sugar water that you get from the grain. I enjoy it. You do, and you're weird. A lot of people enjoy that. It's not, it's fine. It's sweet. You can definitely tell. Lots of

energy there. You can

get the, the precursors of the beer that it will become. But those yeast really do do some magic.

I will try not to throw winemakers under the bus, but there are a lot of compounds found in beer health wise that are not found in wine and that includes certain proteins and minerals and well, tannins are found in wine, of course, but you get those in beer as well. So where, where are we defining beer? When did, when did it become beer? I, I think I should have said those yeast are consuming glucose, but they start in beer as consuming maltose. Maltose is two sugars that are linked together in a certain way. And to the best of my knowledge, uh, wine yeast is not terribly great at working with those molecules. We have selected over time as brewers, those, those yeast that can, can metabolize them, ultimately turning them into what we call beer. So,

but we often laugh in the brewery how you just make work like the brewers just make the work. The yeast make the beer. Right. So it's really a yeast centric.

Yeah. We pamper them. We make it just exactly how they need it to be. And we add oxygen and we add all these things. And then when they're done, we flush them down the drain. I mean, they, they live a luxurious experience or they make it to a, the belly of a cow, but they're, they have an end soon after they make the beer. But we do pamper them. We understand our use really well. And I think there's a little more terroir in the. In the wine world, you sort of let things go with the seasons, but with beer, you have strict control over every single variable to make the same product every time, even though we are dealing with variable inputs because it's an agricultural product by nature. It's just sort of the, so the two natures of those two industries, we celebrate vintage with wine and we tend to expect the same every time from a brewer, that's a big diet, a sidetrack, but. Yeah. Just, just painting way out. Remember the

question was what is beer?

Yeah. What is beer? I think, I think you have to start by, by the modern definition. This is, this is really motivated by modern Germany, modern England. You have to start with barley. And you have to germinate that and do what we call malt it, which is to say germinate and sprouts. I won't go into germination too in depth, but you trick that seed into growing, it becomes softer and then we cut that process short and cook it to generate some toasty flavors.

It's pretty much like a, um, like a, Barley oatmeal.

Yeah, really kind of is. And then we just drain off the water and we leave the sludge. Yeah. And you wouldn't even have to malt it. It does not

sound sexy at all.

Oh, you mean in the brewing process? Yeah. Yeah. But to jump forward to the brewing process is to dis, it's to disregard everything that's done before the brewer starts because the brewer starts with. Malt and malt is created by what are known as monsters. And monsters are people who soften that grain and prepare it for the brewer. Let's just take

a moment and think about what the business card says or how you would introduce yourself on an airplane. I'm a monster,

right? It's just awesome. Exactly. Yeah. It's a, it's a spelling you used to over time, but so there you go. So modern in modern definition, the modern definition of what is beer. You need to start with a barley and sometimes wheat. And you need to somehow get access to those starches inside. And the maltsters have figured that out, but so a brewer is independent of maltsters. So here we go. we hydrate it in the brewery and we boil it and I'll get into all those steps that precede the, the adding of the yeast. But here we go.

I'm just here to dive deep. Yep. Go for it.

At the end of the day, you're making a concoction that yeast can ferment, and it would end up being too sweet. So we have chosen over time, different kinds of spices to balance that sweetness. So we've got the alcohol hooray, but now we're looking for a palatable product. And we've landed on in modern context hops. So that the hops give you that, that bitterness to balance that sweetness against, and that really does summarize what it is to be a beer. You really have just that grain in that water with that yeast. Plus those hops. So the

alcohol comes from the conversion of sugars. Where's the sugar coming from? Is it added or is it coming naturally from

the malt? So malt is, they're sometimes called berries in other contexts. They're, they're grass. It's grass that we've cultivated over the, over 10, 000 years. Uh, selected it for making bread and beer. And they, they've been selected to make larger and larger kernels, seeds, berries, depends on your context. And at the center of those seeds are these starchy centers. And that starchy center is, is what gives those sugars once you break that starch down.

In the creation of spirits like whiskey, which is also grain based, there's a process where they create a mash. But obviously it's, it's, it's later distilled. Where does that process diverge from beer making at what

point? Right. So the thing about making spirits is you're not, you're really mostly looking to produce ethanol at the end of the day. You're not really worried about any so called off flavors that might come about by mistreatment of your fermentation. Now, I'm not a distiller, and I know that there is some thought and some science behind what gets transferred in distillation from, from the, the wash, which is what it's called in that context. But in general, you're just looking for, for ethanol production. So you're still have your, your yeast combined with your, with your wash and that's breaking down those starches into sugars and alcohol. And then that gets distilled off and the rest of, so it's, you start with a really low quality grain in general, because you're just looking for something to fuel that ethanol production. But with beer, you're looking for the whole profile, nothing escapes. So you have to nail the whole process in terms of fermentation temperatures, the most obvious pH there's mineral content. There's so many different things you got to think about because those yeast have got to be top performers and the yeast itself, by the way, because the, the yeast that you can use to make Spirit. It really is just needs to be robust. It doesn't need to have any finesse at all involved. So that's really where they diverge because once you have your fermented wash, you, you can then go about separating that from your grain and then you can distill it off and produce your spirit. But with beer, you're, like I said, you're taking that, that fermentation all the way to completion, and then you make sure that that beer stays cold and carbonated and. Ultimately, uh, you might even add hops in the fermenter. There's a lot of feed that's along the way for beer. Well, another thing is

that the color that you get, so the difference of the color from like a whiskey or a beer, the beer, the color originates from the grain, whereas a whiskey, you're probably going to have it originate from the barrels that it was aged and it would have started clear when it was in the barrels. So that mash even though it kind of up to that point of extracting the sugars from the grain but then with the beer, there's so much more. Residual, not residual, but a history of that mash in the glass. You're actually drinking. Whereas not necessarily the same with spirits,

right? You, you, you order your barrels. If you make bourbon, you order them with a certain char and a certain toast. You can see this with wine as well. You're, you're getting flavors and colors from your barrels and the spirit world. Yeah, it's all very clear in the spirit world and the spirit world.

Okay. So. Then hops. Right? So you talked about four ingredients. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And then this is the traditional German ridings height. Kobo. Mm-Hmm. You have water, yeast, malt, and hops. So we've kind of talked about the malt. The yeast makes the alcohol. Water is obviously water. Where do the hops come into play?

Is it at what, by what stage? In the process? In the process? Yeah. The, the motivation was to balance that and also the preservative property, balance that sweetness. But then the. Preservation of that liquid is also important. I think that was plenty of the elder and later Hildegard von

being in, yeah,

of Germany,

Bavaria.

I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm not sure it was several

hundred something.

I defer to Gary on the history there, but we was Hildegard of being in St. Hildegard. She was an Abbess who. It's extensively on beer, botanist and astronomer and all kinds of rumor

has it. She was the first one to add the hops.

Well, she was the one to identify the, uh, preservative nature of hops in beer, as far as I know. But when did it become, you asked when in the process, is it, is it coming into play? So if you take, if you take hops, there's, there's a couple of things that we, we use them for in terms of. The, the flavor one is the bitterness. Coincidentally also gives you that preservative quality, but you get flavors and aromas too. And there's these oil, the essential oils that are involved and

the exact same type that are the fresh cut grass smell. You get terpenes.

Yeah. There's all sorts of oils that we look at in, in, It hops in a modern context. In the old days, you might not have cared much about that. You might've been focused only on the bittering and on the preservative quality.

And when you say bittering, you mean to balance out the sweetness of

the malt? So in the old days, you would just throw those hops into a boiling kettle of this, what we call wort. And that wort is that liquid that's been separated from that grain and it contains all those sugars that will later become alcohol. So you, in that boil, you toss these hops and you let it boil a quite a long time. And in modern times, 60 minutes and older times when you didn't have as strong of a boil, it might take three hours. So they would toss these whole cone hops. They look a lot like they're cousins to cousin, that they are a little bit like marijuana when you see them for the first time. But you can pull them off like a little, uh, kind of meets, uh, I was going to say artichoke. But you just can, you toss them in right off the, off the plant, boil it for 60 minutes or more. And you're going to be mostly left with that bittering acid and not much else except for that preservative, preservative quality. But now in later times, we've been, We've been breeding these hops to give us more aromas and more flavors. We've really latched onto that. And that's not something that Germany did. Germany didn't care so much about that feature of hops. And so it really took an American hop revolution to take us where we are today. So that's about 50 years of. Of hop breeding in the U S to give us those aromas. And those, and then those hops don't get put in for 60 minutes. Those hops get thrown into that kettle at the moment that you stop boiling. Cause you don't want to lose those oils. You also might just throw them in like a tea into a finished beer and then steep them and that's called dry hopping.

I was just going to push you along to say that you can really, I, in the Boiling before you add the yeast, it's boiling, then you have to chill it really quickly, but you can add the, add the hops pretty much any time when that boils going all the way through to, you can even add it after it's done fermenting, it's been in the keg, it's come into the glass and then you can actually add it into your beer as you're sitting here and drinking it. So there's actually no, you should consider doing that. It's a garnish. It's very aggressive hop

garnish. Well, we've done it actually lion's tail. I'll give a shout out to a brewery nearby. We,

they have those fancy tea mug things that, that they fill with hops and then they pour the beer through and then you let it steep for a few minutes. Um, it's quite, again, it's aggressive in the hop flavor. When you do that,

Alison's not a huge fan. I like my multi beer. I think she likes the balance they provide, but beyond that, she, that's the limitation of her love for hops.

They're lovely.

that, I now kind of want to do a speed round because each one of these things I'm going to bring up and some that you're going to have to bring up we can do full deep dive episodes on, but there's a lot of terms out there that people have heard beer is obviously an overarching kind of thing, but now that I want you to kind of briefly describe and explain what each of the, the types of beer are.

Oh.

And let's start with an ale. What is, is, is an ale a subset of beer?

Yes. I would say it's, so the ales are going to be the top fermenting yeast. So the, the yeast will either find their way, um, when they're, they've been thrown in the beer or the wort's been cooled, the yeast go in to eat the sugars and make CO2 and make ethanol which is the alcohol that we consume. And the yeast will find themselves if they're an ale, they will float to the top. Of the vessel. And if they are a logger, they will float to the jet. Don't really float to the bottom. Is that a phrase? Sing to the bottom. But yes, and the Ailes with that have a slightly different feel. They're creamier, they're boxer. More robust in malt flavor. They're just overall more glorious because I might be partial to the ales.

I, I have an intimate relationship with all of these fermentations that happen and, and it's a little bit simplified to say that it's top and bottom, but Alison's basically right there. Ales. I am very much right there. Unless it's

not an ale or a lager and that's kind of in the middle.

Yeah. They tend, they tend to, those exist too. Yeah. They tend to be on top because they tend to be fermented warmer. And when you ferment warmer, you tend to generate, evolve carbon dioxide more quickly and it tends to drive the yeast to the top. And if they have any, what I'll call a flocculant characteristic, that's a, that's a word that really means do they have a tendency to group against one another, to stick against one another. Then they tend to raft and they tend to ride bubbles to the top.

Little yeast parties. Yeah. It's fun.

So when you learn, this is for the home brewers out there, when you learn about flocculation, you're thinking about how they family friendly show. Yeah, right. It's the F word. Once you

go flocculation.

Yeah. So when they, so when they group together, they tend to make larger and larger and larger bundles. I mean, literally like 10, 000 in a one bundle at the end of their, their, their fermentation, they will do so. And then they drop to the bottom of your, of your fermentation vessel. And so when home brewers or anyone that's somewhat familiar with brewing Brewing hears me say that more flocculent yeast tend to be on the top of the vessel. It's counterintuitive and the reason is because they're riding the carbon dioxide that's evolving from beer. Okay. Okay. That's, that's beer. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Pale ale.

Woo. Pale ale. Awesome. So I'm going to butcher this story, but we're going to go with it because it's fun. The, gosh, a pale ale is actually a hoppy beer, which is frustrating. At least if it's an American pale, a British pale, it's going to be more malty. But a pale ale is the idea that you actually have a light colored beer. Beer and light colored was actually very hard to do because I believe the grain when they would roast it would always catch fire. And so they had to basically roast it until it was dark and you get like a, like a really, really dark beer when you roast or when you toast your bread too long, it turns dark, kind of that burnt color. Same thing with the grain. But to get it to where you were roasting it but had enough temperature control that you could get the grain to be just slightly amber and or light, that was actually really hard and it was an industrial, like milestone that they reached. And the pale ale then became almost like a, uh, a status symbol that you could afford a pale ale because it was a very rare thing and hard to do. Did I get it right?

Yeah. There's, there's seven podcasts here. I won't even go into any of them. But it was like 18, 30, 000. It was burning

around the industry revolution when, um, steam engines were all the rage, they were able to then really control the temperature.

Yeah. Of the

killing. You know, without

going into it.

Oh, it was the Molsters. Oh, yay, the Molsters are going to come back. I was about to say, this is

why we have to always bring back the Molsters. They were able to create these light colored malts and it led to the number one malt that's ever been made is the Pilsner malt. And it became, it led to the Czech Pilsner, which led to the German Pilsner. We'll get to that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So India pale ale. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. As I'm drinking one of those, the original one. Yeah. English in England made the India pale ale. And the, there are many, many stories. And I'm sure we'll talk about this at length at some point. One of the stories is that you would make a, hop that could survive voyage from United Kingdom to the colonies in, uh, in India. And so one of the stories goes that they would, they would hop up their pale ale and, and, you know, That it would be able to survive a warm voyage across the horn of Africa. And that's some truth to that, but the reality of it is they were sending hoppy porters more than they were IPAs, like a factor of four to one. But nevertheless, the, the India, the India, India pale ale originated in England. It was a pale ale that was hopped and also more alcoholic in general. But again, you find conflicting evidence as to, it may have been lower alcohol. In fact, But in, in every case, it's always hoppy. Yep. Double, triple, quadruple IPA. Well, right. Is it just more hops? A lot of this is from the American craft beer revolution. These names. The double IPA, I think, was the, the first one was. Pliny. I know it's pronounced Pliny, but commercially it's pronounced Pliny the Elder by Russian River Brewing Company. And that was the first of its kind, at least it's credited as being that. And that was only in the last 20 years. So this is really in the last two decades we see these, these monikers. A porter. Oh, that's a long answer. Allison could start on that one.

It's delicious. Porters are dark.

You can just run it through chat. GPT tell you to summarize one paragraph. Yeah, that's true.

Porter. What's a Porter. It's not a stout. I'll say that. So Porter's going to be a sweet multi dark something about Porter was actually the original, I believe before the stout.

It was, yeah, it was stout Porter. It became stout. So Porter evolved into stout.

Right. And the difference between, and I always get this confused and I always have to look it up right before I say it and I don't have my phone in front of me. So. A stout is roasted unmalted barley. Correct. And a porter is malted, not

roasted barley. It's roasted. But lower proportions.

Lower proportions of roasted in the recipe, but it's malted, whereas a stout is an unmalted. Roasted barley.

Yeah. And significant proportions. Yeah. Yes. You get a lot of I did it. Yay. Yeah, you get a lot of flaked barley as well, so you get a lot. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of that in an Irish Stout Unmalted product.

A lager and you see a lot of beers that most people drink are a lager again, I don't know if most people could tell you the difference between a lager and an ale or anything else. So what is a lager?

Many people will come in and say, Oh, I'll have the logger. And we're like, well, which one? And they're like, well, the logger, like we have seven. So there's so many different types of loggers.

I'm not sure how to answer that in a speed round, but it's

a top fermenting. Oh, he's all right. No bottom fermenting. There we go. The other one.

Yes, in Germany, this Reinheitsgebot happened, but alongside, the Reinheitsgebot defined those ingredients by which you can make beer and call it beer, but there was also rules of time of year that you could brew because it, beer that was brewed in the summer would go sour and really what they did in making that rules, they started to self select yeast that can survive the colder months. And, over time, that meant that the ale yeast got out competed, and then you had this new kind of yeast that could endure these colder temperatures. Uh, there's, there's a very long, interesting story about how they connected the lager strain of yeast to other strains in history, but very fa fascinating stuff.

And when it comes to me versus Bobby, which is always an important thing to say I would say that I'm the ales, you're the lagers. Cause I think ales are just so much better.

I'm drinking an ale right now.

No, that's not fair. Loggers are, I think are technically more challenging to do, to make.

They are the technical Marvel and it really took the German approach to brewing to make them what they are. And they led to a million different innovations along the way. Pilsner. Speaking of modern Marvels. Yeah. Yeah. Pilsner may be the quintessential, maybe the peak of the mountain in terms of, uh, beer making prowess. Everybody says order the Pilsner first when you go to a brewery.

It's true. It's just like when you go to a diner and it's like, you just start with the bacon and eggs. If they can't do eggs, right. You don't even care about the omelet that they're going to screw up.

And the, and the Germans make a beer called a Helles. And that is sort of the response to the Pilsner originally. So both of those beers are the most difficult ones to make. And in the world, in my opinion, that I've come across, they're just perfectly balanced, clear beers that have nothing to hide behind there. There should be very, very corrupt. What people call crushable. They should be able to be consumed without thinking about them. But if you're a brewer, you can get lost in the details. If they're perfectly made, they're, they're just amazing. And there's too many, too many things to say, to fill that speed round up a sour.

Oh, please let me talk about this one. Also delicious. The sours are, I think, the most misunderstood type of beer in that they are normally naturally fermented with, they'll, they'll, you'll open up the vats. So they're they're not necessarily, Bad, but they have certain notes that in some beers would be an indicator that they've gone bad. They're also made with pretend on my season a lot of times, which is a different kind of yeast. Is that

British fungus? That's how that translates. And I didn't know that

the Brits

were the ones that. Isolated in, in inadvertently.

Go team. Anyway, so it's a, it's a delicious beer. But there's so many different types of sours. I wouldn't say that there's necessarily one kind of sour. Would you?

No. Originally every beer was sour because there was bacteria in all the process. There was, there wasn't a, a microbiology didn't come about. More than 150 years ago. So you, you certainly saw that that would happen with every single beer. And so you got, you had, you saw people drink milds and English milds were beers that were young. They may be dark, they may be light, but they were young and they weren't sour. And porters tended to be sour because they were older. And then they, then the port of the, the people working behind the bar were called publicans and they would blend the, these milds and these porters and these sometimes stouts and they would create your drink of choice. They have three pools. That's all they had. They had three beers to pull from. Eventually they had pales and IPAs, but they were able to blend those to the customer spec. How sour do you want it? But yeah, there's, there's so many episodes there. A Bach.

Is Bobby's favorite?

So, a bach is to malt what IPA is to hops. What a double IPA is to hops.

That

is true. It's extremely malty. Extremely balanced. If done well, malty doesn't mean sweet. So if you get a, a Bach, that's hard to drink, if you can't finish a glass, but you like the flavor of it, that's much like an indulgent dessert, right? It's not what you want to see as a brewer though. You want someone to finish a glass and then at that last sip want the next glass. And so that's, that's my little soapbox about. Um, about malty versus sweet, but yeah, you're really celebrating some of these amber malts that the Germans have perfected. And you've, you bring up the alcohol too, because that's a flavor component in a Bach.

Yeah. One of our highest alcohol beers is our ice Bach, which is

14 and a half, 14 and a half percent. Yeah. So, but box range, you don't want to, there's so many different kinds of box. You can even make a vice by Gertrude. It is. I bought your last bottle. Well, we have others.

She stashed away.

We stash them away.

there's A lot of other beer types out there, but I think those are like the big ones.

One, one worth mentioning is, is this the smoked beer, the rauchbier, because, because every beer was smoked. Well, no, no, no. Every beer was smoked just as every beer was, was soured at some point because you didn't have the means to indirectly make your, your malts. So everything was directly fired and directly smoked. It wasn't by intention. It just came through from the process. So. So only in the modern kiln, the process by which we, we toast our, our grain today. Can we separate the smoke from the heat and now make not multi we're not smoky beers, but that's neither here nor there.

So you have to buy like specialty smoked malt if you want today.

Uh, Bomberg, Germany only makes smoked malt. There must be a dozen breweries there that make it. And I think the rauchbier is, I think, yeah. And they're, and they're very drinkable, right? There, if you've had enough smoke beers, they do do them well, but you can, you can get those out of balance if you don't watch it.

All right. I think this this is kind of a roadmap for a lot of what we're going to be talking about in future episodes. We just covered them briefly, but there's a lot of science, a lot of history, a lot of culture behind a lot of these different types of beer. And we'll be covering them on future episodes of respecting the beer.

Thanks.

Excellent.