Backyard Brew

When life hands you lemons, the saying goes, you make lemonade. And when life hands you hops and barley, well … it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what to do with those.

That’s the situation Jim Kershner found himself in this summer, with a back 40 full of barley (well, 450 square feet, anyway) and a trellis covered with fresh Centennial hops.

How hard could it be, we figured, to brew some backyard beer?

We fancied ourselves a bit like the Brew Dogs, those adventurous Scotsmen of cable TV fame – but without the adorable accents, not to mention any shred of brewing knowledge or ability.

Call us the Brew Pups. Like the typical puppy, we were full of enthusiasm, but rather prone to accidents.

The barley

Jim had planted some barley as a cover crop to give a patch of his garden some rest.

Ideally, you want a special, low-protein type of barley for brewing. We weren’t quite sure what we had, since the bag from the garden store was labeled VNS – “variety not specified” – and the small print said, “For use as pet feed.”

Pedigree aside, it looked like perfectly good two-row barley by August, with rows of grain gleaming golden in the sun. We grabbed a sickle and, once we got the hang of wielding it without slicing off any appendages, took turns reaping.

Then came the threshing – separating the kernels from the stalks and the chaff. This turned out to be the most maddening part of the whole process and gave us a new appreciation for Middle Age serfs.

We tried banging sheaves against the inside of a trash can. We tried spreading them out on a tarp and stomping on them. We spent one whole afternoon stripping kernels off by hand. “I’ve never felt more in touch with my beer, literally,” Jim offered.

The most effective method turned out to be putting the sheaves into a pillow case and whacking it with a Wiffle bat – an implement unavailable to the average serf.

Next came the winnowing – removing the remaining bits of chaff and stalk – which we accomplished by pouring the grain from pan to pan, in front of a blowing fan. After all of this work, we had 16 pounds of grain (including junk we were too lazy to pick out), which was plenty to make a 5-gallon batch of beer.

Then it was decision time: To malt, or not to malt? Malting the barley – steeping it in water, partially germinating it, then kilning it – prepares the starches inside for conversion into sugars, a key step in the beer-making process. But it’s tricky to accomplish, particularly without professional temperature control. Few home brewers even attempt it.

Jim decided to malt 5 pounds to start, equipped with an aquarium aerator (to keep the steeping barley from drowning) and plenty of determination. Despite his best efforts, some of the grain didn’t germinate at all, while some sprouted too much.

We kilned our erratic results in a food dehydrator, being careful not to fry what few enzymes might have developed, left the remaining barley unmalted, and hoped for the best.

The hops

With our barley a bit wanting, we realized the hops would have to be the star of the show.

They were ready for the spotlight. Most of Jim’s bines (the term for hop vines) were in their third year, the beginning of prime hop-producing time. And Centennials, with their floral, spicy, slightly citrusy aromas and flavors, are found in some of the best beers around.

Then disaster struck: An intense late summer windstorm brought down the bines. Only one bine snapped completely; the other eight were, fortunately, still intact. Jim and his wife, Carol, rescued the fallen bines and tied them to a clothesline.

Once the hops were properly papery and dry, with lots of yellow lupulin inside – which contains the resins and oils that give beer its zing – it was time to harvest. At least the horizontal hops were easy to pick, once we lowered the bines to lawn chair level so we could work sitting down (and imbibe a bit).

Still, Jim said, “If everybody had to do this to make a batch of beer, nobody would drink any.”

We ended up with 40 ounces of hops, a hefty amount for our purposes, which also went into the dehydrator to dry. Now we had our raw ingredients, but we needed a little polish.

Brew day

After all the calamities we’d suffered so far, we realized we’d better turn to some people who knew what they were doing when it came to actually brewing the beer.

“I can make it turn out good,” assured Peter McArthur, owner of Nu Home Brew in Spokane Valley, who graciously offered his brewing system, expertise and time.

We met with Peter and his cohort, Cameron Johnson, for a long brew day. Since we were working with mostly raw grain, we would be doing what’s known as a cereal mash, in which the mash – the initial steeping of grain in hot water, which activates enzymes to produce fermentable sugars – is brought to various temperatures and allowed to rest in between, to break down the grain structure.

To raise the temperature each time, we pulled off some of the mash, boiled it in a separate pot, then added it back – a process called decoction, which also would contribute color and flavor from the grain caramelizing as it boiled.

If we wanted to play it safe, we would have tossed in some commercially malted barley, to make sure there was enough enzyme action. Instead, we decided to stay pure with all homegrown grains, though we did add some supplemental enzymes when a test showed we were running low.

Then we brought the resulting liquid (called wort) to a boil for an hour and added the dried hops, mostly toward the end, for maximum aroma with minimal bitterness. “We don’t want a sharp bitterness, we want smooth,” Cameron said.

Some nine hours after we started, we pitched yeast into the cooled wort and waited for it to work its magic. Readings indicated we would end up with a lighter beer, around 4 percent alcohol by volume.

Jim returned a week or so later to add even more hops, fresh from the bines, to our budding beer. With all those hops, how could we possibly go wrong?

The unveiling

Once our pride and joy had finished fermenting, we couldn’t wait to taste the results. We eagerly tapped the tall, narrow Corney keg and poured a pair of pints.

The pungent hop aroma was all we had hoped for. Then we took a sip. Jim immediately did a spot-on imitation of “bitter beer face” from those old commercials.

“It tastes somewhat recognizable as beer,” he finally managed to muster.

Pleasant hop character aside, there was a fair amount of astringency in the finish. And the cloudy color could best be described as dishwater blond.

Undaunted, we proceeded with plans to share our bounty – which Jim dubbed “Thrashing and Flailing” – with a few friends in his backyard, where it all began. After touring the scene of the crime, we filled their glasses and anxiously awaited the reaction.

Well, it could have been worse. The astringency lessened as the beer warmed some and lost a little carbonation, and it also cleared up nicely.

“It has an exceptional aroma – it really smells good,” one of our guests offered.

“If I could have Budweiser, Miller, PBR or Coors, I would drink this instead,” came the somewhat fainter praise from another.

One taster referred to the flavor as “green” – no real surprise, given the unmalted grain and all the hops we crammed in there.

Only a couple of people poured it out (that we spotted, anyway), though the accompanying growlers of commercially brewed beer vanished faster. And the bread and pretzel bites we baked using leftover brewing grains were well-received.

In a later post-mortem, Peter said both the cloudiness and the sharper flavors likely came from the hops – particularly the final, fresh ones – with carbonation accentuating the astringency. Cameron compared the rawer malt character to Raisin Bran cereal.

“I’ve tasted beers brewed with quality ingredients that were a lot less drinkable,” he said.

We decided to declare victory and retreat. We learned that growing, threshing, flailing, winnowing and malting are best left to professionals who own combines and kilns.

We also came away with a new appreciation for all of those farmers and brewers, over thousands of years, who acquired the patience and knowledge to turn golden stalks of grass into a beautiful, sparkling beverage.

Now, about those grapes growing in Jim’s yard …