The Making of a Brewing Goddess

Janet Spindler figures it this way: Dr. George Fix, a science professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, who also happens to be a home brew magazine columnist and respected author (“Principles of Brewing Science,” “Analysis of Brewing Techniques”), is not unlike a brewing god. He enters his beers, known for their consistency, in home brew competitions hither and yon, and he wins over and over and over again.

If Spindler has her way, she will be known someday as a brewing goddess. Last year, Spindler entered the Novembeer Fest home brew competition in Seattle, an important regional event, and came in second in one category--strong Scottish ale--and fourth and sixth in two others. Dr. Fix, of course, won the contest’s best of show prize. But Spindler’s finish makes her swell with pride.

“This is what second place means,” she says, facing down a reporter’s blank stare while clearing away with one swipe of her mother bear-sized paw the arcana of beer tasting and competitions: “If you are in the top 10, you are rockin’.”

Spindler, like competing home brewers all over the country, currently has her eyes fixed on the Masters Championship of Amateur Brewing (MCAP) to be held in 1999 in Houston. But not everyone can compete at MCAP. First, there’s the little matter of qualifying, which keeps Spindler brewing 15-gallon batches of beer as often as she can, all to come up with the best beers she knows how to make. Her bottled lovelies will be mailed off to MCAP qualifying rounds all over the country, beer fests where they’ll compete with brews from the likes of Dr. Fix and pass beneath the noses and across the palates of rigorously trained judges. She has to win best of show in a qualifying contest to get her ticket to Houston.

Many fine home brewers don’t bother putting their beers up for judging in competition. Home brewing experts estimate that there are probably 2 million home brewers of one level of enthusiasm or another in the U.S. today. The American Homebrewers Assn., started as a division of the Assn. of Brewers 20 years ago, has 20,000 members. Since the AHA’s beginning, and especially in recent years, the world of competitive home brewing has grown tremendously. In 1990, the AHA sanctioned 45 home brew competitions. That number climbed to 196 competitions seven years later.

Spindler has been brewing beer at home for four years, taking her beers into competition for three and dreaming and planning a brew pub of her own every inch of the way. For the time being, she works nights as an emergency medical technician for an ambulance company. She was almost a firefighter. She has been a restaurant cook and a baker. And before that, she trained harness race horses.

Despite her taste for denim and the kind of big honkin’ boots favored by firefighters--despite the piercing light in her eyes that suggests here is the soul of a major-league competitor--something gentling envelops the onlooker standing near Spindler as she makes beer and pores over her notes, her calculations, her recipes.

She hails from Michigan, up near the Canadian border. “Home of Stroh’s,” she calls it, “of Carling Black Label.” She went from the local brews, and the fresh Canadian ales sold nearby, right into imports--Beck’s, St. Pauli Girl. Meanwhile, harness racing moved her all over: Michigan and California in the fall, Florida in the winter, the East Coast circuit, the Poconos (“the home of Rolling Rock,” to her).

What caught her attention in the Pacific Northwest when she arrived was the local microbrews. “I tell people I moved here for the beer,” Spindler says. “There’s nothing quite like the real thing.”

Even on the harness race circuit, Spindler didn’t give up baking. And baking, Spindler says, led her to brewing--call it a fondness for fermentation. But it was the reaction of her friends to her first batch of beer that cemented things for her. She discovered the satisfaction of having made something better than can be found in just about any commercial bottle, and she liked the sounds of her friends laughing and enjoying themselves, enjoying her beer. She lifted a glass and thought, “I made this.” And that was that.

That first batch was made with malt extract syrup, a route suggested by the basic books on home brewing. “I used ‘Dave Miller’s Homebrewing Guide’ to get started,” Spindler says. “Dave Miller is a brewing god.”

The way of least resistance is to buy a complete home brew kit from a brewing supply house (look under beer making equipment and supplies in your Yellow Pages). It should cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 and will include instructions, a five-gallon glass bottle called a carboy, an airlock, a six-gallon plastic bucket, hose and hose clamp, bottles, bottle caps, bottle capper, thermometer, brushes and a grain bag, as well as the raw materials: malt extract syrup, malt, hops, yeast and sugar. You supply the big enamel or stainless steel pot and the stove. Making beer, after all, is cooking.

“Yeast, barley, water, hops: That’s your recipe for beer,” Spindler says.

To make her first batch of beer, Spindler used a rolling pin to crush the crystal malt that came with the kit. Crystal malt isn’t the same as brewer’s malt--it won’t make beer, but it contributes sweetness and caramel-dark color. She put this in a muslin bag and placed it in a big pot of water on the stove.

Just before the water boiled, she removed the bag and added a can of brewer’s malt syrup--off the heat; the trick here is not to burn or scorch the malt. Then she brought the pot back to a boil--it’s contents were now officially a wort (pronounced “wert”), the raw material of beer--and added hops for bitterness. The wort cooked like that for one hour. In the last five minutes, Spindler added aromatic hops to the wort.

Then she mixed the wort and yeast in a large glass carboy. The wort is full of flavor and sugar drawn off the malt, and the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol. Primary fermentation lasts for a couple of days and, with all its bubbling and foaming, is quite dramatic. Complete fermentation can last from four to 10 days.

After this fermentation, the beer is put in bottles, where it will continue to ferment in the bottle--this is called “conditioning”--over the next two to three weeks, gaining both character and fizz. A sediment of dead yeast cells will fall to the bottom of the bottle over time, which is why Spindler is careful not to agitate her bottles of beer. She’s also careful to avoid pouring out the sediment when she fills a glass, holding it up to the light to admire her very own creation.

That first brew four years ago was the beginning for Spindler. It could be just about anyone’s beginning, it’s so simple. And relatively inexpensive. Should you brew five gallons of beer and decide it’s not for you, you haven’t lost a great deal, and the beer-making gear can simply be passed on to someone else.

Easier still is to take advantage of a Brew on the Premises (BOP) establishment, where there’s help on hand and all the equipment you would ever need. The cost per bottle will probably come out a little higher than the 35 to 45 cents you achieve at home, but you don’t end up investing in anything until you are certain home brewing is for you.

If beer-making does seize your soul, you might find yourself standing back one day to admire a newly assembled three-tier gravity-feed brewing system. Spindler has such a system in her backyard, against the side of her house. It took her awhile to move up to 10- and 15-gallon batches where kettles of serious size are the order of the day, and the heat source is a propane-fueled single burner that gets hot enough to melt glass, where even thinking of buying malt and other grains by the 50- and 100-pound bag suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched. It’s nothing that’s likely to happen overnight. But it can happen fast.

*

By her third batch of beer, Spindler had forever left behind the ready-made malt extract beginners use. This isn’t to say you can’t make perfectly decent beer from malt extract syrup and recipe kits, only that if you do, you leave the final flavor of the beer up to someone else, as you do when you simply buy your beer.

Home brewing is all about arriving at what you personally think of as the perfect-tasting porter, ale, stout or even lager (which has its own peculiar demands).

When Spindler makes beer, she starts with a list of ingredients and heads for Seattle’s Pike Place Market, home of Liberty Malt Supply Co., which was established at the time of Prohibition in 1921.

Brewing beer at home had all but died out by 1921, and Prohibition may well have saved the basic skills (skills shared with great enthusiasm by such illustrious American home brewers as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson).

The Industrial Revolution had changed the face of beer making in much the same way it changed everything else, depersonalizing the process, taking out the individual.

Of course, home brewing as we know it today is a relatively recent development. Travelers who had enjoyed drinking the full-flavored beers of Europe realized that they would have to brew their own at home, or hope that a market for a wide range of imported beers would develop.

The market did develop, but not without an awful lot of trial and error at home that led to how-to books on home brewing and eventually to the rise of microbreweries and brew pubs.

Early use of the Internet played a significant role in the sharing of very basic information. Home brewing is where laboratory science, cooking, hobbyist enthusiasm, the need to tinker, and a basic Dionysian urge toward pleasure all converge.

If that sounds an awful lot like a guy thing--well, it tends to be so. Spindler isn’t the only woman brewing beer and entering competitions, but she is a bit of the duck out of water. “Many of the women I see at beer competitions,” she says, “are attached to spousal units. You get the feeling that it’s either enjoy brewing beer or stay home alone.”

Spindler’s gravity-feed brewing system consists of three enormous stainless steel tanks (they can hold maybe 20 gallons of liquid) descending as though on stairs from a height of about 8 feet. Propane burners are mounted under each tank.

The beauty of the gravity-feed system comes in the making of the beer: Add water up high; drain off finished wort down low. Spindler pours 15 gallons of spring water into the highest tank, then fires up the burner. She brings the water up to 172 degrees. A thermometer is mounted in the side of each tank.

She also adds gypsum to the water to harden it. It takes hard water to make European-style ales, and what Spindler likes to make best is strong Scottish ale.

By opening a spigot jutting at the base of the highest tank, Spindler can measure off 10 gallons of hot water into the second tank, the mash tun. The temperature drops to 153 degrees, and she adds about 30 pounds of different malts--pale malt, crystal malt, roasted barley, flaked barley, peated malt--that will poach like that for two hours.

“The mash time isn’t specific,” Spindler says, tapping the face of the thermometer to assure herself of a true reading. “In two hours, you get a better yield from your grain, stronger stuff. Temperature, though, is important. Temperature variations affect the sugars, which affect flavor characteristics. Brewing a good beer is pretty easy. Doing it consistently, now, that’s hard to do.”

To help keep the temperature balanced within a tight range, Spindler wraps the mash tun with insulation foam. The mash tun has a stainless steel false bottom painstakingly drilled with hundreds of holes to make an industrial-size sieve.

A second spigot is mounted beneath this sieve. When Spindler opens the tap into the third great pot, all the barley malt that has given up its flavor, sugar, proteins and color remains behind as the wort flows on.

One-and-a-half hours into the mash, Spindler has reheated the remaining five gallons of water in the first pot, the hot liquor tank, back up to 170 degrees. Brewers call treated water “liquor.”

She attaches to the hot liquor tank spigot a long piece of copper tubing that ends in the shape of a spiral as big as the surface of the spent grains in the mash tun. Holes have been punched into the tubing spiral, which hovers above the spent grains.

With the twist of the tap, a gentle shower of hot water sprays over the surface of the grains, washing the last of the sugars down into the bottom of the pot and out the spigot to join the rest of the wort--this is called “sparging.” There is no waste. The spent grains end up in a compost heap. The compost feeds the hops Spindler grows in her backyard garden.

She holds a little bag of dried hops in her hands, encouraging a closer investigation. The smell is strong, not unlike the smell of a feed store. Each individual petal of the dried hops cone is about the size of a child’s fingernail.

“Put it in your mouth,” Spindler says, waiting for the reaction. The taste is immediate, and then suddenly grows beyond all proportion to its size into a bitter, familiar flavor. “Guess what?” Spindler says with a chuckle. “Hops tastes like beer.”

*

During the boiling of the wort, the hops are added. It’s a 90-minute boil, and in that time the wort sterilizes, any enzymes remaining in the wort are destroyed, undesirable aromatic components evaporated, bittering and aromatic elements of the hops extracted, and the wort clarified by coagulating proteins and tannins.

In the final stages, the wort rapidly cools and is strained into a carboy, where the yeast is added, or “pitched.” Spindler collects a sample of the wort before “pitching,” and keeps it in the refrigerator. She will use this two weeks later when the beer has passed through its fermentation cycle, and goes into bottles and a 7 1/2-gallon soda pop keg. By adding a little sweet wort, she encourages the remaining yeast to activate and “condition” the beer. It’s natural carbonation. It’s all the CO2 the beer will ever see.

“A lot of people just use sugar there at the end,” Spindler says. “But this gives me those tiny Don Ho bubbles and a nice head on my beer.

“My brewing system is my school,” Spindler says. “This is where I work on my degree.” Working on her “degree” also means hanging out with fellow brewers while they work their magic in brew pubs and microbreweries; it means course work on brewing through the American Brewers Guild (completing the Craft Brewers Apprenticeship program is one of her goals).

But mostly, it means brewing good beer, refining the system, taking careful notes, being self-critical, figuring out how to do it better next time, talking to other home brewers, keeping an eye on what’s new on the Net, drinking beer with friends, entering her beers in competitions and learning from the judges’ comments.

One judge has scrawled an enthusiastic, “Janet brews strong beer,” at the bottom of his score sheet. Spindler likes that. “Strong ales get better with age,” she says. “I’ve got some porter that’s over a year old. And I’m holding some barley wine that’s over a year. Age isn’t the issue--unless a beer is too young. The fresh beer thing? That’s for that lite crap, made with those sugars and junk. But frankly, you brew good beer you don’t have a lot of trouble getting rid of it. Good beer attracts friends.”

She proves a point not long after at a potluck gathering in a friend’s backyard.

“Where’s Janet,” people keep asking, milling around the backyard and losing interest in the badminton championship that has occupied the guests to this point. The majority of the potluck food has been picked through, and people are restless. “Where’s Janet? She coming?” they ask. “She bringing beer again this year?”

*

When she does arrive, it’s with a keg on one shoulder and the hose attachments in the other hand. She’s wearing a smile stretched from left to right. She’s wearing black pegged pants with a big old belt buckle. She’s wearing a tight black T-shirt beneath an open white Oxford cloth dress shirt. She’s wearing black and white wingtips with thick, thick Vibram soles. A beer delivery has never looked so good, so tough.

A fellow brewer in from Idaho for the annual party asks, “S’up, Janet? You bring your strong Scotch again?” Spindler nods.

“It’s good, girl,” they say. “It’s strong.”

“This,” Spindler says, holding a glass of her own beer, smiling and nodding to friends, imagining the walls of her own brew pub, “is why you brew beer.”