E2 S1 - Beer Brewing Expert Shares His Wisdom: Professor Charlie Bamforth

In this episode, I talk about the beer brewing industry with the incredibly interesting Professor Charlie Bamforth

It.

Yeah. Really nice to meet you, Charlie. Thank you for your time. My pleasure. I guess first thing is sort of an introduction about yourself and what you do and who you

are. All right. Charlie Bamforth been part of the brewing brewing industry since 1978. I'm the fancy title. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of University of California, Davis. Used to teach brewing at Davis this last for 20 years. Before that, I was in the brewing industry in the UK. And these days I'm a senior quality advisor for the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, which I'm very happy to do. 1.5s

Very nice. And what were you doing? Well, first of all, whereabouts in the UK are you from? Just outside Wigan. So a village to the west of Wigan called Poland. Okay,

cool. Yeah.

And where were you involved in the industry in the UK?

So I joined the brewing industry, as I say, in 1978. Joined at a place called the Brewing Research Foundation, which is down in Nutfield, near Red Hill in Surrey, 1.1s and that is still around these days. It's called Camden BRI, but it's a very different organization. Back then, there was a tax on beer, basically a levy on beer that went to pay for all these scientists working on fairly fundamental problems at the BRF. I'm an enzymologist by training and they wanted an enzymologist, so I went. 1.6s So the biggest paymasters were the ones who brewed the most beer. So the biggest paymasters were Bass. And they decided that they wanted to recruit me to go to join them in Burton on Trent. So I was at BRF for five years, then I went to Bass. I became a research manager in 1984, a year after I joined. And then they insisted I get some of the smooth edges knocked off, get out of the ivory tower. So I went to become the quality assurance manager at the Bass Preston Brook Brewery, the Roncorn Brewery, which is a very tough place. And then I went back to the Brewing Research Foundation as it went international, and I was the director of research. I was also visiting professor of brewing at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh. So when they wanted a professor of brewing at UC Davis, they wanted somebody with research record in brew doing, somebody who'd been in the industry and somebody who had a presence in academia. So I was pretty much the only guy who checked all the boxes. So I went to Davis in 1999. 1.4s

Wow. Okay. So you've been in the US. For quite some

time. Yeah. Can't you tell from the accent? 1.1s

No. You still sound northern.

They think I'm smarter because of the accent, but there we go. 2.3s I was reading 1.2s in church a while ago on this, and they love it. They think I, like, a news reader or something. And this English woman afterwards came up and she said, what part of the north of England are you from anyway? 2s

Yeah, fair enough. Well, yeah, here it's pretty obvious where you're from. Maybe not in the US. So in terms of, like, before you became went into academia, you said you was an enzyme

enzymologist? Yeah.

What's that got to do with?

Well, basically, brewing is enzymes in action. Enzymes, of course, are biological catalysts. They make things happen. And so when you convert barley into the malt that brewers need, that involves a lot of different enzymes that are chewing up bits of the grain. And then when you mill the malt and you mix it with hot water and you're mashing in the brew house, there are other enzymes that are now breaking down the starch. Those are the most important ones to make fermentable sugars. And then, of course, you've got the enzymes from the yeast, which are converting those sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide and various other flavor compounds. 1.1s So basically, malting and brewing are wonderful vehicles to study enzymology, and I'm still doing research. I have a long standing collaboration with my former postdoc, Dr. Makoto Kanauchi in Miagi in Japan. I still feed him ideas and we're still discovering enzymes nobody's ever reported before. So 1.2s it's exciting and it's a great way to work as a biochemist. I actually thought I was going to cure cancer, but instead 1.1s I'm supposed to be the world's leading authority on how to put a head on beer. 2.2s It's a bit different, 3.6s I guess, with sort of your background. 1.9s

I don't know if you do know much about the history of beer or are you more sort of the science

side? No, I've written a lot about it and in some of my general textbooks, I certainly address the history. The history of beer probably evolved independently in different parts of the world, but people usually sort of point to the Fertile Crescent, 1.1s the countries, places like modern day Iraq and around there, and folks had a nomadic existence, and they sort of drove goats around trying to find grass, and they carried with them barley, basically, to eat barley grain. And of course, it wasn't very tasty and it was very hard and chewy and stringent. But the story goes that it got moist and started to sprout and got softer and now tasted like bean sprout. And then they made that into a bread, they baked it and it was really tasty. Now, that nice multi flavor, but like. Malteses, that sort of flavor. And again, they left it, it got wet. And we know that yeast must have crept in there and made alcohol. And so they dipped their finger in and they tasted it and they thought, well, that's nice, and they drank it and they all fell over. 2.2s It was purely accidental. And of course, they went from nomadic existence to a static existence, where they based, grew crops and would bake breads and of course, make beer. So that's what, 6000, 8000 years ago? 1.1s But they probably happened independently elsewhere as well. So beer has been around a long time, modern beer as we know it 1.5s probably, 1.6s obviously, if you actually transported somebody back through time and you went 600, 700 years and you landed in a certain building, you looked around at the vessels, you'll say, I'm in a brewery. So the fundamental shape of it has been the same for many, many years, centuries. But things like hops were first used in Europe, but only later 1.3s in England, 1.2s around the time of Henry VIII. They referred to hops as a wicked and pernicious weed, because hops are antiseptic as well. Antimicrobial. So if you use hops, you can kill off spoilage organisms. And before they were used in beer, you had to make the beer very strong, very alcoholic, because alcohol itself will prevent stuff from growing in there. But if you put hops in, the beer does not have to be as alcoholic. So 1.3s when hops were introduced, it was a wicked and pernicious weed because it made the beer weaker. So before the hops were used in England, that was the original use for the word ale, was unhopped beer. And beer had hops in it these days, of course, but pretty much all beers have got hops in them. Thank goodness. 1.9s

And so obviously in Europe, like obviously in movies and stuff, whatever they show like Vikings, Scandinavia, there's always

beer or like beer or

big jugs of the drinking out of those tusks and things like that.

Skulls as well.

Skulls? Yeah, skulls. Is that an accurate representation? Because I kind of feel like that's where I kind of got impression that's where beer kind of came over to England.

Well, that wasn't how beer came to England, but mean, it's certainly developed in the British Isles kind of independently of anywhere else. And basically if you do sort of archaeological research and diggings and so on, if you found vessels that clearly held alcoholic beverages, you tend not to find just evidence of grain or just evidence of grapes. You find evidence for all sorts of stuff. So they obviously realized that you could convert various things 1.4s through some sort of natural process which we now know is fermentation, to produce a liquid which made you feel good. And of course it sent the sort of the invaders from Scandinavia, made them very happy and they looked forward to getting to Valhalla where they could drink endlessly. So 1.1s there's some romance in the history that is told about brewing, but we can speak with tremendous confidence about how in the last 1.2s thousand years, the way in which it developed and the important role of the monasteries and of course, the important role of what we're referred to as the ale wives. Because for the longest time, apart from the church, brewing has been the domain of the female and the female brewer is the Brewster. And of course through the Middle Ages, 1.7s you know. 1.1s The, you know, the the men were out tending the fields and and the women were cooking, but also brewing the beer. And then some of them, the more entrepreneurial ones, they, they progressively develop the first brew pubs, you know, so they were not only brewing for the family, they were brewing for whoever was passing by. 1.2s And so the history is a remarkable one. And if you look at the application of science to brewing, which really, with the exception of people like Von Louievanoic, 1.2s and looking at yeast through microscopes, 1s we're talking about the last couple of hundred years, really, where beer was transformed from very much being an art form that was handed down without anybody understanding exactly how it all work to progressively now we're in a situation where we really understand the vast majority of the underpinning chemistry and biochemistry and physics and engineering. So that now the big difference is, although the fundamental process is the same now as it has been for generations, we now can control it much more reliably. So we can predict things and we can understand how to address things like stability and make sure we develop deliver if we want to, which most brewers do. Deliver the same product every time. I usually jokingly say the brewing industry is no such thing as a vintage, or rather, everything is a vintage. So it's a product based on agriculture. And of course, the wine folks, God bless them, they celebrate the grape and talk about how wonderful the grape is and the nuances of the grape and varietals and all that, and talk about vintage and some years are better than others. Well, we don't use the term vintage in brewing. Every drop is vintage and supposed to be very consistent, despite the fact we're not only dealing with one fundamental raw material, we're worrying about the grain. We're worrying about the hops, and to a much greater extent than the brine industry, we worry about the yeast. And of course, we worry about the water as well, and how tremendously different products can be developed from water of different compositions. But of course, we're also using water for all sorts of other things, like cooling and heating things up via steam and so on. 1.6s It's a very sophisticated process, brewing, 1.8s and a wonderful way for people to study chemistry and biochemistry. 1.6s

That's really interesting, I think in terms of talking about how things have changed in the last 200 years, what have been some of the massive steps that have kind of got us to where we are today in terms of manufacturing or mass production, what's really changed really

sort of pushed a huge amount. 1s For example, the malting process where you take the grain and you basically soak it in water, then allow it to sprout and then you dry it, you kiln it. Well, it used to be the case that right up until the early 1950s that it was a much slower process because they just put the grain in the water and wait and wait for it to be ready to germinate. Then they discovered something that where the water limits the presence of water itself, sort of limits the healthfulness of the grain onto a better way. So what they learned to do was to steep the grain in water and then drain away the water and let the grain breathe and then add some more water back and then maybe one or two more iterations of that. So now in a 48 hours period, or even less, sometimes times you can introduce all the water and that will give you much grain, much healthier, better able to germinate, which can now be completed in about four days instead of a couple of weeks. So in that way, the whole malting process was revolutionized and much more efficient, much more rapid. 1.1s And so the productivity was dramatically improved. 1.9s In the brew house, there's been all sorts of developments in terms of types of mill to get the optimum particle sizes. We understand the precise temperature program that you need to use to make different types of beer. The boiling, which, of course, is a very energetically, demanding stage, 1.8s much more efficient these days in terms of achieving the purposes for which boiling is used. 1.6s Clarification stages, hops. A lot of work on more efficient extraction of hops. 1.2s We understand much more about yeast strains. Even these days. There are genetically modified yeasts that are available for use if brewers want to use them. Lots of ways of improving how we stabilize the beer. 1.2s And, of course, the most expensive stage of the whole operation, the packaging. 2.5s Vastly improved efficiencies and speeds of packaging. Packaging with the lowest possible oxygen level because oxygen makes the beer go stale. And the list goes on. There's a huge 1.4s I've written lots of books on beer, and there's reams and reams of literature and books, the very thick tomes all about the vast complexity that is the malting and brew processes. 1.1s

Thank you for sharing that. This one. Obviously, you got lots of big beer companies that people know about. 1.8s Who's kind of the powerhouse, which are the bigger ones? That kind of go. Because is it a bit like Unilever, where you see a brand like you see Nestle or like these other little brands, and they own all these parent companies in beer. Is it the same as one massive parent company or they actually individual? The biggest brewing company by far is anhouse abujinbev, AB InBev, and they brew twice ice as much as anybody else. But within AB InBev, although 1.3s the name is on top of all the brewers, you do have a lot of brands. So the old bass brand is part of AB InBev labat. 2s Obviously, Budweiser is their flagship brand, but Stella Artois is part of andoza Bush InBev and so on. The next biggest brewing company is Heineken and of course, Heineken. 1.3s As well as AB InBev, they have acquired some of the so called craft breweries over the years. So AB InBev own a number of these heineken. Give you an example. In London. A friend of mine, 1.1s Logan plant a brewery called Beaver Tab. I've known Logan since he was knee high because he and I are both avid Wolverhampton Wanderer supporters. He, he gets it from his father, who you may have heard of, Robert Plant. 1.1s And Beavertown is now part of Heineken, 100% owned by Heineken. The amazing thing, David, is that as soon as somebody does that and they sell to one of the big guys, it's amazing how offended people get. 2.7s

It's bizarre 1.1s

independent

brewer, they're very successful, they're very good at what they do, they're very skillful brewers, and the quality control is second to none. And so beers, 1.5s when they're acquired by the big guys, I'm not saying that Beaver Town's beer was not consistent. Always excellent whenever I tasted it. But any beer for any company, if it's got the resources of these big guys behind them, is really going to thrive. And of course, you could say, well, it's a fairly unfair advantage because these big guys got all the clout and they can buy grain for if they buy it in bulk, they get special deals for it and so on. Yeah, all that is true. 1.4s And the third biggest brewing company is Carlsburg from Denmark. 1.1s And then the fourth is a company from China called Snow. Most people will never have heard of it, but one of the biggest, most important brands, beer brands in the world is Snow in China. And of course, China itself is the world's biggest market for beer. The simple reason, there's a very large population in China and individually, they don't drink huge amounts. But there are so many people living in China that the sheer numbers mean that that is the biggest market for beer in terms of per capita consumption, then that is the Czech Republic. They drink more in the Czech Republic than anywhere else in the world. 1.1s

I lived in China for eight years, and one thing I noticed was, everywhere you go around China, they have their own beer for that province or that town. So whether it's Yangjing, whether it's Qingdao, 1.5s it's a bit like when you go traveling. Same thing. You go to different countries and there's always different beers. But in China, it was particularly kind of interesting, that locality of beers and how

popular they were. Yeah. And it's even more so in country like Germany. Tremendous local and regional loyalty to the town or the city's beer. 1.4s So what you have in Germany is the breweries themselves. The biggest is 1s vastly smaller than the beer companies that I've mentioned before, but there are many of them and everybody is very loyal to the local products and the local beer styles. For example, in Bamberg, tremendous love of the beers made with smoked malts. The beers out of Bamberg, the so called Royce beers. To me, they taste like smoky bacon, crisps. They're a very pronounced character. It's not to my taste east, but they love it in Bamberg. In Cologne, of course, the number one style is the Kush 1.1s and so on. 1.4s The world of beer is a fascinating one. 1.8s

Yeah. When you're talking about the sort of big corporations or the bigger companies taking over small breweries, I do notice that in conversation with friends, I was saying the local beer or whatever, or the local pub isn't taken over by this brand. And you are right, there is that kind of people feel like that loyalty is almost gone because it's like, oh, but you're an independent chain and now you're part of this bigger glomerate and it's almost, as you say, people associate that with less quality. Or it is an interesting topic because I do notice it happening more and more around the UK and other places. Yeah.

And it will continue to happen as well. But there's nothing new in this. As I told you, I used to be with the Bass Brewing Company. I was very proud to be part of the Bass Brewing Company. We're all walking around with our ties with the red triangles on there and we were very proud. But if you look back at the history of Bass, it grew to the size it did because it acquired a huge number of smaller companies over the years. And some of the acquisitions and mergers were. 1s Were on a bigger scale. So, for example, 1.3s there were brand names like Bass Charrington, where Bass from Burton merged with Charrington from my land in London. And then there was Bass Worthington, where Bass bass and Worthington, two separate 1.5s Burton companies, merged together. And then Bass, Mitchell's and Butler. Mitchell's and Butler was from two mergers, from breweries from the Birmingham area, 1.3s but there were lots of others as well. Stones from Sheffield and an endless number. So if you look back at the history of Bass, there's an immense selection of smaller brewing companies. Jowls Jewels. Jowls is the pronunciation, and from Staffordshire. Those are many others. They all became part of Bass. And of course, back in the day, pre Thatcher, one of the main reasons for it was acquiring pubs. So when I was at Bass, we had 6350 pubs in Bass. It was vertically integrated. And then, of course, Margaret Thatcher with the beer orders, which basically said, 2.4s basically, you can't own more than 2000 pubs, 1.9s and if you do, you got to sell anything over 2000, you got to sell them. So basically, companies had to make a decision whether they going to brew beer, in which case they could brew as much as they wanted, but don't own pubs or give up brewing, just sell beer, because that's where you make the money, in the pubs and the hotels. So back then, of course, in the UK, in Britain, there were six big brewing companies. Bass was the biggest, as I've said. And there was allied breweries and Whitbread and Watney's and Scottish and Newcastle and Courage. And one by one they all sold bass sold all the breweries to Interbrew in Belgium, which is a forerunner of AB IMBE, Thatcher said, Still Monopoly. So half of those breweries were sold to Kuz. 1.6s From Colorado. My pension my pension from my days in Bass is these days, part of Molson Coors, which, again, the Canadian company merging with Kuz is endless. 2.7s And what did Bass become? They became what is now the second biggest hotel company in the world. So intercontinental Hotels 1.3s which shown Crown Plaza and Holiday Inn. That's what Bass became. So wherever I'm in the world, I find me usually in a Crown Plaza or a Holiday Inn, because that's my old, perhaps misplaced loyalty. 3.5s It's a very different world and these things will continue. And, yeah, people got misguided ideas. A woman said to me a couple of years ago, she said, 1s I like blue moon. I like blue moon, you know? And I said, yeah, it's it's a good beard from Kurs. She said, I hate it. I said, what do you mean you hate it? You just told me you loved it. She said, well, it's a big brewing company. It can't be any good. I said, of course it's good. Of course it's good, but it's bizarre. So there is this perception that somehow beers made by the smaller companies are necessarily better. And there are some great beers from smaller brewing companies, but there are some great beers from big brewing companies. 1.2s Here in the States, the definition of a craft brewery is a company that produces less than 6 million barrels of beer every year, us. Barrels. And that's about the output of Denmark or Ireland. And if

you're less than that, still massive. 2.4s

She's frankly bizarre. 1.4s And I'm at pains to point out you can't define the attitude of a brewer or the skill of a brewer on the basis of size. The big brewing companies have got some fantastically qualified, excellent brewers, 2s and they're craftspeople by whichever definition you want. You know, it's just like if you have, you know, somebody 1.1s doing some repairs in your home, 2.2s a lot of us like to use the small operator, of course, but if that small operator is not as good as somebody who is working for a larger organization, you'd be a fool to go with the, you know. So, you know, you can get excellent tech technicians that are working for very large companies, and you can get some shoddy technicians that are working for themselves, if you like, on small scale. So I really do resent it when people try to define 1.2s the quality of brew or brewers on the basis of size. It really is not about that. 1.6s

That's very interesting. I think hopefully when people listening to this, I'll maybe rethink that because I definitely heard that people like us going to this company and they just assume that the quality is going to go down. But obviously, as a scientist, you're looking at it from more factual point of view and data.

I'll give you another example. There's a well known beer in 1.5s Pennsylvania called Rolling Rock Lager. And Rolling Rock Lager is characterized by a very, very high level of something called DMs, which gives like a canned corn flavor to beer. And 1.1s it's a very, very high level. Well, this beer was acquired, the brand was acquired by an, who is a bush, before they became AB in bed. So I was speaking to the main colleague, contacted AB, and I said, I know what you're going to do. He said, what am I going to do? I said, you won't like all that DMs, so you're going to tone it down. You're going to lower it bit by bit by bit over a period of time. Nobody will notice it, but you're going to bring it down to a level that you're happy with. And he said, no, we're going to learn how to brew it consistently. And they did. And they brewed it more consistent than he was ever brewed before. But I was on the radio 1.9s in the Pennsylvania area and people were calling in saying, well, it's rubbish now. What? It's not. It was never better. It was never more consistent. Before I joined Bass, before I joined them, they used to ferment the Bass Ale in something called the Burton Union system, which is basically fermenting it in rows of barrels. So there are all these barrels and the beer would the yeast would rise through these swan necks and go into this trough and then flow around. It was a microbiological nightmare. And what Bass did was to shift the fermentation to an entirely different way of doing it 1s in square fermenters. And Bass hugely responsible company, a very technically adet, and they did all their research to actually get a superb product, a superb match. But when the word came out that the Bat Ale was no longer being produced in the Burton Union barrels, people saying, oh, it's rubbish now, it's not a patch of what it was, 1.1s it's nonsense, but it's people's impression. And that applies. 1.5s Beer drinking generally, 1.1s they call me the Pope of Foam because of all this work I've done on foam. And I can tell you, you present the same beer with and without a good head on it in many parts of the world, including the north of England, and the one without a head on it will always be voted down. They're always saying, it's not as good taste, right? It's just got a different amount of head on it, foam on it. When I was that quality assurance manager and people made complaints, they never complained about the flavor, they always complained about the foam because any idiot can see whether it's got a head on it or not. And usually it didn't have a

head on it because the way it been

poured out, 98% of the time, the foam is nothing to do with the beer as it left the brewery. It's everything to do with the dirty glass or being poured wrong. So it's endless. It's endless, the perceptions. People drink with their eyes and that includes what the label says or what the newspaper says, 1.6s and it's 1.1s amazing, but endless challenges. But, you know. It kind of links into a question I was asked later. But I think appropriate to ask for now is what makes the perfect pint. Because I think I worked in a bar when I was at university and ordered stupid amount of beers, and people would always want, like, I want a bit more head, or there's not enough head 2.5s

in terms of flavor. Say, for example, if you had the clean glass, everything, what does the foam actually make a difference, or is it more just like an appearance?

It is an appearance thing. As I say, people make their judgments based on appearance. And of course, it's a completely different world these days in that right up to me and a long time after coming to America, it was all about making sure that beer was not cloudy, not hazy. These days, for a lot of beers, you got to make them consistently hazy. And it's harder because guess what? That hay settles out, it sinks. If it sinks in the barrel when you start pouring the beer off, pulling the beer from the top of the keg or what have you, it's going to be brighter because all the particles will settle out. 2.2s It's not the same for all all products, and of course, it's not the same regionally. 1.2s Um so chances are you probably 1s be expecting to deliver a beer with more foam on it in Sheffield or Newcastle than if you're in Pimlico, 1.6s because up north they really do insist on having excellent head on the beer. To the extent, of course, you have those oversized glasses, you have that light which indicates you're getting

the light, says one pint, got a

pint of liquid and will be died. Me coming from near Wiggle don't short change me. That's why I get very frustrated in Europe and I get half a glass of foam. I don't want half a glass of foam, I want a pint of liquid. But I do want the head on top. 3s The glass cleanliness is absolutely critical, 1.3s and 1s pouring it vigorously so that you do generate that foam. 2s But 1.3s I can remember way back when I was at the brewery in Ronco, we used to go out into our pubs and look at how they were pouring the beer. And of course, you'll remember you have a sparkler on the end of the tap, so there's a sparkler and you could loosen it or tighten it up, depending on 1.5s how much you want to force the beer through. And of course, this slowed everything down so they would unscrew them, they'd take them off. 1.6s We made tamper proof ones so that they couldn't screw them off. And we went to a pub and they'd soared them off. They'd literally got a saw and soared off the end of the taps. And this was not far from a football ground. And of course, 1.4s if there's one class of people, and I'm a big football fan, one category of people that are not too fussed about the appearance, they just want to get it liquid down their neck. His football fans on the way to the game. So Speedy dispense was of the essence, 2.5s but 1.5s the flavor is primarily it is going to be influenced by the foam to a certain extent. Not a lot, but to a certain extent it's psychological. 1.3s Much more important is for flavor, is getting the carbonation right, so you've got the right amount of tingle and sparkle on the palate, 1.2s keeping the beer fresh. 1.2s So one of the big nightmares for brewers is flavor change with time. When I first came over here, I was interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle and I was asked the question, you go into a bar, there's 30 beers on tap. Which one are you going to choose? And I said, One in a bottle. Because if you got 30 beers on tap, they're not all being consumed at exactly the same rate. And some of those beers are going to be sitting around for quite a while and going stale. And also, if they're not cleaning those lines out every night and flushing through with the beer, next day, you're going to get the accumulation of spoilage bacteria and they're going to make the beer smell of popcorn or butterscotch or something like that, and it's going to be horrible. And of course, my favorite beer style, I have two favorite beer styles. One is Trappist Beers in Belgium, but the other one is English cascale. 1.3s Um, which is a wonderful, wonderful product. But it has to be looked after, because once that beer has been tapped in the pub, you got three days. If you don't drink that within three days, it's going to be vinegar. 2.7s As a beer style, it is a fantastic product, but tremendous skill in pouring it, getting it ringed up properly in the cellar, but also making sure you pour it properly and you don't get undesirable turbidity in it, but also that it's going to be turned over fast enough before it becomes vinegar. So cascale is an absolute delight. But if it's turned, if it's gone off, it's probably the worst thing you could, you could, you could buy. So, you know, the looking after the beer in the pub is so critical, and that was the beauty of vertical integration back in the day at Bass, we worried very much about our beer. We had 1.9s loads of people going around, going into the sellers, going into the pubs, making sure everything was being cleaned properly and so on. But once that close link between brewer and 1.3s the pub was severed, it wasn't good for the customer, it wasn't good for beer quality. 1.8s

Yeah, I definitely had some bad beers and pubs and stuff, which normally it's true, actually, now I think about it, a lot of times I've had bad beers, it's been when there's so much choice, so it's probably, as you say, they're not getting through those beers. I'm not super adventurous with beers. I like a good lager and everywhere I go, I'll try the local beers and stuff, but super adventurous. But I do like beer and I definitely tried some ones that I'm like, oh, that doesn't taste very nice. And because I don't know that beer, I'm never quite sure if it's the taste or if it's gone off. So I'm like, I don't want to be I don't want to be like, this taste doesn't taste very nice and it's because I don't like it rather than because it's actually what it should taste. Well, that's

the point I was making earlier on, that people don't complain about the flavor because they're thinking, I wonder, it's supposed to be taste. Like, 3.8s my wife gets so crosses me, I never complain, 1.3s I just quietly put it down and walk out. 2.1s What you should be looking at in England, particularly you're in London, so you should be looking for the sign on the outside of a pub that says Cask Mark. Cask Mark Marque. And that is a sign to show that they are routinely visited by people who 1s scrutinize every part of the operation to make sure the beer is being looked after and being presented properly. That's a really useful thing to know. I think I'll be looking for that from now on. One thing I wanted to sort of ask you about is I know during Lockdown I had a few friends that were brewing their own beer. 1.9s Well, they say it was successful, but I feel like that's. 1.2s I don't know. I imagine a lot of people may not have been says, but still say they were.

If you were to start brewing your own beer, what kind of things would you be? Some of the steps you should probably take to get that quality.

Well, I usually jokingly say to people, there are four essentials for home brewing. The first is hygiene, and you make sure everything is clean. Second is hygiene. You really can't underestimate. You've got to really clean everything thoroughly and then clean again. The third is hygiene. Did I say how important hygiene is? And the fourth is, whoever you live with, make sure they understand, because this is going to take over not only your life, it's also going to take over every spare inch of your home. 2.5s Things are going to be fermented in places where perhaps not everybody is pleased with that, particularly if they explode. 2.7s But 1.3s the importance of cleanliness and hygiene cannot be overestimated. I would argue that the vast majority of defective homebrewed beer is because it's become contaminated with wild yeast or bacteria or something like that. 1.6s Other than that, 1s start small. Don't start to be too adventurous. 1.1s Make a beer that is fairly robust in flavor. Don't start trying to make a me too Budweiser. It's very hard to make the gently flavored beers because they show the defects much more obviously. 1.8s Than a fully flavored beer. I'll give you a specific example, and I always mention Ken grossman. Ken is the guy who founded the Sierra Nevada brewing company, who I advise these days. Tremendously impressive guy. And when he started back in the late 1970s, his first beer was stout. And then his next one was the pale ale. Both of them pretty robustly flavored. But Ken had six separate goes when he first started his brewery. Six separate batches of stout, and he poured them down the drain because he wasn't happy with them. Now, this is a fairly robust flavor beer with all that roast character, but he wasn't happy with the product. It's only when he eventually was satisfied that he could do it consistently would he go with that beer, but he was advised to go with a fairly robust flavored beer at first, and that's what he did. And of course, then he went on to a very hoppy pale ale signature brand, sierra Novada pale ale, 2.7s and read good books. There are books by a guy called John Palmer, and there are books by Charlie papazian. These are well known home brewing experts. I've never brewed at home. As I always say, you know, if I was a brain surgeon, I wouldn't go home and operate on my wife. I 1.1s leave the day job at work. 1s I write. I write about football in my spare time. That's how I escape. And 1.3s in fact, I've written a lot more about football than I have about beer for the simple fact that I used to write in programs and so on a lot of the

time. 1.5s Well appreciate those tips and hopefully someone's not going to have their beer exploding in their house somewhere. 1.8s Yeah, I've seen a couple of videos on YouTube of people that have talked about it 1.5s when it's fermenting, but yeah, one of the questions I was really interested in is something I've seen particularly not in China but in the UK since moving back here is of 1.1s non alcoholic beer. I've seen heinekens ones, obviously it's pretty much the same can just a slightly different color, but it's definitely becoming more popular.

Yeah, I personally have a psychological block on buying alcohol free beer. You know, same block I've got on decaffeinated tea. I mean I I just never wouldn't do it. I think the answer is they are getting better. I have sampled some of them recently and they are far better than they used to be. When I was at Bass, we had a beer brand called Barbecue 2.4s and it wasn't the best. 1.4s The competition, the main competition was a beer called Caliber and 1.5s they were very similar. The way we used to do them barbecue was vacuum stripping. So basically you took the full strength beer, in this case Carling Black Label and 2.1s heated it at about 35 Celsius in a vacuum. So basically you strip off the alcohol. What you also strip off is a lot of the other flavor and so the trick was to add it back in the. 1.4s Not exactly in the same proportions because the alcohol itself influences the flavor from the different entities 1.3s I'm not sure we ever got that right. 1.3s What I used to do because I used to play a lot of cricket and football 1.1s when I'd done playing a game, wanted a drink but I was also out of fair way to drive home. I used to take the barbecue and I used to mix it 50 50 with the regular lager so the Carling Black Label, which is 4% ABV and barbecue zero so I ended up with 2% product and the barbecue hadn't ruined the calling, 3.1s it was still a very drinkable product. So I'm personally much more interested in that alcohol range. 1.1s It doesn't flow over here in the States because whereas in the UK you pay tax in proportion to alcoholic strength so every 0.1% increase in alcohol by volume in UK beer means more taxation, more duty. Here in the States it's a flat rate, it doesn't matter whether the beer is 10% alcohol or 0%, it's all the same taxation rate. So over here you say hey, how about let's make a 3% ABV product? And people say, Well, I want that. I want bang for my book. I don't want to drink something like that. There's only when it gets to truly alcohol free that people, particularly younger people, because I guess they're getting their kicks in some other way, I don't know. But particularly younger people are genuinely interested in something that does not contain alcohol. So I've been in the industry for what is it now, 45 years? And I just don't get it. I like my 3.54% CASC Ales in England, I also like my 8% Trappist beer but 2.7s for me beer 1.4s is an alcoholic beverage 2.6s so why people want an alcohol free product 1.1s when they could basically 1s have alcohol free other types of beverage? 1.2s But I was described as being a luddite some while ago so perhaps I'm a luddite but 1.7s they're coming back and they are better I think than they were back in the day when I was part of the brewing industry in the UK. 1.4s

Yeah, I'm not a fan of nonalcoholic beers. I've tried a few and as you say, I kind of feel like I just drink something else, then rather have a beer. 2.5s It doesn't really make sense to me. I get it. People

used to argue that it was a sort of a peer pressure thing, that if you were you wanted to be seen to be drinking something that looked like everybody else was drinking, 1.5s but it was alcohol free. 1.2s We used to sell barbecue in Saudi Arabia 2.3s for a nation that was strictly no alcohol. Quite how our sales and marketing people at Bass had convinced them that they should drink this ursat's beer, 1.5s particularly bearing in mind it it really tasted bad. I don't know if that's a skill of sales and marketing, I suppose. What do I know? I'm just a simple scientist, 3.5s

I guess. Last question is, what are you kind of up to at the moment? Anything exciting happening in the beer world? There's always

things exciting happening, as I say. This is my fifth year now since retiring from the university advising Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, which means I go about 100 miles north of here. I'm in Davis, just to the west of Sacramento, so about 100 miles north, there's the original brewery in Chico, but also they have another brewery in North Carolina, a place called Mills River, and it is the single most beautiful brewery on the planet. It's an astonishing location, so I'm very proud to be doing that. I still do a lot of teaching on shorter courses for the university. A lot of those are available online 1.4s and so if you look at my name, Bamforth and UC Davis and brewing courses, you can get to those, and some of those now are available on coursera, 2.8s so I'm still doing a lot of that. When COVID kicked in, 2.1s we certainly learned how to do much more education online. And the beautiful thing about that is that whereas people before that had to come to Davis to study, maybe up to four or five months in Davis, well, that's four or five months that are away from the brewery. Whereas by doing it online, if you pace yourselves and do it properly, you can still be brewing your beer wherever you are in the world, but also have a good brewery education 2.1s through UC days, which I like to say is the number one brewery education. 3.2s I'll give a plug to Nottingham as well. I'm an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham as well, so let's mention them too. Awesome. Well, yeah. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate everything you've sort of I feel like I've learned a whole lot about beer, which is kind of the idea behind the whole podcast, is to talk about things I don't know a lot about and learn from people that are experts. So I really appreciate your time and I'll be looking out for that sign on any pubs I go to. And yeah, I really appreciate your time. So thank you very much and have a good rest of your day. All right. Thank you, David. Bye bye.

Cheers. Bye bye. 2.9s

The Traveling Chef Podcast

E2 S1 - Beer Brewing Expert Shares His Wisdom: Professor Charlie Bamforth

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