Maybe a year or two ago I was driving up to Sheffield with my old friend Mr Tiffen. He's a keen home brewer and general beer enthusiast, so I decided to wring every last bit of his beer knowledge from his mind. I recorded the conversation in the hope that I could make a reasonably informative blog post about it. It's a bit of an unusual post, but I'm sure you'll enjoy learning from a fellow enthusiast as much as I did. Pour yourself a pint or a dram, settle down in a comfy chair, and prepare to have your horizons broadened.
It's pretty long, so maybe keep the bottle handy for a top up.
David: Here we go with the magical beer interview with Mr. Tiffen. How are you, sir?
Mr. Tiffen: I'm well, thank you.
David: Good. I'm delighted to hear that.
Mr. Tiffen: Good.
David: Erm... I forgot my first question. Oh yeh, brewing!
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: Tell me about that.
Mr. Tiffen: Brewing is a very fun, therapeutic hobby and is a good way to make yourself tax free, really cheap, very tasty ale.
David: Awesome.
Mr. Tiffen: I've found that I can make ale as good if not better than the ale I drink in pubs.
David: I would agree with that. I remember your stout being the best stout I've ever tasted in my life. Still is.
Mr. Tiffen: That was my recipe. Four Shades of Stout. It's a good one that, I've made that twice.
David: What's in it?
Mr. Tiffen: That's a good question. What is in all beer, which is Maris Otter pale malt. Crystal malt, chocolate malt, dark malt, and oats.
David: Oats?
Mr. Tiffen: Oats, yes.
David: Sounds good. I was actually going to ask you about malt later on, but since you've just mentioned about forty different malts; tell me about malt.
Mr. Tiffen: Erm...
David: Especially pale malt because I've been reading about that.
Mr. Tiffen: Pale malt is the basis of all beer.
David: All beer?
Mr. Tiffen: All beer.
David: Beyond the realms of human imagination? There's nothing else you can make beer with?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, for it to be beer you have to have malted barley steeped to get the sugars out of it, so yeh, that's pretty much the basis of all beer. All beer is malted barley.
David: Is it always pale malt?
Mr. Tiffen: Normally pale malt is your stock malt. That's what you'll get your main fermentable sugars out of, and then you'll use other malts for differing flavours. All other malts are just different styles of roasting, so your chocolate malt is more heavily roasted than a pale malt. A caramalt is a...
David: A what malt?
Mr. Tiffen: Caramalt.
David: Caramalt?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: Like Caramel malt?
Mr. Tiffen: Essentially yes. It's toasted at a different temperature.
David: Would that be amber malt? Isn't that one?
Mr. Tiffen: It's a variation of it, yes. A variation of amber malt is caramalt.
David: So is a caramalt a type of malt that has caramel flavours, and amber malt is a kind of caramalt?
Mr. Tiffen: Basically, yes.
David: I see. That makes sense.
Mr. Tiffen: So pale malt is your stock malted barley, then you've got various different roasts of that malt, all the way down to your dark chocolate malts and black malt.
David: Sounds good. What would happen, theoretically... Well, not theoretically. Hypothetically... What would happen if you only used a really dark roasted malt, like black malt.
Mr. Tiffen: If you only used that? When you roast malt quite heavily you break a lot of what are called long chain starches, which is what the mashing process breaks down into simple sugars which can be fermented.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: You'll still have a lot of long chain starches in them (dark malts), but not as much as ones with a lower roast. So what you'll end up with is a very strong tasting, roasted flavoured beer that's quite weak.
David: Ok. Fascinating.
Mr. Tiffen: You get that in beer styles such as a mild.
David: Is that what a mild refers to? It's mild because it's not very strong?
Mr. Tiffen: That's correct, yes. Traditionally a mild is not very strong and they're normally dark beers. They're not exclusively dark beers, but they normally are. They contain a lot of the high roasted malts like the chocolate malts and the black malts.
David: So a stout would be a strong dark beer?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, stout would be a strong dark beer, but stout has a lot of oats and wheat in it as well as malted barley.
David: I had one recently that had roasted barley in it.
Mr. Tiffen: Yep, that's right, roasted barley and essentially porridge oats are what's used.
David: Is that what you had in your Four Shades of Stout?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, that had porridge oats in it.
David: Nice. Err... I was going to ask you about something else that you mentioned just then and I've forgotten what it was.
Mr. Tiffen: Mashing?
David: Mashing! That's the one. Not in the Yorkshire way which is to make a cup of tea, but mashing in a beery way.
Mr. Tiffen: Well, it's similar in a way. Mashing is the process that's used in extracting the fermentable and unfermentable sugars out of the complex starches which are in malt. It involves pouring hot water over the malt at a specific temperature. The temperature's very important to the profile of the beer you want to make.
David: So it's a sort of a fractional solution situation?
Mr. Tiffen: It is, sort of. I'll have to dig out an article for you that explains it better than I can. There's a lot of complex science behind it. In the starches in malted barley there are various different starches. There's really complex branch starches, and then there's still complex, but less complex chained starches that are just a big long chain. When you're mashing what you're essentially trying to do is break those chains into simple sugar molecules and the higher the temperature you mash at the more of the branch starches are broken off, and those branch starches are complex sugars which are unfermentable.
David: So would mashing at a higher temperature get you a sweeter beer?
Mr. Tiffen: It would get you a sweeter beer, but mashing at different temperatures results in more than just fermentable and unfermentable sugars. It affects the gelatiny of the proteins so....
David: Ok, what?
Mr. Tiffen: So...
David: What? What?
Mr. Tiffen: The proteins when you've done the boil will tend to all clog together and gelatinate together and fall out of the beer.
David: Is that what the finings are for?
Mr. Tiffen: Finings...
David: Let's come to that in a minute.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. The proteins in a beer you don't want too much of, but the more of it you have the more viscosity you'll have.
David: So it'll have more body to it?
Mr. Tiffen: Exactly, yes.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: But it'll also mean that you get more cloudiness in the beer which you don't want, you want clear beer really.
David: So the higher it is (the temperature) the more gelatinous the protein gets.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: So if it's hotter it'll be sweeter and thicker?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: And then at a cooler temperature you'll get more of the fermentable sugars out, so you get a stronger, less sweet tasting beer. A drier beer.
David: And presumably less body to it as well.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes. The sort of mash temperature you normally go for is between 65 and 69 degrees centigrade.
David: Ok, so not boiling then?
Mr. Tiffen: No, no.
David: That's surprised me. I know there's boiling stuff involved but I think that's later.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, you don't boil yet, boiling is once you've got your wort out. So wort is the sweet liquid...
David: Yeh, that tastes really biscuity.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, that's right.
David: It tastes like malted milk biscuits. I remember that.
Mr. Tiffen: It's the sweet liquid that you add the hops to and boil.
David: So when you've poured hot water over the malt then you've got wort. Is that right?
Mr. Tiffen: That's correct.
David: So what's sparging? It's one of my favourite words.
Mr. Tiffen: It is a cool word, and it's quite fun to do.
David: It is.
Mr. Tiffen: Sparging is essentially just rinsing the grain that you've been mashing for the past hour or so. So you mash it at the right temperature for an hour to ninety minutes, sometimes longer. Sorry, I'll try not to crash the car here...
David: Yes, it's a good idea not to do that.
Mr. Tiffen: And then you've got all of the right sugars out of the malted barley that you want. You'll drain off any of your mash liquor or mash, which is essentially wort.
David: At what point does it change from mash liquor to wort? Or is that the same thing?
Mr. Tiffen: Liquor is water, it's what brewers call water. It's just water.
David: A technical word for everything.
Mr. Tiffen: And wort is the sweet liquid that comes of the mash. Mash liquor's probably a bad term because there's probably no such thing.
David: I guess that could refer to it while it's in the process of changing from water with malt in it to wort.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, so you've got your sweet wort. You drain all that off as much as you can, into your boiler ready to boil, but also there'll be lots of sweet, converted sugars that are just sitting on the grain. Sparging is simply rinsing it off.
David: A bit like getting milk on your teabag.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: Random jack who I used to live with used to get very angry with his teabag for being a milk stealer and he insisted on not putting the milk in until the teabag had come out, because otherwise you're just wasting milk.
Mr. Tiffen: Makes sense.
David: He could have sparged his teabag with some extra hot water, but then he would have had weaker tea.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: Do you end up with weaker wort? Do you have to be careful how much water you use?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes. There's two methods of sparging. There's what they call fly sparging...
David: Like fly tipping?
Mr. Tiffen: A bit like that. It's essentially just showering it.
David: With water?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, hot water. Probably 75 to 80 degrees.
David: And it doesn't matter that it's a hotter temperature?
Mr. Tiffen: It doesn't matter because it's just flowing through it, it doesn't have enough time to do anything to the malt. You don't want it too hot though You wouldn't want it boiling because that will pull out some of the nastier flavours.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: Fly sparging is wher eyou just keep showering it and water drains off the bottom, and that's what a commercial brewery would do to sparge. You'd measure the gravity, which is just another word for density, of the liquor that comes off the bottom.
David: Is that with your little floating device?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: And what are you looking for there?
Mr. Tiffen: It depends on the beer. I think normally you're looking for about 1.20 but I'd need to look that up because I'm not a fly sparger.
David: When you put it like that it sounds like a good thing.
Mr. Tiffen: The gravity of water is 1.00.
David: Ok, so it's relative to water?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: So it's denser than the water?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes. The density's related to how much sugar's in it.
David: So what's your method of sparging?
Mr. Tiffen: I do batch sparging. Now there's advantages and disadvantages to that. Batch sparging is where you've drained off all the wort from your mash into your tun, then you calculate exactly how much water you need for the amount of grain that you've got in your tun. You'd do two batches normally and you'll dump so many liters of water on top of it after you've calculated the amount you need for your grain. You leave it for ten minutes then drain it out so it's rinsed out all the grain, then you do the same again. You know that that's the right amount because you've done a calculation.
David: So you're not watering down your wort too much.
Mr. Tiffen: Well, you're watering it down in the same wat, you're just doing it in batches rather than measuring it (the density).
David: I see.
Mr. Tiffen: The advantage of fly sparging is that you can increase what brewers call efficiency. You just keep draining it until you hit the right density level, so you can get more beer out of the grain, whereas the way I do it I just calculate and say "This is my brewery's efficiency" and if it is a bit more efficient then that just gets wasted.
David: So there's a big difference between brewing it as a hobby where you've got a whole day to make a batch.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, I'm only doing 25 litre batches. I might get 25.5 litre out of it if I have a bit better efficiency.
David: One extra pint.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's not worth messing about with.
David: I'm thinking it probably would be, but then I live in Norway where a pint costs about four hundred pounds.
Mr. Tiffen: So that's sparging for you.
David: So then you boil it?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes.
David: This is where the hops come in isn't it?
Mr. Tiffen: This is where the hops come in.
David: So tell me about hops.
Mr. Tiffen: Hops.
David: What are they? They're little things that grow in a hedge.
Mr. Tiffen: Hops are the flowers on what they call bines.
David: Bines?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, which are essentially like a crawling plant like ivy. They grow quite fast, they'll grow in a season.
David: Do they grow in a hedge?
Mr. Tiffen: Neturally they grow in hedges, yes.
David: Awesome.
Mr. Tiffen: But commercially they just grow like runner beans on big frames.
David: Oh, really?
Mr. Tiffen: And when it's time they just rip them down and it's the flower...
David: I guess it's like peas.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, that's right. Hops are just the flowers of the hop plant.
David: If they lift the flowers on would they turn into a kind of beery pea?
Mr. Tiffen: Erm... I've no idea.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: You'd have to look that up.
David: I think I will.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't think anyone would waste it in such a way.
David: It'd be awesome to have beer peas. Maybe that's what wasabi peas are.
Mr. Tiffen: Possibly.
David: You could potentially have them as a snack with your beer. I think that's probably unlikely though. Now that I've said it out loud it doesn't sound as good.
Mr. Tiffen: You're a nutter.
David: Oh well.
Mr. Tiffen: So it's a flower that's full of alpha acids and that's what gives beer its bitterness.
David: And that balances the sweetness?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes. A hop has to be dried after its picked. That's what... they used to call them oast houses. You'll see a lot of houses in southern england are.. they're now posh converted houses... but they're like a small cooling tower, if you've ever seen cooling towers at a power station. Like a small version of that. They'd light a fire at the bottom and all the hops are layed out in stacks on top and it dries them out.
David: Would they get a bit of smoke on?
Mr. Tiffen: They probably did back in the day. Modern ones are all electric so you don't get any smoky flavour from hops.
David: Even if you dry them over a smoky fire?
Mr. Tiffen: I don't think so. There wasn't any intention to do so.
David: Not like with the peat smoke in kilning the malt for whisky?
Mr. Tiffen: No. So in the boil your bittering hops would go in sometimes at the start of the boil, or earlish on in the boil because the longer you boil them the more of the alpha acids you bring out of the flower into your wort. At this stage its still wort, it's always wort.
David: So why are we not drinking wort?
Mr. Tiffen: You could drink wort, but it would be very weird tasting. It'd be very sweet and sickly.
David: Oh, because it's not fermented yet?
Mr. Tiffen: Exactly, yes. As soon as you add yeast to wort it becomes beer.
David: So the second you add the yeast it's beer?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, because techincally it starts fermenting as soon as you hit it.
David: I suppose it does.
Mr. Tiffen: As soon as it starts fermenting it's a very, very weak beer, but until you pitch the yeast (it's called pitching) then it's wort.
David: It sounds like it's something to be done from a distance.
Mr. Tiffen: You can do it from a distance.
David: It could be quite fun.
Mr. Tiffen: It can be done from a distance. Sometimes I pour it from a pot from a height just to make it feel more pitchy. So at this stage you're boiling. The boil serves two purposes. It's to boil the bitterness out of your hops. The point of your bittering hops is predominantly the bitterness. You'll get a bit of the floral flavour, but when you boil something for a long time any subtle flavours like the floral nature of the hops is boiled out of it.
David: Like over boiled cabbage. It doesn't really taste of anything, it's just kind of wet and slimy.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, and that's not the point at this stage. The second reason that you boil for a long time is to bring all of the proteins out of the wort.
David: These gelatinous proteins again. Have they come from the barley?
Mr. Tiffen: They've come from the malted barley, yes. You don't want proteins for several reasons. it makes your beer cloudy, It gives it a sort of harsh, bitter taste, a biscuity taste. Some proteins are good. Some breweries will add finings after the brew is done, but adding finings is a bit of a no no.
David: And what are finings?
Mr. Tiffen: Finings are essentially gelatine.
David: Oh, ok.
Mr. Tiffen: Some breweries use them from fish guts. You get finings from fish guts. They essentially form a gelatine in the beer which takes any small protein particles. The small protein particles are attracted to it and it drops out. But finings generally are a no no, they're something you shouldn't have to use if you've done your brew right. If you've done your boil right all of the proteins should clump together and drop out, and also a little bit of proteins gives the beer a nice texture, a nice body, and a hint of those flavours can be quite nice. For an artisan brewery and a home brewer finings are a no no. Sometimes I've used them before when I've ballsed up a batch.
David: Didn't we use some sort of moss when we made the Benjamin Laurence pale ale?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, you should use a protoflock tablet or irish moss.
David: How does it work with moss? Is it gelatine again? Is there gelatine in moss?
Mr. Tiffen: I'd have to look it up again, but it causes a chemical reaction which encourages the proteins to fall out of the solution.
David: Wow, that's so weird.
Mr. Tiffen: You add that right at the end.
David: And what was the tablet we used?
Mr. Tiffen: That's a protoflock tablet. That's a commercial version of the irish moss.
David: A kind of concentrated moss tablet?
Mr. Tiffen: Essentially yes.
David: Bonus. Can you tell me about different kinds of hops? I've read about cascade hops which apparently have a bit of a grapefruity flavour.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, that's right, cascade hops have a fruity flavour. You've got saaz hops, which have got lemony sort of summery flavour. All these different hops that you would use you would generally use at the aroma hopping stage. That might be anywhere between the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the boil...
David: So the bittering hops you just want alpha acids and it doesn't matter...
Mr. Tiffen: Well, you want the right amoung of alpha acids because that affects the profile of your beer. You want the right amount of alpha acids to balance the sweetness of your unfermented sugars.
David: At this stage are we getting any flavour from the hops other than the bitterness?
Mr. Tiffen: Not much, no. You'll get some, but not much. Mainly bitterness.
David: So it's not a big factor in the taste?
Mr. Tiffen: No, but you will choose a hop that has the right alpha acid content for the beer profile that you want. So if you're making a dry beer you want less bittering hops. If you're going for a sweet beer, so you've got lots of unfermentable sugars in there, you'll want more bittering hops to balance that.
David: That seems sort of the wrong way round.
Mr. Tiffen: No, if you think about it you've got a dry beer you haven't go much sweetness in it.
David: So this is about how much sugar is in it that you need to balance, rather than we're aiming for sweet so...
Mr. Tiffen: Think about it as a weighing scale, on one side you've got sweetness and on the other side you've got bitterness. If you've got a dry beer you've not got much unfermentable sugar on the scale so you don't need much bittering hops on the other side to balance it.
David: So there's just not as much on the scale. Yes.
Mr. Tiffen: If you've got a very sweet beer you need a lot of bittering hops to balance it out otherwise you get a sweet sickly mess.
David: I would have thought that if you want your final beer to be sweet, the intuitive thing to me would have been to not have too much bitterness because i would want it to be heavier on that side.
Mr. Tiffen: No, no. You want good balance. You want your weighing scale to be roughly in the middle but obviously it's down to the profile of the recipe you're making. You want it to be tilted maybe one way or the other, but the center is the rough guide and then you'll tweak it either way.Some hops will have loads of alpha acids in so you might need a hop that has a lot of alpha acids and not much of it, or you might need a lot of a hop with a lower alpha acid content for your bittering.
David: And that would have more or less the same effect?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes. it's important when you get your hops to measure your alpha acid becasue it's not just down to the type of hop, but from season to season and bineyard to bineyard you'll have different profiles of hop.
David: Bineyard. I like that word.
Mr. Tiffen: There's a whole science behind hop growing and hop drying that I don't know about. We'll have to investigate.
David: One day, if we ever meet a hop farmer, we'll have to have a word.
Mr. Tiffen: They mainly come from europe now. Germany and Austria.
David: The hops do, or the hop farmers?
Mr. Tiffen: The hops do. You do get some in England, but less so. The whole of southern England used to be filled with hop farms, but you don't get it so much now.
David: That's a shame.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: Oh well. So aroma hops: What's going on there?
Mr. Tiffen: Aroma hops are just getting the floral flavours out of the hop really. And I really enjoy hoppy beers so...(I deleted a bit here by accident. I assume he was talking about using a lot of aroma hops) ...turned off the boil, so it's just stopped boiling.
David: Oh, ok.
Mr. Tiffen: So you dump tons of hops in so you get lots of floral flavours at that stage.
David: So after you switch it off boiling you chuck another load of hops in. Would you then immediately drain the boiler?
Mr. Tiffen: No, no. I'd leave it for another five or ten minutes to steep the hops.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: Get all of those lively hoppy flavours out of it.
David: Awesome.
Mr. Tiffen: It's well worth it.
David: So is this the stage where the type of hop makes more of a difference to the flavour?
Mr. Tiffen: It makes a big difference, yeh.
David: Fuggles!
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, fuggles is a very earthy flavour.
David: Is it? Did we use those?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, we've used fuggles before. A lot of traditional English ales are fuggle filled.
David: Are they?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, fuggles and goldings are popular in a combo.
David: Which ones did we use in the Benjamin Lawrence?
Mr. Tiffen: I've no idea, I can't remember. I'd have to look at the recipe.
David: I remember you mentioned fuggles. Fuggles and sparge.
Mr. Tiffen: They're good words.
David: It's worth making beer just to get to say these words.
Mr. Tiffen: I'd agree. So this is where you'd choose your exotic hops. Cascade you get a very sort of appley flavour from.
David: Really?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: I didn't notice apple.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, appley, pineappley...
David: Grapefruit was the main...
Mr. Tiffen: Grapefruit, yeh, Then saaz hops are an Austrian hop that are used a lot in Belgian and German beers. They a bit of a sort of lemony, limey flavour. A zing to it. What else have we got? You've got your goldings... there's loads out there.
David: I had a little look on the internet and the list's as long as your leg.
Mr. Tiffen: Yes. Hoppy beers I'm a real big fan of. A lot of people do what we call dry hopping, which is where you dump hops in either at the fermentation with the fermenting, or even in the barrel. You'll have dry hops in the barrel just to keep that floral sort of aroma ever more present.
David: Presumably those aroma compounds are going to break down with the boiling.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. The more I brew I find the more and more hops I add to the end of the beer, I'm dumping tons of the stuff in. You get a bit addicted to it. When you get a pint of English ale and you put your nose in it, the first thing you want to smell is just this massive hit of hoppy aroma. It's quite addictive I think. I think it is addictive, Ï don't know.
David: I think it is. It's like that hallucinogenic mould in libraries.
Mr. Tiffen: It's like chilis I think. Jamie Oliver says he's addicted to chilis.
David: Yes.
Mr. Tiffen: I'm addicted to hops.
David: At the coffee shop I used to work in we had a guy come in and he looked at the menu and said "Your steak sandwhich looks delicious, but if you haven't got any chili sauce I'm going to have to go somewhere else."
Mr. Tiffen: Really?
David: Yeh, he actually said "I'm addicted to chili, if you don't have any chili sauce I'm going to have to go somewhere else."
Mr. Tiffen: Did you have chili sauce?
David: We did.
Mr. Tiffen: Cool.
David: It was a bit mild, but he enjoyed his sandwhich.
Mr. Tiffen: Good, good.
David: And we made a few quid.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, so there's no particular science about aroma hopping, it's what sort of flavours you want in your beer
really. You know, floral, grapefruity, zingy flavours.
David: At the aroma stage is it going to affect the balance that you talked about?
Mr. Tiffen: No, because you've got your bitterness and your sweetness sorted at that point. You get a tad more bitterness out of your hops if you add it in the last fifteen minutes, maybe, but negligible. Fifteen minutes isn't enough to draw alpha acids out of a hop really, so you shouldn't get any bitterness at that stage.
David: One thing I was speculating on , which I think I might have said I was going to ask you about, was using the natural bitterness in the darker roasted malts to balance things. I was having a bit of a guess because one of them had used a..... I can't remember which one it was now... They'd used a typical base of pale malt or crystal malt or whatever, and then they'd used some darker malt in there and I couldn't smell much hoppiness with it (I messed up the recording and missed a few seconds here) and wondered if that they'd use a little bit less hops.
Mr. Tiffen: Quite possibly if they were divising a particularly clever recipe. It would do, although...
David: Have I come up with an idea that's cleverer than any brewers have thought of do you think?
Mr. Tiffen: Possibly... well... you're not... A heavily roasted barley bitterness is a different sort of bitterness really. It's not the same.
David: Oh yeh, I think this might have been the one with the roasted barley in it.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's not like the bitterness you get from hops, which is a very sort of acidic bitterness.
David: Yeh, it's like a harsh bitterness.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's a harsh bitterness, so it will affect the flavour profile.
David: Astringent? Would that be the word for it?
Mr. Tiffen: Maybe. I dunno.
David: Quite sharply bitter.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. It would affect the flavour certainly, and you use different malts to affect the flavour profile, definitely, but there's only so far you can go with that as a bittering compound without it just tasting horrible I would have though.
David: Presumably with something like a black malt which tastes sort of burnt you'd get a charcoaly bitterness.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's not a nice bitterness. I guess the concept that you're alluding to is a bit like saying to a chef "You're making like a chocolate flan or something and instead of adding more lemon to it to balance it out, just burn it a bit more."
David: What kind of chocolate flan is this?
Mr. Tiffen: Exactly, so what I'm saying is it's probably not the way that you'd try and do it. You can only go so far with it without it tasting horrible basically.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: Or like making a cake and saying instead of adding more lemon to make it bitter just burn it. You wouldn't do that.
David: Yeh, I get what you mean. Yes. You want to go to a different restaurant there. You've clearly been sold a forgery.
Mr. Tiffen: I know.
David: I was just trying to think of a similar thing in coffee where a darker more heavily roasted coffee will give you a stronger more bitter flavour, and also brewing it longer will give you a stronger bitter flavour but not in the same way. An over brewed coffee is nothing like a darker roasted coffee, it's just a very different thing that's going on.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, so you'd have to be careful with that strategy I think.
David: I think so too. I'll just check my little notes because I think I've nearly asked all my questions. Oh, just one little thing going back to malt: Is the malt used for beer different to the malt used for whisky?
Mr. Tiffen: No.
David: Not at all?
Mr. Tiffen: Not really, no. Whisky's essentially distilled beer, so no, it's not. the big difference between the beer used to make whisky and the beer for drinking beer is the yeast used.
David: Ok. And there's no hops in whisky.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. The yeast's very different.
David: So that brings us to the next thing to talk about which is yeast.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeast! Yeast is very complex.
David: It is, it's like a little fungal mouldy thing isn't it?
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know as much about yeast as many other home brewers do. I use a very stable yeast, S-04, which is a favourite home brewers dried yeast.
David: Sounds like an explosive.
Mr. Tiffen: It does, doesn't it.
David: We're using S-04 because it's more stable.
Mr. Tiffen: S-04 stands for Safale-04.
David: It stands for what?
Mr. Tiffen: Safale.
David: Safale?
Mr. Tiffen: Yes, it's a strain made by a company and its used...
David: Used for making ale?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: Safe ale?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. It has a relatively neutral flavour, so yeast affects the flavour of your beer quite a lot and this is fairly neutral so I use it for pretty much everything because I know...
David: Because you're aiming more for the hoppy...
Mr. Tiffen: Some people like experimenting with yeast, they cultivate their own, they grow it from other bottles of beer. I've done that once actually. I got a bottle of Hopback... I think it was Cropcircle.
David: I haven't heard of that one.
Mr. Tiffen: Hopback Brewery. And it was a conditioned bottle, so I drank the beer and in the bottom of the bottle you get a bit of beer with all the deposits in, which is essentially yeast. I tipped it into a sterilized container, added some wort to it which I'd just made from some spray malt, which is like dried... essentially wort that's had all the water evapourated off. It's like powder. You mix it with water and it makes a sweet wort.
David: Can you make a beer out of that?
Mr. Tiffen: You can. In fact there is a style of home brewing which uses it.
David: Is it any good?
Mr. Tiffen: No, it's not that great to be honest. It's pretty nasty. The process involves getting all of the water off it kind of affects the flavour quite significantly. It's a bit synthetic, so it's not brillint.
David: A bit like plastic cheese in burgers.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, a bit like that I guess.
David: Not quite as good as a slice of Stilton.
Mr. Tiffen: No, not quite.
David: Metaphors. We're getting philosophical.
Mr. Tiffen: So I poured the wort on my little bit of beer deposit, sloshed it around and then kept it at twenty degrees for five days. Pulled the cork out of the bottle and sloshed it around to get air in it every day.
David: To get air in it?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: Do they need air?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeast essentially takes sugar and oxygen and makes alcohol and carbon dioxide. Without oxygen it can't reproduce.
David: I wouldn't have thought about it breathing.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. Then after about a week I had a bout a centimeter thick cake of yeast.
David: Really?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. Then I poured...
David: Like sludge in the bottom?
Mr. Tiffen: I poured boiled distilled water into little sterilized water bottles, took a bit of yeast into each one and I can store that in the fridge for probably a month before it goes bad, and you can use that in your brewing.
David: Did you use it?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, I used it, yeh.
David: Was it good?
Mr. Tiffen: It was nice.
David: Did it taset different from your usual yeast?
Mr. Tiffen: It did, it had an almost creamy texture.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: Like a sort of creamy biscuity flavour to it. Like i say, I don't know a great deal about all the strains of yeast and the different profiles.
David: I heard you used to get bakeries built around breweries and the bakers would be given foam off the top of the fermenting stuff that would have bits of yeast in it, and they'd scoop that up and turn it into bread some how.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, possibly. You can use brewers yeast for baking, but probably not the other way round.
David: I've made ginger beer with baking yeast, but then that's a different situation I guess.
Mr. Tiffen: So as well as different flavour profiles, different yeasts have different abilities to ferment for longer before dying.
David: Is that their own alcohol tolerance essentially?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, so yeast will ferment, will turn sugar into alcohol, to the point where it creates so much alcohol it kills itself.
David: Crazy yeast.
Mr. Tiffen: The strongest strains of yeast will be able ferment out to about 14% alcohol.
David: Like a wine?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's called a barley wine. It's what you use to make whisky. Some people drink barley wine, but only weirdos really. Absolute freaks. It's not very nice.
David: I've got a bottle of Dark Island Special Reserve that's about 14%, possibly a bit stronger.
Mr. Tiffen: I find it very sweet, because the nature of having to have so many fermentable sugars in your beer, which you need lots of to make a strong beer, it pulls out a lot of the unfermentable sugars as well and you get kind of a sweet sickly... eeugh, I don't like barley wine.
David: There was one of the beers that I tasted at a beer tasting last year, it was the final one and it was the strongest one, it was about 14% I think. It was like the barley wine that you've just described, and that one to me tasted of Marmite.
Mr. Tiffen: Ok.
David: I think I put in my tating notes: "Smell: Smells of Marmite, Taste: Tastes of Marmite, Aftertaste: Marmite. This is some sort of Marmite liqueur."
Mr. Tiffen: That can be two things: you can get some yeast flavour profiles that are quite marmitey, but you also get that if you've left the beer on the yeast cake too long. So when the yeast drops out the yeast cells eventually die, which is fine, but if you leave it too long they'll break down and the cells will burst.
David: Oh, right.
Mr. Tiffen: And when they burst, the chemical that's in the yeast cell has got a very...
David: Marmite flavour?
Mr. Tiffen: A very chemically flavour to it, but also Marmite flavour, yes. So you'll end up with nasty, chemically taste in your beer. It tastes like ester.
David: Like Marmite and nasty chemicals?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it tastes like TCP and ugh.
David: Ugh.
Mr. Tiffen: You don't want it. So don't leave your fermented beer on your yeast cake too long if you can avoid it.
David: So When they're making marmite, is that just the yeast cake from the bottom or do they do something else with it?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, so when you're making a beer the yeast will multiply hundreds of times.
David: Oh, so you end up with a whole lot more yeast than you put in?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh. Fermenting beer is always a net gain, a net producer of yeast.
David: Nice.
Mr. Tiffen: You end up with quite a lot. So I'll chuck a little packet of yeast into my big fermenter bucket and I'll end up with half an inch to an inch of yeast in the bottom.
David: Is that all dead?
Mr. Tiffen: No, no a lot of it's still alive.
David: So you can scoop that up and use it again?
Mr. Tiffen: You can scoop it. One thing I've done before, which a lot of home brewers do, is a back to back brew. I'll dump the wort from a new brew right on top of it and just keep fermenting.
David: That sounds interesting.
Mr. Tiffen: There is risk of infection doing that, so you wouldn't want to do it more than once I wouldn't say, but it's possible.
David: And would that create just the same type of beer if it's the same type of yeast, or would that be a different kind of flavour?
Mr. Tiffen: You can put a different beer on. I normally wouldn't put a lighter beer on top of a darker beer, I'd do it the other way around. Purely because if you had like a stout and you dumped a load of pale ale on it you'd get traces of stout in it.
David: Stouty pale ale.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, It'd be a bit weird.
David: Could you make home made Marmite?
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know how Marmite is produced from a yeast cake. I suspect it's just boiled off and dried and then...
David: Turned into some sludge?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: Put in the sludging machine. We should Google it.
Mr. Tiffen: We should. I don't see why you couldn't.
David: Yeh, I think we should google it.
Mr. Tiffen: It probably isn't worth it because Marmite's so cheap and you probably need an awful lof of yeast to make a little bit of Marmite. I don't know. I'd have to look it up.
David: Let's do that. Hang on, I was going to ask something else. Oh yeh: What about weird beer?
Mr. Tiffen: Weird beer?
David: Yeh. Like that garlic beer that we had.
Mr. Tiffen: It was a bit...
David: It was essentially some sort of beer with a clove of garlic floating in it wasn't it?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh... I'm not too keen...
David: I wasn't keen. Especially when I thought I was just having a nice garlicy pint and then the garlic clove touched my lips. It caught me off guard, I was a bit disgusted.
Mr. Tiffen: I remember. To me it's a bit gimmicky to add flavours to your beer post ferment. It's just my personal taste, but I think it's a bit gimmicky. Some people might add Ribena to it and have like Ribena ale. It's a bit like making alcopops I think.
David: Is it?
Mr. Tiffen: I think so.
David: You get stuff like strawberry beer and raspberry beer and stuff like that.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't do mixing. I don't do cocktails.
David: You're a wise man.
Mr. Tiffen: Like whisky, the only thing I'll add to it is a few drops of water.
David: Yeh, I'm with you on that.
Mr. Tiffen: I drink straight, I won't have a rum and coke, why drink rum and coke?
David: If you have to put coke in it to make it palatable...
Mr. Tiffen: It was nasty in the first place.
David: You shouldn't have bought it. You've wasted your money.
Mr. Tiffen: You have wasted your money.
David: Flog it on Ebay to a gullible fool.
Mr. Tiffen: The only mixing that is valid is adding tonic water to gin.
David: I'm with you there.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know why, but that seems ok.
David: That's a very interesting thing. I think there must be some sort of chemical reaction between the quinine in the tonic water and something in the gin, because gin I find revolting. Tonic water I find revolting. Put them together and somehow you've got this magical potion of loveliness.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, that's the only cocktail I'm willing to drink.
David: What about a mojito? That's got herbs in it or something.
Mr. Tiffen: Woofters. That's for woofters. No, not keen. So for me, adding flavours to a beer post-ferment, you're just making an alcopop really.
David: There was a video that i came across, it was a guy, I haven't actually seen him for a few year, a guy called Nick Law who's in Sheffield. Runs Emmanuales, a new micro or nano brewery, I'm not quite sure. He is commercially available now, he's got licensed and stuff, and there's a video of him experimenting and he had some old coffee beans lying around so he put them in a little muslin bag and chucked them in the coffee while it was fermenting, in the brew.
Mr. Tiffen: Wow.
David: To me that sounded slightly more sensible than putting Ribena in it or something.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh... A friend of mine who's a keen brewer recently made a christmas brew, and something he tried doing which I could get on board with was he tried separately, aside from making the ale, he boiled up some prunes and some figs and some raisins just in water with a bit of sugar and got this sweet, reduced liquor at the end of it. And then he fermented that seperately so he had this really sweet, pruney flavour syrup and he made his beer, pitched his yeast and added in his pruney, fermenty stuff with the erm...
David: I could see that working.
Mr. Tiffen: So he's tried that this year.
David: I could see that working.
Mr. Tiffen: Generally adding prunes in with the boil of your beer... you just never get the pruney flavour out.
David: Is that what they do with crhistmas beers?
Mr. Tiffen: Erm... A Christmas ale is normally just an ale with lots of erm... with a very sweet profile. So you'd put a lot of malt in that brings out a lot of sweetness, you'll steep it at quite a high temperature.
David: I find christmas ales... Some of them are really good. If I'm going to not enjoy it it'll be because it's too sweet and too sort of treacley.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: What about that banana bread beer? Have you had that?
Mr. Tiffen: I think I have had that.
David: I don't think I approve of that.
Mr. Tiffen: Well, I don't like it, I'm not sure how it's made to be honest. I suspect...
David: They just chuck some banana bread in when they ferment it.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know, it might be the strain of yeast that gives it that flavour. You do get banana flavours from yeast.
David: There's a bit of an interesting flavour right now, what's that smell?
Mr. Tiffen: What is that? It's not me.
David: It wasn't me.
Mr. Tiffen: I think we must be passing a farm or a sewer or something.
David: It doesn't smell like a farm. That's an unhealthy smell.
Mr. Tiffen: We need to stop at a service station.
David: Oh yeh.
Mr. Tiffen: We just went past one.
David: Oh, that was a mistake.
Mr. Tiffen: Warwick might have one.
David: Where's Warwick? Where are we now?
Mr. Tiffen: I dunno, I'll have a look.... What?
David: I'm just trying to think of other questions to ask you.
Mr. Tiffen: We've exhausted the beery questions.
David: I'm thinking about barrel aging beers.
Mr. Tiffen: Oh yeh. It's quite common.
David: Like you get cask conditioned, bottle conditioned, these kind of things. What are they referring to?
Mr. Tiffen: Cask conditioned is simply post ferment, you dump the beer into a keg. You take it off he yeast cake, put it into your keg...
David: Say that again, I wasn't paying attention.
Mr. Tiffen: You take your beer off your yeast cake, out of your fermenter, put it into your keg. There will be some yeast in suspension in that beer, and it will very slightly continue to ferment in your keg. Normally you'd keep that under pressure and your remaining fermentation brings off a bit of CO2.
David: Oh, and that's how it gets slightly carbonated?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, cos it's under pressure it gets carbonated. Bottle conditioned is exactly the same...
David: But in a bottle?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh , in a bottle. What you tend to to when you're bottle conditioning beer is take the yeast off and add a little bit more sugar, just normal sugar to your beer which gets the yeast going again and you get that little bit more fermenting to get your carbonation.
David: I've heard of that in ginger beer making.
Mr. Tiffen: In a keg you generally don't need to do that because the remaining fermentation, because there's so much of it, will produce enough CO2. Home brewers tend to add sugar because it's such small qualitites. I don't add sugar because I force carbonate my beer using a CO2 cannister. That's technically not cask conditioned, that's technically keg conditioned.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: So a cask is what you' call inert, so there's no external factors, it's just in the cask under its own pressure and sealed. A keg is gassed.
David: Ok.
Mr. Tiffen: So that's the difference between a keg and a cask. I only gas it at very low pressures, just to carbonate it and store it, you don't want it too bubbly.
David: No. I had a stout recently....
Mr. Tiffen: Stout's interesting, you don't use pure CO2 to carbonate it.
David: Don't you?
Mr. Tiffen: No, you use a 70/30 CO2/nitrogen mix. 70% nitrogen and 30% CO2.
David: And what would happen if you used pure carbon dioxide?
Mr. Tiffen: Nothing. Some do, bottle conditioned ones are pure carbon dioxide.
David: But if you force carbonate it?
Mr. Tiffen: The nitrogen gives it that creaminess like you get in Guiness. That's the nitrogen.
David: interesting.
Mr. Tiffen: It creates smaller bubbles.
David: So is it nitrogen in a widget?
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know about widgets. Widgets are silly. Something that was invented in the 80s to try and sell nasty bitter.
David: Nice. It makes your can overflow.
Mr. Tiffen: It does, yeh.
David: And then you've poured half your beer on the floor before you've even started. Ripoff.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, your can just ejaculates all over your jumper.
David: I bet that's how they make their money, that's their profit. Like you want four pints, you've drank your first four but you've spilled a quarter of each one onto the floor making it essentially three pints, so you have another pint and then they're in the money.
Mr. Tiffen: That must be how it works.
David: It's like how Tabasco make money on the little bit left in the bottom of the bottle. You buy your tiny bottle of Tabasco and use a little bit and then forget it's there. A year later you're like "Oh, it's out of date. Buy a new bottle."
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: The thing with this stout that I tried, it was the Sortefår Stout, which is one of the Berentsen's ones that I'm working my way though, quite a cheap Norwegian stout. It actually had some decent flavours in it, but the thing that ruined it for me was it was a bit too fizzy and it had like a carbonated taste, like the flavour...
Mr. Tiffen: It's probably been carbonated too much.
David: Yeh, that's what I was thinking. It was like the flavour that's in sparkling water that isn't in normal water.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, I know what you mean. It's just been over carbonated. It's easy to do. In bottle conditioning it can be easy to do if you just add too much sugar to your bottle.
David: This was in a bottle, but I don't know if it was bottle conditioned.
Mr. Tiffen: You can tell it it's bottle conditioned because if you don't pour it carefully you end up with a load of gunk in your beer.
David: Yeh, it wasn't bottle conditioned then. There was no gunk in there.
Mr. Tiffen: That's what's known as bright beer, it's not bottle conditioned.
David: Bright beer? That's another word I've learned today.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's normally been stored in a keg, conditioned in the keg and then they just draw it off clear into a bottle.
David: Do they then force carbonate it?
Mr. Tiffen: The way they bottle it is they pressurize the bottle and then cap it with the pressure in it.
David: Good stuff. I'll just check my notes. So we're nearly there, I've just got two more questions for you.
Mr. Tiffen: Go on then.
David: Er... I've just read them and I've forgot what they are.
Mr. Tiffen: Favourite beer?
David: No, you're favourite bit of the brewing process.
Mr. Tiffen: Erm... That's a difficult question.
David: Is it sparging?
Mr. Tiffen: Weirdly I quite enjoy weighing out all of the malt at the start, getting my recipe right.
David: That's quite cool. I can see that.
Mr. Tiffen: The crushed malt sort of flowers up and fills the air with that smell, so there's that, but I also quite enjoy the start of the boil, so the sparge has just happened and you've got that sort of sweet biscuity smell in the room from your mash, and your boil's quite nice because it's quite a nice time to relax. You've weighed out your hops, all of your wort's in there now and you're just waiting.
David: You can get the kettle on, make yourself a coffee.
Mr. Tiffen: Or pour yourself a pint, which is what I normally do.
David: Nice.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, probably weighing out the grain and the sparging is quite enjoyable.
David: And then the final question. Probably. I've come across and I've been reading about top fermented beer.
Mr. Tiffen: What fermented?
David: Top fermented I think.
Mr. Tiffen: Top fermented?
David: Yeh.
Mr. Tiffen: Dunno what that means.
David: As opposed to bottom fermented. I might have just made it up, or mis-translated it.
Mr. Tiffen: I can't imagine what top fermented would mean.
David: I remember at school them saying about different kinds of yeasts doing more of the fermenting at either the top or the bottom of the stuff.
Mr. Tiffen: Possibly. It's something I've not heard of. Sorry, I can't answer that question.
David: Well, the Norwegian word was "overgjært" which means either top fermented or over fermented.
Mr. Tiffen: Ok.
David: Would over fermented mean anything?
Mr. Tiffen: You could over ferment a beer.
David: Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Mr. Tiffen: Well, normally you ferment a beer until it's finished fermenting.
David: Yeh, so what would over fermenting it be?
Mr. Tiffen: Dunno.
David: Oh, right.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know. Dunno.
David: Would it mean leaving it on the yeast cake possibly?
Mr. Tiffen: It could do if you want to get some of those weird flavours out. But it's not really fermenting it at that stage, so I'm not sure the makes sense.
David: Maybe they're just making up stuff.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know, I'd have to look it up. Sorry that's where my expertise ends.
David: Oh, right. Well, there's a lot of expertise there and I'm glad we've covered it all. Anything else you want to add?
Mr. Tiffen: Erm... No, I guess the key thing to understand is how the different types of complex starches break down into fermentable and unfermentable sugars. That's the key to getting your beer profile right.
David: Oh, I'll ask you about balance as well. Have I done that?
Mr. Tiffen: Well, we've talked about it a lot.
David: Yeh, forget it. Do you have a favourite commercially available beer?
Mr. Tiffen: Favourite commercially available? Well, I'll tell you what I drink a lot at the moment when I've not got home brewed stock. I don't know if it's my favourite. It's Banks's Bitter because it's a really good stock bitter.
David: And what exactly is a bitter? I found this out recently. It's a pale malt type ale...
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, it's basically an ale, but it just has your standard pale malt and then a bit of caramalt to make it slightly darker balanced. It doesn't really have any other fancy malts in it to add all these extra flavours.
David: Just quite plain, bog standard, cheap...
Mr. Tiffen: Well, I quite like bitter.
David: I quite like bitter as well. I'm looking forward to a bitter with my tea.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: Didn't you need a piss?
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, but I don't like McDonalds.
David: What?
Mr. Tiffen: I'm waiting for one with a Burger King, so I was hoping to go to Warwick. Where are we?
David: I don't know.
Mr. Tiffen: Near Warwick?
David: We're near Silverstone. Where's that?
Mr. Tiffen: Oh right, we're near Silverstone.
David: I just saw a sign for it back there.
Mr. Tiffen: We are near Warwick then.
David: Is this Warwick services?
Mr. Tiffen: No that's Northampton.
David: Oh, right.
Mr. Tiffen: We'll go to the next one.
David: Ok. I'm getting hungry. Genuinely final question now: When are you going to finish building your brewery?
Mr. Tiffen: I don't know. I've nearly finished building the steps now.
David: Yeh, I heard you started in the middle.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh.
David: Is that logical?
Mr. Tiffen: It seemed sensible at the time. I thought I'd do them a bit differently. Why not start in the middle eh?
David: I don't know. I'd have thought the plan would be start at the bottom and work your way up.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, traditionally that's what you'd do, but I started in the middle. Built up and down at the same time.
David: Ah. Did you get it done quicker that way?
Mr. Tiffen: No. The middle's quite difficult to reach.
David: You don't seem to have got it done very quickly. Get it finished.
Mr. Tiffen: I know. Hopefully this summer.
David: Awesome. I'm coming for a brew day when it's done.
Mr. Tiffen: Yeh, definitely.
David: Nice. Mr. Tiffen, thank you very much.
Mr. Tiffen: No problem, any time. It was a long interview.
David: It was quite long.
Mr. Tiffen: I don't like the M1's traffic problems.
David: Oh, it's still going. Hour and five minutes that was.
Mr. Tiffen: Gosh.
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