Not just a handy word if you’re playing a game of Scrabble... Zymology is the study of the chemistry involved in fermentation by every brewer’s favourite friends... Yeast!

I last left you with the brew day over, the delicious, sweet hopped wort aerated and on its way into a fermenter. The yeast is added to this wort on its way to the 10000 litre vessel and it’s these little guys that are so important! Without them the beer would not be, it would be sweet and bitter with no carbonation, no alcohol and a completely different bunch of flavours.

I sit here now in the Brewhouse Control Room, my nasal passage accosted by the heady aroma of hops. Today is one of the five planned brewdays for our New World Pale Ale, Lumford. This is a beer that we have spent a good six months planning for. Various brews to assess the interplay between ingredients and fine-tune what is becoming one of our best beers.

Andrea is to my left, gloves on and breaking up kilogram upon kilogram of deliciously aromatic hop flowers, careful not to get the resin on his fingers (otherwise, everything he touches will end up with sticky, yellow-green fingerprints all over it!). We’re an hour and a half into the brew at the moment, but I’ll fill you in on the day so far...

Everyone arrives around 7.45 and the steam boiler is turned on. We all have a bit of a chat about what beers we’ve drunk the previous night, dance a bit of a jig (usually to Metallica) to get the blood pumping and then head to our respective parts of the brewery to do various jobs, whether it’s bottling or cleaning or racking beer into cask or cleaning or collecting yeast or cleaning, there’s generally a lot of cleaning going on...
The first part of actual brewing involves us mixing the milled malt with hot water. This process is known as mashing (not to be confused with moshing... if you flail around to some hardcore rock music in the presence of both hot water and milled grains, I am sure you would get sufficient mixing, but your brewing career will be considerably shortened). We do this at around 69°C, which is quite a high temperature, but allows the fermentation to not go to crazy and ferment out until the body and the mouthfeel of the beer become too watery.
The vessel that this is done in is called a mash kettle and it has a steam jacket (kind of like a goose-down jacket but even hotter!) that allows us to increase the temperature of the mash to 72°C. During the mash, there are a bunch of proteins called enzymes that help break up all kinds of things, mainly starches into sugars (which our yeast will need for food), proteins into amino acids and longer chain sugars that aren’t as fermentable by the yeast into shorted chain sugars that help provide body and mouthfeel to a beer.

The  days of brewing are upon us. All the planning and the recipe development and the purchase of ingredients has come together like clockwork and our Italian Lead Brewer, Andrea Pausler has been working closely with our resident homebrew wizard, Process Brewer, James (JK) Kemp and pushed the recipe close to perfection