We were at a beer festival in Fond du Lac Wisconsin serving out some of our local brewery’s samples, along with our own home made beers and meads, when a slightly intense gray haired gentleman in a beer-themed baseball cap tottered up to us and intoned “Clean. Temp. Starter.”
Then he nodded and looked as if he had delivered the secrets of the universe, waiting for us to acknowledge the blessings of his bountiful wisdom.
We just looked at each other behind the counter, then back at him. Huh? The festival was held in a huge hall, and hundreds of people were talking and shouting and shuffling their feet and clinking glasses. It wasn’t easy to hear each other even when you kind of knew what to expect. Especially when the rock band was playing.
The guy looked slightly annoyed, and repeated himself. This time a little louder, and more intense.
“Clean! Temp! Starter!”
Again he waited for a response. Other people were next to him getting pours of our samples in their custom festival-labeled glasses.
Okay, I could hear what he said but there was no context, and I just shook my head and smiled back. I find that it’s usually a good idea to smile and be kind to people even when you have no idea what might be in their heads. Especially then.
But he deserved some kind of a response. I apologized, pointing to the stack of beers and cases and cardboard and chairs and miscellaneous lunch leftovers behind our homebrew club’s counter.
“Sorry, what about clean temp starter? I don’t think we have that one. Can I get you something from back here? I’m pouring my mead today.”
Everyone likes mead, don’t they? Everyone at a beer festival, anyway, at least for a taste.
He nodded and held out his glass, so I poured for him.
He smiled back and sipped and explained.
“Clean, temp, starter. Those are the three secrets to making good beer. You know?” He looked at me like surely I must be in the inner circle, one of the upper crust, nearer the beer gods, and must know exactly what he was talking about. But I didn’t, not then, and put on my best befuddled but benign look.
“Um, no, I don’t think I’m following you. I know about cleaning, that’s important all right.”
He sounded a lot less tipsy and a lot more capable as he filled in the details.
“Sanitation is the most important thing if you want to make good beer. Temperature controlled fermentation is next, and making a yeast starter is right up there too. This mead is good!”
He wandered off to find someone else to receive his wisdom, or maybe to find someplace to dump the mead where I wouldn’t see. Sometimes you get a bad taste of something at beer festivals and really need to just get rid of it and the taste it leaves in your mouth. But it’s bad form to dump it out in front of the guy or gal who made it and served it to you. You have to at least try to be nice: maybe next time they’ll bring something you really like.
And “clean temp starter” really does go a long way toward making better beer.
In the thirty plus years I’ve been making beer, just about every time something went wrong I can trace the problem back to a flaw in sanitation. Getting some unwanted contamination in there is a great way to make vinegar, or to get bottle bombs, or to get really ugly stuff you hold your nose at when you’re dumping it out. And if you only get a tiny bit of contaminant in there, maybe the beer will still be okay, but it won’t be great.
So sanitation is my number one most important thing to do. No short cuts. No skimping on any part of it. There’s the “clean.”
I’ve also found that controlling the temperature at which your beer ferments is also important. That will depend on the style.
If you are making a lager style, something light, you probably want to ferment it much colder than if you are making an ale. Lagers like to ferment at 50f, and down to near freezing. Sure, it takes longer, but the flavors that develop are just right. Ales like it more up in the 60s, and can even stand the low 70s. But if you ferment them at a temperature that is too warm, off flavors can and will develop. Your beers will probably be drinkable, but again they would be so much better if you could have controlled the temperature better.
In the winter my brewing space gets down around 50f, and I can make lagers then. But in the summer I take milk jugs full of water and freeze them, and pack the containers around the fermenter, and swap them out every day, just to keep the temperature down in the low 70s or upper 60s. It’s not ideal, but it works for ales.
Some guys have converted chest freezers into fermenting spaces, and can dial in just about any temperature they want for as long as they want. They can make some awesomely good beers that way. There are a couple of styles of beer and some beer yeasts that like it up in the 70s and even warmer, but temperature control during fermentation is indeed an important factor in making better beer.
Finally, getting your yeast going ahead of time can help a lot too. Sprinkling dry yeast on the top of your wort at the start of fermentation works most of the time just fine. Or pouring in a smacked pack of liquid yeast. But there is wild yeast everywhere. Wild yeast that loves to eat your wort and make vinegar, or something else you don’t want. Pouring in your own beer yeast, dry or liquid, will hopefully overwhelm the wild yeast and you won’t get any (or many) off flavors from the wild stuff. But it takes time for your beer yeast to get going, time the wild yeast can use to get itself going.
When you start the beer yeast the day before, for example, you are getting it going and getting it built up and making it strong. Pouring a started yeast into your wort gives the wild yeast much less time to work before it gets overwhelmed, and gives your own yeast a tremendous head start. You will see bubbles in the air lock a lot quicker when you start the yeast ahead of time.
Making a yeast starter isn’t absolutely necessary, but if you want to make better beer it can be very helpful.
So I want to thank the guy, the guy I mostly tolerated. But I’m glad he came to talk to me, and glad I listened.
Clean. Temp. Starter. Indeed.