How to Brew Beer: Growing Barley, Making Beer and Moonshine

Barley

And so to grow the good barley — the basis of it all. Barley
is traditionally grown after the root break, and in the
days of High Farming after roots had been fed off to folded
sheep, and the latter had trodden the ground and enriched
it with their manure. On the light lands of Norfolk the
effect of sheep used thus was termed the ‘Golden Hoof’. The
very finest malting barley, however, is that grown after
another white straw crop, when the ground is not too rich
in nitrogen, and the barley therefore richer in starch and
not so rich in protein, for it is the starch content that
makes the beer. Barley will grow well on much lighter land
than wheat demands, and in wetter climates. It is much
faster growing than wheat and I have seen barley sown in
May in England give a good crop. You can, in England, grow
winter, barley in the same way as winter wheat; but most
barley is spring-sown: usually in February or March. The
preparation of the land is much the same as for wheat,
except that the tilth should be much finer and the last
ploughing not too deep: four inches is enough. If you drill
it you need two to three bushels to the acre (one to one
and a half hundredweight); if you broadcast it about a
bushel more. Very often you will probably undersow the
barley with ‘seeds’ (grass and clover seed) for a
subsequent ley. After sowing it must be harrowed of course,
and rolling helps. If the land is very rich in nitrogen a
dressing of phosphate and potash will counterbalance this,
make for earlier ripening, and give a better ‘malting
sample’. If the land is poor add to this a hundredweight to
the acre of nitrogen, if you can afford it and have no
ideological objections. But the organic farmer will say to
this: well, the land shouldn’t be poor.

Harvesting can be just the same as for wheat in every
respect. For a malting sample do not harvest until the
grain is dead ripe — the ears all falling over. The
traditional way to harvest fine barley was to cut it with a
scythe and not tie it, but ‘make’ it like hay. That is rake
it up into swatches, turn it by rake or pitchfork until
both straw and grain are bone dry, then cock it like hay,
cart it to the stack and stack it, and thresh it out in the
winter when there is nothing else to do. I think for the
smallholder this is a very good way of harvesting barley.

A word here about the ‘barley mow’. There is many a pub up
and down the land of England of that name, and very often
the landlord, even, does not know what it means. In the
wetter parts of the country today, and at one time all over
the country, much corn was put into ‘mows’ after it had
stood for a week or two drying in the stook. We harvest our
barley and oats in this manner in Pembrokeshire now. As
soon as you get a dry spell, after the corn has been
stooked for long enough to turn the grass that clings to
the roots of the sheaves into hay, you stack the sheaves in
the field in little stacks which are known as ‘mows’. You
do it like this: make a circle of sheaves standing upright
and leaning against each other. The diameter of the circle
should be fixed by the length of the sheaves, but after you
have made one mow you will see how big the circle should
be. If the sheaves have been tied by a binder it takes
about fifty of the little sheaves to make the circle. For
stability the outer rings of the circle should lean inwards
(of course). On top, in the middle, lay a ring of sheaves
ears together in the middle and butts outward. Secure each
sheaf to the next by grabbing a handful of its straw and
stuffing it under the string, or band, of its neighbour.
You are left with a ring of sheaves each one tied securely
to the next. Place another ring on top of this one, but
bigger, also secured in the same way. Work, in fact, in a
spiral. Arrange it so that the outer sheaves are lying on a
steep slant because the middle of the heap is much higher
than the outside. The reason for this is of course to shed
the rain. Then continue your spiral upwards, reducing your
diameter until you come to a point. This point will consist
of say five sheaves with their ears blowing up in the air.
The whole mass will be tied together sheaf to sheaf and
completely rainproof, and yet the wind can get through it.
When you have got your corn in the mow you can heave along
sigh of relief, because you need have no further anxiety
about it. You can leave it there nearly until Christmas if
you want to, but probably before the terrible gales of
January and February set in you should have carted it away
to the rick or the barn. The mow is very weatherproof but
not quite gale-proof as the proper corn-rick is.

Threshing, winnowing and all the rest of it are the same as
for wheat. For feeding, barley can be ground, in which case
it is unsurpassed pig food, or cattle-fattening food. It
should not be fed to horses as it is too ‘heating’, and fed
only in moderation to sheep. If you haven’t got a mill it
is just as good to soak your barley: dump it in water for
at least twenty-four hours. It then makes a most excellent
stock feed: quite as good as barley meal.

Beer

Barley meal can be baked into bread, and in fact used to be
extensively in the western parts of Britain where barley is
easier to grow than wheat. Never having tasted it I cannot
comment on it, but folk-lore gives it a pretty bad name:

I’ll eat no more of your barley bread
Nor drink no more of
your water,
I’ll sleep no more in your flea-ridden bed
Nor
court your pudding-faced daughter!

sang the ‘living-in’
farm hand to his parsimonious master. Mixed with wheat
flour it is said to be not so bad. The fact is that the
barley grain differs from the grain of the wheat in that
the protein of barley is soluble in water while that of
wheat (gluten) is not. It is the insoluble gluten of wheat
that makes the dough ‘rise’: in other words entraps the
carbon dioxide given off by the yeast.

But barley has, thank God, one noble use to which it can be
put, and that is the making of beer.

Malting

Alcohol is made by permitting the yeast organism to feed
upon sugar, whereupon it excretes carbon dioxide and
alcohol. The yeast needs more than just sugar for its life,
just as we, we are told, cannot live by bread alone. Now
the grain of the barley is mostly starch, but before the
barley can grow this starch must be turned by chemicals
called enzymes into sugar. The malster and brewer take the
starch of barley, turn it into sugar, and then ‘ferment’
this sugar (as eating it with yeast is called) into
alcohol. The way the malster turns the starch into sugar is
simply by encouraging the grain to grow. This he does by
keeping it wet and warm. When it has grown to the optimum
stage, i.e., when the enzymes have already converted most
of the starch into sugar and are ready to convert the rest
but before the sugar has been turned into plant tissue, he
stops the process of growing by roasting the grain. He then
has a grain that looks very like an ordinary grain of
barley but which is in fact composed more of sugar
(maltose, which is a particular form of sugar) than of
starch. This grain is called malt. He cracks the malt, so
as to make the sugar available.

In practice what you do is dump your barley into warm water
and soak it for four days. Drain the water off and keep the
wet grain on a floor at between 63 degrees Fahrenheit to 86 degrees Fahrenheit
(17 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius), turning it from time to time to
keep it at the right temperature. Turning cools it. Keep it
moist, occasionally sprinkling it with warm water. After
about ten days of this the acrospire as the shoot of the
grain is called (the shoot which intends to grow up into
the air-not the root), should be about two thirds of the
length of the grain. The acrospire grows under the skin of
the grain, but you can see it easily. When this has
happened you must ‘kill’ the malt, and commercially this is
done in a kiln. With small quantities you can more easily
do it in the oven. If you want to brew a lager or fairly
pale ale keep the temperature of your oven down to under
120 degrees Fahrenheit (about 50 degrees Celsius). When the grain is quite dry,
and brittle between the teeth, raise the temperature a
little for a quarter of an hour but to no more than
140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) whatever you do or you will ‘kill’
not only the malt but also the subtle enzymes within it
which are going to go on converting more of your starch
into sugar. If you want to brew a dark beer you can roast
the malt until it is brown, but I would advise against
this. If you must have a dark beer burn a bit of sugar and
put it in your beer: it will do no harm if it does no good.

If you are malting more than a bushel or two the oven will
be too laborious, and you will need to make a kiln. This
can be quite simply a perforated iron plate (the
perforations being too small to let the grain drop through)
placed over a fire. A coke fire is the best, and the malt
must be turned continuously with a shovel while it is being
kilned. Great care is needed to dry it properly without
overheating it, and there is nothing, for this, to take the
place of Old Mother Common Sense. You must keep looking of
the grain, and biting.. an occasional one, and decide for
yourself when the grain has that brittleness of complete
dryness, and wholeness roasted malty smell of good malt,
and then stop. Of course if you didn’t ‘kill’ the malt it
would go on growing and waste all its sweetness in growth
and be no good at all. Above all kind gently. Never get it
too hot: never above 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a commercial maltings (which the malting activity of a
large community will more- closely resemble) this is the
sequence:

1. Steep the barley for 60 hours or more: up to four days.

2. Drain and put on the malting floor in a ‘couch’. This is
a high steep-sided heap.

3. Leave for 12 hours if it heats quickly — 48 if it heats
slowly. The grain should heat to a pleasantly warm
temperature when you shove your hand in.

4. As soon as the barley has ‘chitted’ (that means when the
root has just burst out of the skin) break the couch. That
is shovel the barley out into a flat layer about five
inches deep.

5. Now comes the flooring. You must watch the barley
continually to see that it keeps warm enough but does not
get too hot. It heats spontaneously. When it gets too cold
pile it up in a thicker layer. When too licit spread it out
thinner. Use a wooden shovel and wooden rakes and work
barefoot among it so as not to crack the grains. ‘Freshen’
occasionally by sprinkling with water. The temperature must
stay between 60 degrees and 62 degrees Fahrenheit (about 16 degrees Celsius).

6. After about ten days (i.e., when the acrospire is two
thirds the length of the grain) couch it again for twelve
hours, and hope to get it up to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius). The
rise in temperature is, of course, spontaneous. You now
have ‘green malt’.

7. Kiln the green malt as described above: not above
140 degrees Fahrenheit.

You store your malt in the whole grain form, but before you
use it you must crack it. This you can do with any
mechanical device from a rolling pin to a cracking mill. A
coffee grinder will do. Do not grind it to powder though
— just crack it.

Making Your Homemade Beer

This is the principle of the operation:

Put your malt into a tun, mash-tub, or kive or whatever
they call it down your way — a big open-topped barrel (many
poor people nowadays have to make do with plastic dustbins)
and mix it into a mash with water that has been boiled and
cooled to about 150 degrees to 155 degrees Fahrenheit (66 degrees to 68 degrees
Celsius). Old people say you can tell the temperature by looking
into your copper — and when the water has cooled enough so
that you can see your face reflected in the water it will
do (but I prefer a thermometer). Mix it up into a thick
mash, such as you might feed to the pigs. Cover it over and
leave it all night. In the morning run the liquor (called
wort in England; spree in Wales) out of the bottom of the
kive, at the same time sparging — that is sprinkling more
boiling water on top of the drying mash. This sparging
water can be boiling — it doesn’t matter now. Before it did
matter — boiling water would have killed the enzymes — that’s
why you had to be able to see your face in it. Now the
enzymes have done their work.

When you have as much wort as you think you ought to have
from the quantity you used of malt (we will deal with this
later) stop sparging and let the mash drain dry.

Put your wort back in the copper and boil it together with
as much hops as you think you need wrapped up in a cloth.
You should strain the wort into the copper through a
muslin, for any bits that get in will stick to the bottom
of the copper and be hell to get off, besides tainting the
beer. If you wish to add sugar to give extra strength
(cheating really) now is the time to do it. Boil for an
hour.

Put the wort back into your kive (or another vessel if you
have one) for fermentation. Now the faster it cools the
better.

In the old days people used to run it into large shallow
pans to cool it quickly. Modern breweries use
refrigeration. We just let it cool by itself, which is all
right in the winter but I think a bit risky in the summer.
It is during this cooling process that the wort may be
attacked by enemy organisms which will beat your yeast and
turn it nasty. I am making, this very day, a copper ‘worm’:
a spiral of copper tubing which I intend to lower into my
wort and run cold water through, like the ‘in-churn
coolers’ dairy farmers used to use. But, up to now we have
been brewing for six years and have only had one bad brew.
But still, one is too many: it must be cooled quickly.

While the wort is cooling you should be breeding your
yeast. You do this by taking some of the hot wort (a
jug-full), cooling it very quickly by standing it in cold
water; dropping in a handful of yeast, and letting it stand
in the warm. By the time the main body of wort has cooled
to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (or about blood heat — we use common sense not
thermometers) dump your jug-full of breeding yeast in it.

To simplify these instructions I will describe exactly what
we do to make from eight to ten gallons of beer.

1. In the evening, before we go to bed, we boil ten gallons
of water in a ten-gallon electric copper. We used to use an
old-fashioned copper heated with a stick fire and it was a
darned sight quicker. Now we haven’t got one, or we would
use it again.

2. While the water is boiling I make a strainer for the
kive. Our kive is a big open-topped tub with a hole in the
side near the bottom in which fits a cock. A cock in this
context is a wooden tap, or spigot. Obviously there has to
be a strainer to let the wort run out of the cock without
letting the mash get in and bung it up. The way we make the
strainer is this. We cut a bunch of gorse, tie a string
round it, put it inside the kive, poke the loose end of the
string through the cock-hole and — holding the string tight
outside — drive the cock in with a mallet. The pressure of
the cock then holds the string tight and the bundle of gorse
against the inner end of the cock. As this straining is
very important I often put a layer of gorse all over the
bottom of the kive and lay a muslin over this also.

A better way of doing this straining is not to have a cock
at all, but drill a hole in the middle of the bottom of
your kive. Push a long stick down from the top so that the
end of it goes in this hole and bungs it up. Now, if you
pull the ash stick out you will open the hole. But push the
ash stick in, put a layer of gorse around it on the bottom
of the kive, put a layer of clean straw on top of the
gorse, and lower a big flat stone with a hole in the middle
over the ash stick so that it rests on the straw, and
compresses it, and turns it into a first-class strainer.

3. We let the water boil, and then let it cool until it is
15O degrees Fahrenheit, or until we can see our face reflected in the
water in the copper. We then mix the water and one bushel
of cracked malt into the kive, making sure that the malt is
thoroughly wet right through.

4. We go to bed.

5. We get up and start draining the wort as the liquid is
now called into buckets (traditionally the vessel that you
drain into should be wood and is called an underbuck). In
our case we open the cock to do this; in the case of the
ash stick users they loosen the ash stick — and of course the
kive is held up on something so they can get their
underbuck underneath it.

6. While this is happening we pour kettle after kettle of
boiling water on top of the malt (this is what is called
sparging). We go on doing this until ten gallons of wort
have drained out. The original ten gallons of water we put
in has been reduced somewhat by natural causes.

7. We put the ten gallons of wort in the copper again, put
a pound of hops in a pillowcase, and boil for an hour. If
we wish to cheat and use sugar we stir it in at this
juncture — either six pounds of sugar or, as we always do
nowadays, half a 14 pound tin of malt extract, which is
simply maltose, or sugar of malt. Last time I used a whole
tin of malt extract and made 20 gallons of beer with a
bushel and a quarter of malt and the extract.

8. We transfer the boiling wort back to the kive which by
now we have cleaned out. Now what we ought to do is to have
another fermenting vat (a plastic dustbin would do) and put
it in this, and then we would be able to make ‘small beer’
of the mash in the kive. Not having a spare kive however we
just have to throw the mash out and wash the kive and use
it again.

9. We take a jug-full of the wort and cool it by standing
it in cold water.

10. When it is blood heat we plop some yeast into
it — generally yeast which we have borrowed from a neighbour
who brewed beer recently. Some neighbour will send a child
to us for yeast in due course, for his beer, and thus the
neighbourhood is knit together, in a friendly mesh of
yeast-borrowing, and the strain of living yeast with which
we brew our beer may go back, in ancestry, to the brewers
of Caractacus — who knows?

11. When the main body of wort has cooled to blood heat we
pour the jug of foaming yeasted wort into it — with a prayer.
We cover it well with blankets to keep vinegar flies out.
The generation of carbon dioxide inside the kive now is
such that, so long as we keep the blankets over it, no
vinegar fly could live.

12. Now all we have to do is to keep our hands off it. And
here I might say that in our part of Pembrokeshire — the
‘Home Brew Belt’ — we farmers cannot keep our hands off it for
very long. I have known us to be at it like dogs before the
yeast has been in twelve hours. This practice is, of
course, barbarous, and the stuff is far better left alone.
It does not, however, as the uninitiated always suppose it
does, make you ill.

We skim the floating yeast off after three days. If you
leave it another day it will sink, which is bad. It is this
floating yeast which our neighbours will send for to make
their beer in due course. Kept cool (many people around
here keep it in a screw-topped bottle in a stream) it will
keep for a month or more.

After eight days we rack the beer (pour it) into a
nine-gallon barrel, and if we can keep it bunged up for a
month or two it is absolutely superb. If we get eight
gallons from a bushel of malt it is very strong indeed.
Twelve gallons, which many people make, is strong enough.
The stronger it is the better it will keep: eight gallons
to a bushel beer would keep for a year easily. It should
not be golloped down by the pint like pub beer — it is far
too good for that. To people not used to it it is
dangerous: in spite of all warnings they are inclined to
drink too much. For such people — water it, they won’t know
the difference. Water it for the harvest field too, or you
won’t get much harvesting done.

Small Beer

Now to make small beer (which we have never done but will
do) you pour say another ten gallons of boiling. water (yes
— you don’t have to wait this time until you can see your
face in it) on to the mash after you have taken your first
lot of wort out of it, let it stand until you have finished
boiling your first lot of wort, then run it off and boil it
in the copper like the first wort with hops, put it back
into the cleaned-out kive and ferment it with yeast in the
usual way. It is said to be an excellent nourishing and
slightly alcoholic drink (about the strength of pub beer),
but, like pub beer, it won’t keep long. It is good for the
harvest field.

The mash, after you have used it, is very good stock food,
and you can feed it to any animals you feel particularly
kindly disposed towards.

Vinegar

This is beer, cider or wine which has been exposed to air.
It is attacked by Aceto bacter, an organism which converts
alcohol into acetic acid, thus: C₂H₅.OH+O₂=CH₃.CH₃.COOH+H₂O.

The traditional way to make malt vinegar is to sprinkle
beer on to the top of a big open funnel which is filled
with birch twigs. The birch twigs have previously been
impregnated with vinegar. The beer runs through the birch
twigs and picks up the Aceto bacter in the presence of air
and turns to vinegar. Strong vinegar contains 6.2 percent
acetic acid and for pickling it must not be less than 5
percent. You will know if it doesn’t because, exposed to
the air, it will grow mould on it. It shouldn’t. If beer or
wine ‘turns sour’, turn it to good account by turning it
into vinegar.

Distilling Alcohol

If you fill your copper with beer, float a basin on the
beer, cover the copper with a big shallow dish of either
copper or stainless steel or some clean metal (not
galvanized), allow cold water to pour into the dish and
trickle away over the lip of it, and light a fire under
your copper, you will make moonshine. The alcohol will
evaporate before the water of the beer does, it will
condense on the cold underside of the shallow dish, run
down to the lowest point of the dish, and drip off to be
caught by your floating basin. Distilling is illegal in the
realms of Her Britannic Majesty without a license, which is
very difficult to obtain.

A word about gas. If you want your beer to be gassy, like
pub beer, you must keep it in pressure-proof containers.
Screw-topped cider bottles are the usual things for this
purpose, and don’t blame me if one of them blows up and
kills somebody. Personally I don’t like your windy liquids,
and believe that the cult of making gassy beer is
deleterious. Most of the horrible liquid termed ‘home
brewed beer’ that one has been subjected to by one’s city
dwelling friends is of this nature, and generally brewed,
too, from ‘malt extract’ bought from the chemist. The
makers, nurtured on the windy chemical liquid made by the
giant brewing combines, cannot recognize beer as beer
unless it is bubbling like soda-water, and so they mess
about with their hydrometers, their dollops of sugar, their
screw-topped bottles until they end up with an inferior
imitation of bottled pub beer and it is horrible. Real
beer, such as nurtured the Englishman and the Welshman in
days of old, is a beautiful rich, slightly viscous, bitter,
completely unwindy (yes — ‘flat’) liquid, akin to the ambrosia
of the Gods.