By Greig McGill
I know “mindful” is a bit of a buzzword these days, with every hippie snake-oil seller on the planet wanting you to align your chakras and focus your third eye or whatever… but, I do like the thinking behind the concept. It’s as simple as being present and aware of what you’re doing and why. That is, it’s the antithesis of “going through the motions”. I have found a lot of beginning, and even some advanced, brewers who pretty much just follow a process without really understanding it. That’s fine, in many cases they still make excellent beer, and the steps in the process they follow are all perfectly sound. It does make me wonder how much we all do things just because we always have, without putting thought into why they are necessary, or if they genuinely make a difference, positively or negatively.
In this article, I’m going to talk about a few things that most of us know as “common wisdom”, which aren’t necessarily wise, or at least required to make great beer. In some cases, they may even be detrimental! On average, these are, at least, more levers you can pull to make your beer unique to you.
Mash Length
What’s the point of the mash? Saccharification, the conversion of complex starches in crushed grains into simpler, fermentable sugars that the yeast can ferment, right? Yes, there are other buttons you can press here, like step mashing to maximise control over enzyme activity and tailor the fermentability and protein structure of your wort, but most homebrewers are just “makin’ sugar” at this point. So, why do we traditionally mash for an hour? Modern base malts are highly diastatic - meaning their potential enzymatic power for converting starch to sugar is very strong - and conversion is fast and efficient. Testing on my set-up has shown 96% conversion within 15 minutes. Given that remaining 4% only accounts for 2 gravity points in a 1.050 wort, I could just add a little more base malt and save myself 45 minutes! A big time saving is achieved just by asking why we do something.
The obvious caveat: as I have alluded to, there may be reasons you want to mash longer, or add a more complex mashing regime. Perhaps it’s as simple as making a beer with a grist possessing a large proportion of specialty malts with little to no diastatic power of their own? In this case, yes, it will take a lot longer for the now proportionally lower diastatic enzyme load from your base malt to perform full conversion. But… try measuring. It may still be swifter than you think. Google “starch conversion test for brewing” to see how to check your conversion, and go forth, armed with the knowledge and power to save time with no loss of quality.
Sparging
Again, why do we sparge? To rinse as much available fermentable sugar out of the grain bed as possible, thus achieving higher efficiency and lowering cost. Given that grain cost is fairly low, and efficiency loss to no-sparge methods are only in the 5-10% rate, it’s sometimes simpler just to add 10% more grain to the mash and save yourself the time spent sparging. I would still recommend a full volume mash though, meaning you dough in with all the water you plan to use (ie. total calculated water to achieve your fermentable batch size, allowing for loss to grain absorption), and so you will need a mash tun that can accommodate this. Again though, the point isn’t to tell you to save time here, it’s to be mindful of what you are doing and why you are doing it. It’s for you to weigh the factors and decide how you’d like to brew. Personally, back when I was homebrewing, I used to find the sparge a nice relaxing time to read a book, or chill with some music and a beer - guess who didn’t follow the “no beer until yeast pitched” rule?
Boiling
I guess you already know what I’m going to say here. Still, I’m frequently surprised by asking brewers why they boil, and why for the length they’ve chosen. One of the most common answers is “so I can properly fit in my hop additions”. That’s quite a good answer, though see the next section for tuning that one a bit too! The correct answer to why we boil is for many reasons. Sanitisation is the obvious one, though wort is effectively microbe-free after just a few seconds at 85℃. We also get volatilisation of undesirable flavour and aroma compounds such as the precursor for DMS, SMM. We want some coagulation of protein compounds, so they drop out, forming a clearer beer. Heck, if we’re making a hazy, this boil property is almost a problem! We need isomerisation of hop alpha acids to get the bitterness we need. We also tend to want some evaporation to concentrate our wort to our desired fermentation volume and strength. We also get some maillard reactions, darkening our wort, and we lower our pH to optimise fermentation.
So, again, armed with reason and knowledge of our goals, we can tweak boil length (or even not boil at all if you’re targeting a super haze positive beer) to get just what we need out of it. Sanitisation happens very swiftly, so by the time your wort is boiling, you’ve done this. Full protein coagulation is often achieved within 10 minutes of boiling, so you might be able to experiment with this to find the optimum for your typical grains. All malts have different protein levels, so it’s something to be aware of when tweaking this aspect of the boil. pH adjustment can be solved with acid additions, so is a null factor for working out our desired boil length. Ditto evaporation, as we can just calculate our target volume for less evaporation if we’re shortening the boil.
The tricky variables - SMM volatilisation and wort flavour complexity via the maillard reaction. Again, understanding what we want is key. SMM has a “half life” of around 37 minutes at boiling, though this can be affected by wort density and composition. That means that 50% of SMM will be gone after 37 minutes of boiling. You’ve probably heard “boil longer to reduce DMS in your beer if you’re using Pilsner malt”. Well, that’s true, but there’s a “but”. SMM potential decreases with kilning - the darker the malt, the less SMM there is, so the less potential for DMS there will be. If you’re only using a little Pilsner or super-pale base malt in your beer, then I wouldn’t weight this factor too much. Even if you’re using a larger amount, or it’s 100% of your grist, a 50% reduction may be more than enough to drop the DMS in the final beer well under the human sensory perception threshold. As always, the only way is to try it and see! Why waste so much time to achieve a tiny reduction in something that doesn’t even show up to any noticeable level in the final beer?
So there’s a bunch of reasons to shorten your boil. But what about reasons to increase it? Mr. Maillard is on the phone and would like a word. The Maillard reaction is a non-enzymatic browning reaction that occurs between reducing sugars (like those in malt) and amino acids (from proteins) in the presence of heat to produce melanoidins. Melanoidins give a depth of colour, complexity of flavour via nuttiness, caramel, toasted bread, and other notes, and even a fuller mouthfeel. Making a super clean hoppy NZ pilsner? You probably don’t want this. Making a full, complex barleywine designed for aging? Oh yeah, you want this. In that latter case, you might even want something like a three hour boil (or even longer - I’ve done six hours!) to completely change the wort colour - pale to deep brown in my case - and provide massively rich and complex flavours which mature well.
Kettle Hopping
You’ll notice I left out isomerisation of hops in the above section on the boil. Well, that’s because the hop industry has given us cheat codes in so many forms now! We can add iso-alpha extract to achieve bittering to exact levels without boiling a single hop. We can also add any of the various flowable hop compounds at flame-out to simulate whirlpooling, or even the complexity of multiple boil hop additions.
But just because we can, does that mean we should? This, like all the other choices I have presented here, comes down to you, the brewer, being mindful in your understanding of what you’re doing and why. It boils down to your sensory evaluation of your finished beer. Can’t tell the difference, or can tell the difference, but it’s insignificant to you? Best of all, maybe you prefer the difference? Then you can make these intelligent, thoughtful choices about your process and potentially save time, make the process simpler, or just more fun for you.
Go forth and think… then drink!