I had the pleasure of working with dietetic intern Lauren for a few weeks in April. Lauren’s fun hobby is beer brewing at home! We both chatted about our love for good quality dark beer and it’s health benefits. Here is Lauren’s guest post on her latest home brewed batch. (p.s. Oldways cookbook winner announced at the end of this post!)
Warm weather is HERE! Which means all I want to do is sit in my backyard with some friends in the sun, play some volleyball, eat hot dogs and hamburgers, and drink an ice cold brewski. As do a likely 20 million other Americans. But this summer they’ll be particularly enjoyable because of some great new information I’ve learned on the health benefits of beer.
Beer has been shown to lower the risk of kidney stones and prevent bone disease. Pretty cool and fairly unexpected, says I. But what’s even cooler and more unexpected is that beer has a surprisingly good chunk of fiber in each drink. Certain beers have more than others, specifically darker beers, which have on average 1-2g of soluble fiber in each 12-oz serving. Given a two-drink night, that’s almost 20% of your daily fiber recs!
Here’s some tips on how to manipulate your health benefits while enjoying a frothy cold pale ale:
- The more malt in the brew, the more B-vitamins. (This is that sweet, roasted taste in a beer.)
- The more hops, the more phytochemicals. (Hops is that bitterness in a beer.)
- The more sugar in the wort, the more alcohol.
- “Light beers” are brewed either to be lower in alcohol, carbohydrates or both.
- Similarly, “low-carb” beers are typically brewed to remove the carbohydrates.
- Darker beers may have more fiber.
Beer isn’t just the binge drink at college parties anymore (although it surely is still that). Craft beers, which are self-explanatory in that they are beers crafted for taste and content much like classy wines, are taking over the healthy, graduated crowd. And now we all have a better reason to try them.
Take me for instance. My boyfriend and I, avid “craft” beer drinkers, decided to try brewing some beer of our own. Which is pretty simple, believe it or not—well, after purchasing all of the ingredients and equipment and finding the time and space, etc. It’s fun and rewarding. And it’s SCIENCE!
We first heated 2 gallons of water to a specific temperature. “Brewing is 50% sanitation, 30% temperature control, and 20% ingredients”
We then added the hops and grains in a bag similar to a cheesecloth and let sit for an hour. The temperature is changed multiple times for development of nutrients and beer quality, more hops are added, and the wort as it’s called continues to be under heat. At the end of the heating, the muslin bag of grains is drained and removed. This is called sparging, or getting all of the sweet flavor out of the spent grains.
The cooled wort is added to 2 gallons of water in a large basin called a primary fermenter, then more water is added until total volume is 5 gallons.
We then added (pitched) the yeast. This photo is fermentation at work–the process of converting sugars into alcohol. What you see here is the airlock, which allows carbon dioxide to escape, but does not allow air in. The tube attached to the airlock is a blow-off tube, the end of which is placed in a small glass of water. This is to ensure that fermentation is taking place (you will see and hear bubbles within 24 hours!)
This primary fermenter now sits in a cool dark place for 1-3 weeks. Depending on the beer style, there is another step in which extra hops are added one or two weeks in. Sanitation is ESSENTIAL. Anything that touches your beer needs to be sanitized with a cleaning solution or diluted bleach.
After the 3 weeks are up, this next step is called priming the beer. We have to add sugar to the beer so it can become carbonated. We had to measure it out; too much and the bottles will explode, too little and the beer is flat! Pressure pressure…
Here’s our almost-beer!
Floating hops don’t go well in a beer you’re about to drink, so we made sure to transfer, or rack it to another bucket to avoid the trub (pronounced troob, basically the debris and mess at the bottom once fermentation is complete). We put the boiled sugar/water solution into a sanitized bottling bucket before adding the beer to start the interaction.
In order to make sure our beer is actually going to be the style we aimed for, we have to take a hydrometer reading to get the final gravity. Ours was 1.013—PERFECT for an American Pale Ale. It looked delicious.
From the bottling bucket that now contains the beer and sugar solution, we racked it through a tubing system into the bottles, which was a lot messier than it looks! Lining up bottles in rows helps eliminate spills (but won’t avoid them completely!
Champion bottler, clearly. Equipment exists to make this easier, but rookies have to earn their keep (and beer!) Once the bottles were filled and capped from this fancy device, they sat in a cool dark place for another ~ 10 days to carbonate.
A delicious final product, good head retention, color, clarity, and although you can’t tell, tastes and smells amazing!
We used The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, the homebrewers “Bible”, to guide us. Many thanks to Charlie Papazian for starting us up!
Seriously, anyone who likes beer or science or cooking up something great should try this. If you’re in the Boston area, The Homebrew Emporium is a great place to begin for all homebrewing equipment and know-how. You’re not only making a great product to share with friends, but you’re preparing a healthy beverage that’s good for the heart and the gut!
More information on the health benefits of beer are found here and here. Cheers!
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And now for the winner of the Oldways Cookbook: Whitney! Congrats Witney and Happy Mediterranean Diet Month!
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Lauren is a dietetic intern at Yale-New Haven Hospital and is currently fulfilling an external rotation with Janel. She received her bachelor’s degree in nutrition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a member of the American Dietetic Association. She has always loved to eat, cook and bake as well as work with people in the community creating programs to make healthy eating easier. She graduates from her internship program in August of this year and will be certified as a Registered Dietitian upon completion. She plans to move back to her home of Boston to start her career. Lauren can be contacted at [email protected].
