Boil and bubble

A working day’s worth of brewing and a lesson on the  beginnings of ‘liquid bread’

For the beer enthusiast, a trip to the microbrewery at SAB’s Training Institute in Kyalami to try your  hand at brewing beer feels something like how Charlie must have felt visiting Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Reading about the brewing process will never compare to a day spent in the brewhouse, getting your hands dirty and seeing just how your ice-cold Castle is made. In the space of an  ordinary working day you can watch, smell and taste how the malt, maize and water is heated up in the mash tun (two to three hours), passed into the lauter tun to separate the wort from the grain (two to four hours) and finally doused with just enough hops pellets before being heated and boiled in the wort kettle (one- to two-and- a-half hours) to finally produce  a delicious, aromatic “hopped wort” that is ready for the cellars.

The theory behind the various biological processes that make beer such a thirst-quenching and aromatic indulgence was very entertainingly bolstered  along the way  by the tales that SAB trade brewer Kate Jones told us about the amazing journey that beer (or “liquid bread”, as it came to be known  because of the similarities that the brewing and baking crafts shared) has travelled over the ages. 

Beer brewing today is a huge global business, but it actually has very  humble beginnings. The earliest written record of beer dates back to around 3 900 years ago,  with evidence of a Sumerian tablet displaying a recipe for beer. The recipe  was written  in the form of a poem praising the patron  goddess of brewing “Ninkasi”, but Jones went on to explain that beer is actually believed to have first been brewed in Neolithic times, between 8 000 and 10 000 years ago, when man moved from a hunter-gatherer nomadic existence to a more settled agricultural lifestyle and started cultivating cereals.

So how did the first beer come about and who exactly do we have to thank for it?

“A fortuitous accident possibly,” says Jones. “Some barley grain would have been wet, it would have sprouted and germinated and  then  been dried out,  ground up and mixed with warm water to make some kind of gruel or broth,” she says. “A naturally occurring wild yeast in the atmosphere would have settled into this liquid and started a spontaneous fermentation.”

This drink would have been a very crude and different brew to what we’re used to today, but it was nevertheless the prototype for the lagers and ales that we know and love today. As Jones humorously and rightly pointed out, the person we have to thank is really “the first oke

who looked at it and said ‘that stuff’s bubbling but I’m still going to drink it’.”

A day in the brewhouse is a crucial step in the brewing process, but certainly not the last. Cellar processing time is anything from 18 to 28 days, which means that once it has been sent over to the packaging hall and bottled,  my very own brew of Castle Lager should be arriving at my office any day now.

All in a hard day’s work...

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Friday 2 September 2011.