The World’s Best Beer

It seems to come up all the time. In the restaurant, at a party, in the pub. Everybody has one. Everyone has an opinion about everybody else’s opinion. And none of them are wrong. The best beer in the world.

This is not to be seen as an starting an argument, nor is it to be taken as a bet-settler or a point scorer. That’s not beer. Remember, it is egalitarian. And that in itself is a big word for beer. We are all created equal in the eyes of beer., although you could argue that some beers treat us poorly in that regard. And, really, that’s the fault of the brewer, and he’ll get his later.

Now to my point. Because there are so many different styles of beer, and interpretations within this framework, there is almost a best beer in the world for a) every style, b) every occasion and c) every drinker. There are also a million combinations and permutations within these contexts - I might ask Dr Lager to calculate them, maths not being my strong suit - so the chances of narrowing down to even a thousand is next to impossible.

There is that beer that you love to drink as the first one as you front the bar, the one you enjoy sipping with a meal and the one you love to suck the guts out of after a day in the hot sun. The beer that you only need one of and the one you can put away til’ you’re full as a fat lady’s sock. The darker, fruitier ale that joins you in quiet contemplation and the paler, easier drinking session-designed lager that you down in a crowd.

I have always had a firm rule on this. The best beer is the one in your hand, second only to the one in your hand that’s been bought for you by someone else. Such is beer. I also think along the optomist's line that the best beer I'm enjoying now is the second best ever and that the best is always yet to come. Hmmm. Deep.

So, when you hear someone utter the words ..” best beer in the world !”, do us a favour. Tap them on the shoulder and tell them to go talk to the beer blokes.

MAKING BEER pt3 - 101

In part three of our entertaining and informative series about making beer we look at the most interesting, misunderstood and volatile of all the beer ingredients. No, not the pissed idiot in the pub. Yeast. Perhaps no other step of the brewing process is as simple, yet easy to stuff up than the pitching and working of the yeast. This is the step which involves working in harmony with a living organism - one which, treated nicely, will reward you with rivers of golden beery enjoyment and, if mistreated, will curse you with 23 litres of cats’ piss. Yeast



Yeast is, put simply, a single cell micro-creature of the fungus family. It has millions of different sub-groups and are to be found floating free and roaming wide and wild everywhere. Some are good at making bread and some are good at making people sick and some are good at making beer. Some of which makes people sick. But here is why you need to respect yeast.



Yeast is ancient, prehistoric. Maybe a caveman - let’s call him Grog -discovered the natural effect that this airborne miracle had in the right circumstances. Perhaps he left a bowl of half finished grain outside the cave one night. In the morning he awoke to find his porridge in a state of froth and the overnight rain had turned it into a drink of sorts. A taste told Grog that some kind of magic was afoot.

Some anthropologists even believe that mankind’s change from nomadic hunter-gatherer to community group can be attributed to the discovery of the effect that wild yeast had when it infected this source of grain in the right temperature range which then got rained on and magically produced a foamy beverage which, after a few bowls, made Mrs Grog start to look pretty good. For the staying put and planting of crops to make beer - and perhaps some obscure food products, like bread - is thought to be the turning point of civilisation.

Yeast has, since then, been a miracle and a menace to generations of brewers. In the right conditions - temperature, food source and protection from bacteria - it will begin it’s beer making by multiplying rapidly, then feeding on the fermentable sugars and, finally, producing alcohol and CO2 before dropping to the bottom to become a rich source of vitamin B - the very vitamin that beer consumes. Magic! It is also responsible for many of the flavour notes found in different beers.



So there it is. A little miracle. It happens, but nobody can really explain how. Like Jason Gillespie’s 201 not out or the apparent popularity of dickheads who go on Big Brother , yeast is sometimes difficult to figure out - but impossible to ignore.

Next Time - Water

Getting Beer-sy - 101

The Beer Blokes are powering away at present with another lager in the bottle, an Australia Day Commemorative Lager brewing , a new Pilsner Blonde cooked up and fermenting, Original Pilsner ready for tasting and a couple of slabs of Cooper’s Heritage Lager stored away for the winter. All in all a productive few days., what with all the production of empties and everything. And Prof. Pilsner is well under way with the new ale brewing calendar.

The latest effort- NZ Black Rock brand tin - again involved a cook-up; a next-step towards our future challenge of moving from can kits and can kit improver kits to malt extract brewing. Apart from the fact that this can often be a less expensive way of brewing, it also unleashes a myriad of possibilities of style and beer type. We can take the building blocks of malt and add specialty grains for colour and flavour, boil up the bittering hops, choose some aroma hops and tinker with the very fabric of the beer universe. Not yet, but. When we get good. And when we start playing Beer Creator, I promise you all that it will be in a Morgan Freeman in “Bruce Almighty” way rather than in a Dr Evil sort of way.







The Australia Day Commemorative Lager is presenting us with some challenges. A little slow out of the blocks and light on the yeast activity despite a good period of temperature control. We may have struck our first batch of poor yeast. Which brings me nicely to the next topic. We have begun buying yeast separately. This means that we can use more per batch and at only $3 or $4 it adds very little to the unit cost. We have begun with Safale - a fairly common and easy to get brand. Used in the latest brew, it has certainly displayed fierce yeast qualities early on. A feisty foam appeared on top of the brew in only a few hours and the aroma is something special.

Cheers, Prof. Pilsner and Dr Lager
P.S. I apologise for the lack of fine tuning with the pictures on our posts lately. the program running this show seems to corrupt every pic I try to fit in. it all appears as compu-crap instead of as a picture. hope it is all back to normal soon.