Corn Ethanol is Bad for Beer
I'm sitting here waiting for the wort to cool down to a reasonable temperature so that I can pour it into the carboy. The brew pot is sitting in a cold water bath with some ice thrown in for good measure. I figured that I'd kill some time.
I'm brewing a porter. It's been a bitch. I had to steep the crystal and chocolate malt grains and I haven't bought myself a lauter tun yet. I used coffee filters and my son's brand new fish net to make sure that none of the husks made it from the grist to the wort. Fortunately that stuff floats so I was able to wipe it off the sides of the brew pot. Broke my thermometer though. Had it since the Atlanta years. Fortunately that happened nowhere near the wort, which was covered anyway.
If you've ever checked out my homebrew page, tonight's batch is a variation on #15. More bittering hops. More malt. Even added cinnamon bark to the last 15 minutes of the boil to add some pizazz. I'm going to double the vanilla extract this time. I'll add that during secondary fermentation.
So why is corn ethanol bad for beer? Well if you haven't heard, farmers are abandoning hops and barley in favor of corn in order to take advantage of the demand for corn-based ethanol. This means that hops and barley prices go up. End result: Beer prices go up. And it affects us homebrewers too. At the supply store, hops prices were double and malt was up 40%. Ouch! Granted, I'm a retail user so I'm going to be paying more anyway. Breweries pay wholesale and get bulk discounts. But still, they're going to be paying more so beer drinkers are going to be paying more.
Ok the wort has cooled off and I've added it to the carboy. After topping it of with more cold water (from the water softener bypass) I get an OG that's a phenomenal 1.062! Oh shit! That's off the hook! That's, by far, the heaviest beer that I've ever tried to make. Time to pitch the yeast and put the beer (and me) to bed.
\_/
DED
Update: The shortage of hops is also due to bad weather. Link.
I'm brewing a porter. It's been a bitch. I had to steep the crystal and chocolate malt grains and I haven't bought myself a lauter tun yet. I used coffee filters and my son's brand new fish net to make sure that none of the husks made it from the grist to the wort. Fortunately that stuff floats so I was able to wipe it off the sides of the brew pot. Broke my thermometer though. Had it since the Atlanta years. Fortunately that happened nowhere near the wort, which was covered anyway.
If you've ever checked out my homebrew page, tonight's batch is a variation on #15. More bittering hops. More malt. Even added cinnamon bark to the last 15 minutes of the boil to add some pizazz. I'm going to double the vanilla extract this time. I'll add that during secondary fermentation.
So why is corn ethanol bad for beer? Well if you haven't heard, farmers are abandoning hops and barley in favor of corn in order to take advantage of the demand for corn-based ethanol. This means that hops and barley prices go up. End result: Beer prices go up. And it affects us homebrewers too. At the supply store, hops prices were double and malt was up 40%. Ouch! Granted, I'm a retail user so I'm going to be paying more anyway. Breweries pay wholesale and get bulk discounts. But still, they're going to be paying more so beer drinkers are going to be paying more.
Ok the wort has cooled off and I've added it to the carboy. After topping it of with more cold water (from the water softener bypass) I get an OG that's a phenomenal 1.062! Oh shit! That's off the hook! That's, by far, the heaviest beer that I've ever tried to make. Time to pitch the yeast and put the beer (and me) to bed.
\_/
DED
Update: The shortage of hops is also due to bad weather. Link.
posted by DED at 11:40 PM
4 Comments:
Ethanol is bad period. Takes a ton of energy (Fossil Fuel) to make it, it doesn't work in regular engines, it costs a fortune to change your engine over, and it's inefficient.
It's simply another opportunity to subsidize the growers of possibly the most worthless vegetable in the world.
Oh, and corn syrup is a big reason so many Americans have asses the size of garbage can lids.
Yes, exactly! And since it's an election year, you couldn't help but see almost all the candidates bend over backwards to appeal to the Iowa farmers with subsidies.
People are going to have to pay more to keep those fat asses. I do the grocery shopping for my family and I've seen that anything that has a fair amount of CS or HFCS in it has gone up in price. Coke & Pepsi haven't been having their price wars like they used to. I'd typically see specials with 2-Liter bottles for 99, 89, and occasionally 79 cents. Now, the best deals I see are $1.29.
And to drag morality into the picture, I can't see how we can take a basic food crop and use it to feed our cars instead of feeding millions of people (Not here. In places where corn is better than starving). I'm surprised that liberals haven't harped on this. Cellulosic ethanol would be a better choice, from a moral POV, but the technology to make it work still sucks.
The beer process sounds just a tad involved. How did you get into home brewing, if that is what one calls it?
After drinking beer for many years, I became interested in the various styles and began to wonder why I liked certain varieties over others. I wanted to know what was in my favorite brews. One Christmas, my wife bought me a starter home brew kit and the rest is history. With a degree in chemical engineering, I figured that I should be able to handle it. After all, the kits are marketed towards every day people. You don't need to be a chemist to start brewing beer. And there are only 4 ingredients in beer: hops, barley malt, yeast, and water.
One can make the process as easy or as hard as one wants it to be. Beginners can buy their hops and malt mixed together so that all they have to do is pour a can into a pot on the stove and cook it for an hour. As one becomes more comfortable with brewing, one can choose from a variety of hops, add specialty malt grains (which requires milling the grain and roasting it like coffee), or even add fruit extracts.
Yes, it can be very time consuming. I spent several hours creating this most recent batch because I went through the trouble of adding specialty grains. As I mentioned above, these have to be "steeped" (soaked) in ~150F water for about half an hour to extract the malt from the husks. If you boil it, you add other compounds which will ruin the beer's flavor. And since steeping won't extract all of the malt, one has to "sparge" (rinse) the "grist" (the cracked grains) with ~170F water to extract as much malt as you can. But you also don't want any of the grain husks to get into the extract. Boiling the extract with the hops and other malted barley (in my case dry and liquid malt extract) comes next.
The difficulty level I'm at is intermediate. Advanced beer geeks go even further.
Homebrewing is a labor of love. One has to enjoy the process to invest the time and effort. Chefs create elaborate meals that will push the culinary envelope yet most of us know how to cook. The advanced beer geeks should be thought of as beer chefs.
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