When does the M.E.C.A club meet and some the benefits?
I’ve been doing it for so long I’ve almost forgot the why. It started ten years ago when my brother-in-law handed me a beer and said, “I made this.” And I was blown away; “You can make beer?” And I always thought you had to go to a liquor store to get it. So I asked him a couple of questions and he pointed me in, in the right direction and I found some, some kits and started putting them together and I started making really excellent tasting beers right out of the gate.
We meet in the winter, and take the summers off; we try to meet once a month. It’s just a bunch of guys who like to make beer and we all get together and make beer under the same roof, which has its advantages. A lot of your home brew clubs will brew outside of their social meetings and then they’ll all come together and taste each other’s beers and judge them that way. And we have kind of flipped that to where we all brew at the same time, and then we come back to brew again and that is when we taste the creations that we’ve all made.
And at that point in time (in 2002) is when we really started becoming a club. You know reading the various beer brewing books can only take you so far. You’ve actually got to see a rolling boil. You’ll read in the book, “Perform a rolling boil for sixty minutes or ninety minutes.” Well, until you see someone else’s rolling boil in order to calibrate what that is; I mean it, it got rid of a lot of plateaus that a lot of brewers reach when you brew on your little island and you’re just doing it all by yourself in your garage or in your kitchen. Some of the benefits to coming to a brew club are I think for the very first time guy is, or gal, is not to get all the tips and the tricks of what to do, but it’s really to see what not to do. You can just pick up on a couple quick things that might save a batch of beer from going bad is if you hang out at, at a brew day. So, I think joining a club was one of the most important things to do if you want to be a home brewer and you want to get better at the craft and learn it. You can get a lot of help from other guys.
What are some of the M.E.C.A club success stories?
We did some research and started entering competitions and really just knocking it out of the park; so we knew we were on to something. And as soon as you start with your club and you start winning some ribbons and getting some recognitions, others who have similar thoughts, similar backgrounds, they just kind of gravitate towards you; and pretty soon we had all kinds of people just wanting to come and see what MECA was all about. And we invite anybody out to our brew days. And at our last brew day we had some people who it was their first time and others it might have been their twentieth or thirtieth time. And they come out and, and learn what they can. We don’t, we don’t charge dues or have a formal membership process; it’s just participation. And we share the brewing process and recipes, and there really are no secrets. We want everybody to make the best beer that they can. We’ve sort of become a melting pot for brewers in, in central Indiana. We attract brewers who were professional brewers right now who will come out, and we attract the new guy who’s just getting started. It’s really amazing to see and I don’t know we got there, but I’m happy we’re there. It’s a lot of fun.
If there were a group like MECA when I had started, I probably wouldn’t have made nearly as many mistakes as I had made. When you first start to brew you read the books, you can only get so far, and then you’re going to run into something. And having that phone a friend, so to speak, where you can get a little help, is good. And, it helps you, hurdle the, the plateaus that I had in my brewing. I got really good pretty quick, and I kind of peaked for several years and I never did really make any advancements. And then I would figure out one trick, or one little thing that I was missing and then I would go up and hit another plateau. And it’s those plateaus that can become cumbersome, or might stop someone from wanting to try to continue to brew beer. So I would say just get out there and get a kit and try it. If I could do it, anybody can do it, quite honestly and it’s really not that hard.
What makes a good brewer?
I wouldn’t say that you have to be an engineer, or a chemist, or any profession to be a good brewer. Quite honestly I find that a lot of people who are the best brewers are good at cooking first. If you have the love of cooking, or the culinary arts and combining different ingredients together you’re going to be, probably, a pretty good brewer right off the bat. The translation from cooking to brewing is very similar. You need to have an understanding of your ingredients and how to put them together. And if you’re passionate about cooking, and you’re passionate about craft beer, get out there and get a home brew kit ‘cause you’re going to be passionate about home brewing too. That’s my favorite ingredient: passion. (Laughing.)
Can you talk about brewing and what hops will do to the beer?
Hops are very important for beer. Without the hops the beer is going to be very sweet, almost like Kool-Aid is the best translation. When you’ve soaked the grain and extracted all the sugars – you have a very sweet liquid, it’s call wort. And the balancing act as the brewer is to add hops into the wort to balance the amount of sweetness that you have. If you add more hops you’ll have a bitter beer; if you have less, add less hops you’ll have a malty or sweeter beer. So it’s very important to accurately weigh your hops in order to get the balance that the brewer intended for in the, in the described beer. Hops are a natural product and they change from year to year. So, one ounce of hops from 2008 will not give you the same bitterness from one ounce of hops from 2009; they’ll be similar, but they’ll be different. When I get them as a purchaser, they come with an alpha acid rating. And, that translates to the amount of bitterness that the hop will put into the beer. So, for example, if it has an alpha acid of ten percent this year when that goes into my formula, then I know how much bitterness that is going to put into the beer. The next year, that same variety of hops might have twelve percent alpha acid, so I would need to use less
of that hop. So beer recipes do change from year to year depending on the amount of alpha acids that are in the beer.
Need to enter competitions
I recommend anybody who wants to get better at brewing, enter competitions. I entered competitions long before we had MECA to get feedback. When you enter you beer in a competition, your beer will be scrutinized by someone who’s actually been trained to be a judge, a certified beer judge, and they will give you honest feedback, anonymous feedback because they do not know the entrants just your beer. And you can take those, those notes from the beer judge and tweak your recipes and make the beer better the next time. So, I recommend anybody starting out to enter a competition or two, get some of that feedback, and try to refine your process to make better beer.
Tell us about the home brewers equipment and experimenting with recipes.
It really does not take a lot of high tech equipment to make beer. You can make beer in almost anything; and it has been made in anything. You’ve probably heard stories about people making beer in their bathtubs (chuckle) back in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So, if you can clean it, you can brew in it. Cleaning is the number one thing to making a good beer; cleaning and sanitizing, that’s probably seventy to eighty percent of brewing. Only, only ten to twenty percent is actually recipe and process. It’s so much more about cleaning and keeping bacteria and wild organisms from infecting your beer. It’s a very simple process to extract the sugars from the grain, and add the hops, and boil it for ninety minutes. It’s waiting around for it to ferment in a nice, clean space is where it usually gets most people. I think if someone wants to get better at brewing they should not only experiment and refine their recipe, and brew the same recipe, five or six times to dial in their process, but they should experiment with ingredients as well and try different recipes. There are two paths that you could go down; I took the path of always doing a different recipe every time. Not coming back to one again for several years I would do that. Later, I got into a route where I made the same recipe seven straight times just to see if I could make it repeatable and, and each time I would only tweak one thing. I would either swap out one grain, or I would swap out one hop and try to see what the effects were on the beer. I would change the temperature a couple degrees higher or a couple degrees lower, and try to determine what effects different variations had on the beer in the process. Maybe that’s part of the secret why I’m making some great beer at this time. I think brewing is quite honestly a great marriage between my engineering degree, my engineering background, and cooking, and culinary arts, which are two things that I really enjoy, and it’s a great marriage.
Extract versus grain.
I’ve made award-winning recipes with both ingredients. You can make beers that mimic commercial examples with malt extract, and it comes in liquid malt extract which looks like a syrup, or dry malt extract which is more like a flour; or you can make the same beer with all grain. You can do it either way and it’s just, um, how much time you want to take to brew you batch, and how much control you want to have. If you do decide to go down the route of using a liquid or a dry malt extract, someone else had already mashed those grains, and there are certain things about the recipe, certain perimeters that got locked in when you do your mash. The “fermentability” some of the body and the mouth feel kind of get locked in when you’re mashing. And you have given up control of those over to the malting company that has created that product. So, if you are a controls engineer, like myself, and you want that control, that’s, that’s why I drifted into doing the all grain, the all grain recipes because I can control that part of the beer, that aspect of how the final beer will taste. But you can come very, very close with either malt extract or all grain brewing to making this same exact beer.
Is there a dream for you in the future? A brewery?
Well, I’m convinced that America was made on taxing of beer and wine and alcohol (laughing.) There isn’t a road or a bridge or anything that was built without taxing of alcohol. It’s the sin tax. Let’s tax the people who like beer. But, it’s a highly regulated industry. And there, there are a lot of regulations that you must follow and there are hoops that one must go through to become a craft brewer. And right now I’m navigating those. There’s paperwork with the United States government, there’s paperwork with the Indiana State government; there’s paperwork with the local government; zoning requirements. It’s a big labyrinth of paperwork. If I had enjoyed making pies as much as I do beer I could be selling them tomorrow, but you know, it’s beer. So, that’s just what I’ve got to do if I want to get it out there.
Why are beer festivals important for you?
At this stage I enjoy the beer festivals because I get to do what I called commercial calibration. I get to go around and I get to try what other brewers in the state are creating. And it gives me ideas. You can taste something in this beer, or taste a spice if someone has a spiced beer, or a hop if there’s a new hop out. And your mind just explodes with different ways you could use these new ingredients and combine them into your own beers. So festivals are really all about commercial calibration for me right now and seeing what’s out there and seeing how far brewers are willing to take it. And, craft brewers are taking brewing to a higher level every year. So, it’s exciting to go to festivals and try new beers and see what the latest things are that they’re creating.
Ways to brew
There, there’s two ways to brew a beer. There is your way, and then there is a way that meets a technical guideline or a standard. If you were to enter your beer into a competition you would want to follow a guideline. And, they’re published at the BJCP.org; that’s the Beer Judge Certification Program. And you can read every style of beer out there from porter, to stout, to pale ale, to IPA. And if you were to brew a beer, you would want to taste your beer, match it up to the guideline, and then enter it in, in the right category. If you were to brew beer for your taste, you would throw those guidelines out the window, and just make whatever you want to come up with. And it just depends as a brewer how you want to make a beer. I will say though, even though you throw the guidelines out the window, and just create any kind of beer that, you know, just start throwing in some excellent grains, and, and come up with a great beer, it will probably match up to one of the beers that is already in the style guidelines.
There are very few beers out there that haven’t already been brewed or created. I tend to wing it. I just love to wing it. And nothing excites me more than what I call the Willie Nillie addition. And that’s when you’ve got this great recipe right in front of you and you’ve spent days or months working on it. And you’re in your brew day, and it comes time to add some ingredients, and then at the last second you think, “Oh, this would be good in there. I’ll throw it in.” And it’s the Willie Nillie addition. And then you go back obviously and record it later. But it’s those last minute changes that excite me. And I’m doing that more than I care to know (laughing). But it happens; it, it’s fun. It’s, and it’s the unknown, you know. It’s like when you, ah, when you’re making a pot of chili. You, you taste it at the end, and then you’ll add a little more, you know, add a little more black pepper, or a little more chili powder, or a little more garlic, or oregano, whatever you want to add in there, you’ll add a little more. Those are transferable skills to brewing, and you can add in a little more or a little less of this and, and come up with a totally unique beer; and that’s what excites me.
Bill’s last thought
I like brewing craft beer because…. it’s fun to turn water into beer.
