Tag Archives: Yeast

Pizza and Beer – The Saga Continues

I realized how over the top my yeast obsession is after I had a sobering conversation with a friend while heading home from work this Thursday.  The conversation went like this:

Erik: “So, I’m making pizza for dinner”

Friend: “Oh – I love pizza, did you make your own crust”

“Yeah, but I’m a little worried It won’t turn out”

Puzzled look implying the question – what kind of  idiot doesn’t know how to make pizza?

“I used an unknown yeast strain to make the dough – I am a little obsessed with yeast.  I have been harvesting my own yeast since December; I have four different strains on the go at the moment”

Concerned look “umm…”

Awkward Pause – following by a nervous laugh – “Did that come across as strange?”

“Yeah… a little”

I then went on to better explain what I meant by “harvesting my own yeast” and that yeast is in the air surround us all the time and that some of the best breads and ales are fermented with wild yeast.  The tension was removed and the conversation carried on as usual – apparently harvesting wild yeast is uncommon.

I am fascinated by yeast – it is such an underrated and misunderstood little organism. Nothing captures the magic of this sugar loving, social lubricating creature better than proper pizza and real beer.  I made pizza last night with brewers yeast – it turned out good, but not over the top fists pumping in the air great.  The particular yeast I used, Wyeast 1968 ESB, imparts strong fruity esters during the brewing process and I was hoping that by fermenting and proofing the pizza dough for a solid 24 hours that the pizza would soak up some of these interesting flavour notes – but it didn’t.  Nonetheless, the pizza tasted great alongside its long lost friend and former partner, IPA.

I got out of bed this morning feeling unsatisfied and restless, which is a strange feeling to have on a long weekend Friday.   It only took me a minute of soul searching to find the source of this dissatisfaction – I was hungry and craving more pizza.  Upon this realization, I quickly shot out of bed and Googled “best pizza in Vancouver”.  I ended up heading to Marcello’s Pizzeria on Commercial drive- I was sold after reading about their wood fired oven.

Marcello’s is a great place for proper pizza – The authenticity that a wood fired oven creates cannot be matched.  I am now convinced more than ever that the only way to achieve perfection as a pizza master is with a hot wood fired oven.  A standard household electric oven is just not capable of pumping out enough heat to quickly cook a pizza leaving a crispy crust with an almost-but-not-quite burnt edge.

Marcello’s Pizzeria clearly knows how to make great pizza, but they have their own shortcomings and seem all too unaware about the magic that happens when a great pizza meets a great beer.  I was hopping to find a well hopped pale ale on the menu, but had to settle for Granville Island English Bay Pale Ale.  The beer was stale and almost offensive tasting and did nothing to complement the pizza.  What could have been the highlight of my week was turned into just a good lunch.  It saddens me to see a restaurant with such great potential fall short on such an important matter such as beer.

My search for the perfect pizza and beer combination carries on.  I think building a brick wood fired oven in my backyard may the next logical step.

Home made Pizza

IPA - Homebrew

Marcello's wood fired oven

Marcello's pizza

Marcello's pizza

Cheers,

Erik

Okay, I’ll admit it – I love yeast

The world of beer aficionados is generally divided into two camps; hops heads and malt lovers.  This particular part of the world, the Pacific Northwest,  is chock full of  hop heads and rightly so – Washington State is one of the world’s greatest hop growing regions.  But as much as I enjoy  drinking an over the top Imperial IPA, I’m not a true hop head.  Neither am I a true malt lover – although I can’t image ever turning down a malty Southern Brown Ale.  So where does this leave me – will I forever be lost in this state of limbo? No, for I am a yeast lover.

Yeast is such an under-discussed and unappreciated ingredient – without yeast beer would not exist and the world would be worse for it.  Beer was brewed without hops for centuries and although beer  would not be the same without malted grain, a whole plethora of sugary ingredients are out there just begging to be added into the brewing process, but yeast cannot be replaced or substituted.  Baking Powder just will not do in this situation.

Yeast can be a completely neutral ingredient, imparting almost no flavour at all in its creation of alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is desirable in many beer styles.  On the opposite side, yeast can create esters, and phenols and many other compounds that add a  range of fruit flavours and spicy complexity to beer.  Not only can yeast create flavour, but it can also add mouthfeel and can  draw out or hide the maltiness of certain beers.

The Belgians are masters at controlling spicy, fruity, sour and almost sweet flavours that yeast can create,  Germans have brewing with neutral lager yeast down to a science, the English know how to control malt flavours with yeast, and North Americans have embraced a whole gamut of yeast strains to brew with.  Brewers understand the importance of yeast, but that understanding does not make it to the consumer often enough.

Yeast is a living, breathing organism that is responsible for the creation of beer and I think these creatures deserve a little more attention in the world of beer.  A knowledgeable beer drinker should be able to determine the different hop varieties in a beer and perhaps even the different malts, but I believe only a select few could determine the style of yeast used to ferment the sweet wort into beer.

My obsession with yeast has grown to new heights.  So far I have collected two wild yeast cultures; one for bread and one for brewing my very own authentic West Coast Lambic.  The third yeast culture was harvested from my last homebrew and is essentially an IPA flavoured Wyeast 1968 ESB yeast.  Instead of brewing with this yeast, I think I will try to make pizza dough with the yeast.  Add some heat to the pizza sauce and I would imagine the the pizza would pair perfectly with an IPA – both sharing the same yeast.

Harvested Wyeast ESB Yeast; Wild Yeast for brewing; Wild Sourdough Yeast

Harvested Wyeast ESB Yeast - Wild Yeast for brewing - Wild Sourdough Yeast

Wild Yeast for an Lambic expierament

Wild Yeast for a Lambic experiment

If you only take away one thing from this post I hope it is this:  Yeast creates beer, and without beer where would the world be -  would happiness as we know it exist?

Cheers,

Erik

The Beer Cellar: how to cellar beer and why

My Cellar - A cool basement closet

My Cellar – A Cool Basement Closet

Over the past month we have commented a fair bit on cellaring or aging beer. Most beer drinkers, mainly those who drink generic lager, don’t know that beer ages just as well as wine. A passionate beer drinker will almost always have a beer cellar, and if not they will have tried aging beer only to discover their pallet is not fond of cellared beer. Aged beer tastes dramatically different than fresh beer, and there is no shame in disliking aged beer, but there is shame, lots of shame, in not trying it. Being an inquisitive person, I searched far and wide, the internet mainly, for information about how to properly cellar beer, and to learn what is actually going on in a bottle while beer ages.

How to Build a Basic Cellar

I have been cellaring beer for just over a year now. My cellar is probably one of the most popular styles; it is a closet in my basement. There is a heap of information available on the internet on how to build a cellar, some is good and some is over the top ridiculous. Creating a basic cellar is quite simple; find the coldest place in your house, turn out the lights, place beer in the cool dark room and patiently wait. Ideally a cellar should be between 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit with minimal temperature fluctuation. If the room used as a cellar, a crawl space for example, drops to around 40 F or colder, it is not well suited for cellaring beer. Most homes have a room or closet close to an appropriate cellar temperate, so please feel no need to renovate.

There is great debate about aging bottles standing up or laying down. I don’t think it matters a great deal either way. Beer Advocate has a good article in support of the bottles standing up approach.

What Beers to Cellar

Any beer can be aged, but generally speaking the best choices are bigger ales. Barley wines, old ales, imperial stouts, big IPAs, and most strong Belgian ales are great candidates for aging. I have a small preference for bottle conditioned ales, beer that has been re-fermented in the bottle, as the yeast sediment helps in the aging process. With beer there are no rules, only guidelines, so feel free to experiment with your favorite brew – pick beer that agrees with your pallet.

Many people recommend buying two or three bottles when cellaring beer. One for immediate consumption, one after 6-12 months (if you bought three) and the final one for as long as your patience can last. I have heard of beer being aged well past 10 years successfully. If you only have enough money for one bottle, that is perfectly acceptable – drinking good beer is not a pastime reserved for the elite.

What is Going on in the Beer Bottle

Anyone who has made a stew will know that it always tastes better the next day. The big flavours in a stew need time to blend together and develop – beer is the same way. This is the simplest explanation; the flavours in beer blend together creating distinct new and often more complex flavours.

Many of the unique flavours in ale, fruit, floral and spice, come from esters in the beer. Esters are a byproduct of ale yeast fermentation – lager yeast does not create esters. These esters give ale a unique flavour and aroma and are intended to be there, they are not off flavours. As beer ages, esters break down and their flavours begin to disappear. Yeast helps to break down esters, explaining my preference for bottle conditioned ales. Flavour compounds from the hops also fade relatively quickly. Many other reactions take place in a bottle of beer while is ages, changing its flavour profile. As a result aged beer is often smoother, almost creamy, in comparison to young beer. Common flavours in cellared beer are coffee, toffee, chocolate, spice, and vinous (Sherry like) to name a few. In general, it is the malt flavours that become more pronounced in aged beer. The only real way to find out what aged beer tastes like is to visit your favorite beer store, refrain from drinking all of your newly purchased beer, and keep a few bottles in the cellar. It is that simple.

We are planning on putting together a page dedicated to our cellars – discussing and reviewing how well different beers age. This should be up shortly. For additional information on cellaring beer I recommend visiting brewbasement.com, a great site all about cellaring beer.

Erik

Balance in the world of beer and bread: Sourdough Bread

The last bit of sourdough bread

The last bit of sourdough bread

The world of beer and bread once again has balance – the sourdough bread trial was a success and it was a good chance to learn about yeast. I didn’t have enough patience to let my sourdough starter sit for long enough to develop a strong sour aroma and flavour but it still tasted pretty good. The sourdough starter I used for the first loaf of bread is still fermenting away so the next batch will have a much more developed sourdough flavour.

I always thought yeast was yeast when it comes to making bread and that it doesn’t matter what kind of yeast is used – I couldn’t have been more wrong. Just like beer, bread gets its flavour and texture from three key ingredients: water, grain and yeast. Standard grocery store bread yeast is designed to ferment quickly and impart very little flavour. This allows bakers to turn out a loaf of bread in 3-4 hours start to finish, but at what cost? Well, there is a hugs cost – lack of flavour and texture!

I am by no means a bread expert, but I have been eating bread for long enough to have a strong opinion. Most grocery store bread tastes like a fluffy cloud of nothing. Just like those who think all beer is supposed to be clean, crisp, light and flavourless – I thought bread was supposed to be light, fluffy, white and flavourless. This needs to change.

By using wild yeast, bread can reach its full glory and become much more than a sandwich holder or sauce sponge. Sourdough bread has a nice chewy texture, a unique flavour and a solid crust that can be achieved without the use of bread improvers/adjuncts. To me the most important part of sourdough is its flavour. Every region of the world has different kinds of yeast and bacteria floating through the air – each one producing a different flavour. My sourdough bread will not taste the same as sourdough from Halifax because of the different yeast used to leaven and flavour the bread.

Good bread is made with patience and good ingredients – many good things cannot be rushed. Generally speaking, water, grain and yeast should be the only ingredients needed to make a diverse range of amazing breads. All I ask of you is one simple thing – if you are enjoying good beer, please also enjoy good bread.

Erik

Beer & Bread

I have been unemployed for three weeks now and have a lot of free time on my hands. With nothing else to do, I started to bake bread – I love bread. So far I have made quite a few loaves of focaccia bread, a loaf of braided French style bread, dinner rolls, croissants and standard white bread. Baking bread is dead simple and incredibly satisfying, plus it will make your house smell amazing. If you haven’t made bread before you must give it a try.

Making bread is very similar to making beer. In ancient Egypt, it is suspected that brewing and bread baking took place is the same place and possibly by the same people. In Egypt, a brew master would also be a baker. After all, the ingredients are almost the same, including grain, yeast and water. Hops are the only ingredient that separates beer from bread; however, hops are a recent addition to brewing and would not have been available to Egyptian brewers.

Baking and brewing, siblings at birth, have sadly been torn apart for thousands of years, and now I, Erik Wolfe, am going to reunite them together again. We shall once again have balance in the world. To do this, I have decided to go back in time and use the same baking & brewing techniques that Egyptians may have used thousands of years ago.

The first bread ever eaten would have been an unleavened flatbread made from an ancient grain such as farro. Without cultivated yeast, which was not available at grocery stores back then, bread will not rise and beer will not ferment. Fortunately, wild yeast is floating in the air all around us just waiting to eat some sugary grain. Early forms of leavened bread and beer would have been fermented with wild yeast. In present day, bread made with wild yeast is called sourdough bread and beer fermented with wild yeast is called a lambic beer. Once a baker or a brewer has fermented their beer or bread, they can cultivate the yeast by continuing to feed grain (sugar) to the yeast, allowing the yeast to be reused again and again. In the form of bread, this is somewhat difficult without refrigeration, but beer is easy to store and is shelf stable at standard room temperatures. By adding beer, instead of water, to grain flour the bread receives a healthy dose of cultivated yeast allowing it to rise and turn into bread.

Beer-Sourdough Bread Starter

Beer-Sourdough Bread Starter - Yum!

To recreate a piece of food history, I made a sourdough starter by adding 1 part wheat flour to 1 part beer, my own home brew of course. The starter has been sitting and being fed grain for three days and is bubbling away nicely smelling just like fermenting beer – only brewers enjoy the smell of fermenting grain. The yeast from the beer will continue to eat the flour creating more yeast. Once it has been a few more days, and I have a good amount of yeast in my starter, I will add it to a standard bread recipe and make bread as usual. I will keep you all posted, including the recipe when it is complete.

Erik