Professor Brian Els gave a lecture on the history and process of brewing beer
By Rosemary Peters
College students are famous for finding innovative ways to cut back on expenses. Last Wednesday, beer brewer and history professor Brian Els gave a lecture on the history of beer, during which he told students several hints for brewing their own cheap, yet delicious tall boy's.
Els started to brew his own beer while he was in a fraternity in grad school in 1994. "I was cheap, broke and it seemed like a cool hobby."
According to Els, there are only four ingredients required to brew beer, but the process of brewing is still a long and intense one, despite the hundreds of years humans have spent improving the process.
"You can brew a five gallon batch of beer for $10 to $12, but it takes about six hours and you have to let it ferment," Els said.
Els informed the crowd that to brew beer, there are several steps one must follow.
The first is malting the grain. To malt grain, one must allow barley to germinate then heat it until germination stops.
Next the brewer should mill the grain by cracking it. Properly milling the grain makes it much easier to mash the grain.
When mashing the grain, one mixes together grain and hot water and allows the grain to sit for approximately one hour.
In the next step, the brewer must sparge the grain by draining and rinsing it. Sparging is followed by boiling the resulting liquid.
During the boiling process, ingredients such as hops, sugars and fruits can be added to intensify the flavor and improve the preservation.
In the final step, the liquid must be set aside in a container such as a glass bottle and allowed to ferment for about a week. Before sealing the container, yeast must be added to the mixture to ensure the fermentation process.
According to Els, brewing beer is an art and the beer doesn't always turn out tasting as one would expect, especially if brewers don't have good sanitation practices.
"Sanitation is an important part of brewing beer. Once everything is boiled, everything to come in contact with the beer from your finger to your spoon must be sanitized," Els said. "If you do this wrong, the beer will end up as a Petri-dish and you can get some really crazy flavors."
An example of one awful flavor that brewers try to avoid is diacetyl, which is a compound that tastes like canned corn.
"Making beer sounds like a lot of really hard, really fun work," freshman Steven O'Dowd said after the lecture. "When I get a house in a few years, I want to try brewing beer myself."
After describing the beer making process, Els informed the crowd that in the pre-industrial era, all of the steps in brewing were much more difficult and prone to failure without modern technology. Before 1840, most beer was therefore very different from its modern counterpart.
In the early years of beer making, many of the best brewers were actually monks living in reclusive monasteries. These monks greatly improved the brewing process and made many beer discoveries.
However, one of the main things that these monks and other brewers had problems with was fermentation. Many times the beer would go bad and this was known as "souring of the beer."
It was such an important and confusing problem that people started to blame it on the devil.
In fact, there are many church frescos depicting Satan as the entity responsible for souring the beer.
According to Els, the secret of fermentation was finally solved by Louis Pasteur in the mid-1800s.
Pasteur's research showed that the growth of microorganisms was responsible for spoiling beverages such as beer, wine and milk.
Els also informed the crowd that orange juice also ferments.
"That orange juice you opened a week ago and left in your fridge has started to ferment, which means there is some alcohol in it," Els said. "Maybe that's why your roommate always drinks a huge glass in the morning."
Previous to the discovery of pasteurization, many beer companies lost upwards of 30 percent of their beer in the production process.
Pasteur brought this waste down to approximately 10 percent.
Although the students were presented with an abundance of information about beer, this information was also given with a caveat from senior RA Shea Knecht and sophomore Tom Fuchs.
During this lecture, Knecht and Fuchs stressed the importance of safe drinking. In a joint speech on the subject, they first tackled common drinking myths.
"Some people think the more you drink, the better you feel," Fuchs said. "The truth is you feel the best at a peak of three drinks."
Knecht and Fuchs also talked about myths concerning alcohol tolerance, roofies and passing out.
They ended the discussion on drinking myths by focusing on how important it is to call RAs for help if a friend is in a trouble.
"Don't worry about the consequences," Knecht said. "Your friend's life is far more important and the first concern is taking care of that person, not getting them into trouble."
Knecht and Fuchs also talked about ways to avoid dangerous consequences of drinking such as alcohol poisoning.
The first suggestion was to make a plan for the night.
"Set limits for drinking and sexual contact," Fuchs said.
The second suggestion Knecht and Fuchs made was to pace yourself. This involves taking shots and drinks at a slower pace as well as alternating between drinking water and eating foods like bread.
A final suggestion was to avoid drinking games because as Knecht said, the participant drinks more than he or she realizes and these games generally lead to "praying to the porcelain god."
After Knecht and Fuchs finished giving their talk, Els began his presentation.
"It was a very informative and interesting presentation," O'Dowd said. "It was cool to see how beer has been a part of not only our culture, but other cultures for thousands of years."
