Barley from forty minutes west, hops behind the garage
Two of the three things in these beers grow within an hour of the kitchen and the third comes out of a sachet like everybody else's. Brewing with local barley and garden hops has made the beer more interesting and the record-keeping considerably harder.
| Brewed | 13 October 2024 |
|---|---|
| Written up | 17 February 2025 |
| Into the fermenter | 21 litres |
| Mash held at | 64 °C for 60 min |
| Cellar on the day | 14 °C |
| Original gravity | 1.048 |
| Final gravity | 1.008 |
| Strength | 5.3 % by volume |
FG 1.008OG 1.048
Read with a hydrometer at twenty degrees, at the kitchen table, before anything got washed.
01 / 04
The barley, and why the malt varies by sack
The barley comes from a farm about forty minutes west, out where the county gives way to Žemaitija and the fields run to the horizon without a hedge in them. A small maltster takes it in sacks and gives it back in sacks. The result is not uniform in the way a commercial pale malt is uniform: one sack crushes soft and pale, the next is harder and a shade darker, and the difference turns up in the finished beer as two points of gravity and a rounder body.
Variation is only a problem if you pretend it is not there. I take a modest sample from each new sack, crush it, and mash it in a thermos to see roughly what I have before building a recipe on top of it. That takes twenty minutes and has saved several days of guessing. The figure I get is not accurate in any laboratory sense, but it is consistent with itself over years, and consistency with itself is what a home brewer actually needs from a measurement.
Off the card
- Every new sack tested in a thermos before it is brewed with
- Crush checked by eye and by feel, then adjusted at the mill
- Sack date and harvest year written on the recipe card
- Never blend two sacks inside a single mash
02 / 04
Two bines on a wire behind the garage
The hops climb a wire on the north side of the yard behind the garage, where they get four hours of morning sun in June and shade for the rest of the day. They started as a root from a neighbour's garden, a plant nobody could put a name to, and I have never had them identified. Two bines in a good September give enough cones to dry about four hundred grams, which is a year of bittering at the rate I brew, provided I dry them the same week and get them into the freezer.
Drying is where garden hops most often go wrong. Picked cones hold far more water than they look as though they should, and a heap left in a bucket overnight heats from the inside and begins to smell of hay and old cheese. Mine go straight up to the loft above the garage, spread one layer deep on window screens, with a fan running at one end for two days. They are ready when the central stem snaps instead of bending. Anything looser than that and the following August is disappointing.
03 / 04
Guessing at alpha acid without a laboratory
A home-grown hop arrives with no number on the packet, which is the honest inconvenience of using one. Alpha acid decides bitterness, and mine is unknown and shifts with the summer. What I do instead is calibrate backwards. One batch each spring is brewed to a plain, boring recipe with a fixed weight of garden hops at sixty minutes, and I taste it beside the same recipe built with a bought hop whose strength is printed on the foil.
After three years of that I treat the garden hops as roughly five per cent alpha following a wet, cool summer and nearer seven after a dry one, and then I round down. Rounding down means the beer is occasionally softer than I meant it to be, which is a far easier fault to live with than one that scrapes the back of your throat. The estimate goes on the card marked as an estimate, because in two years I will not remember which of those figures was measured.
04 / 04
What the region tastes like in a glass
Whether a beer can taste of a region is an argument I am not qualified to settle, but the batches built entirely on the western barley have a character the bought-malt ones do not. Grainier, a shade sweeter through the middle, with a finish that reminds me of the bread sold warm at the Saturday market. It may well be the malting rather than the field, or the water, or simply what I expect to find. I write the impression down either way and let the pattern argue for itself.
The farmhouse-style batches show it most clearly, partly because there is so little else in them to hide behind: pale malt, a small share of something darker, garden hops, a yeast that throws a great deal of fruit, and no finesse anywhere. Three or four times a year one of those comes up the ladder tasting like a thing that belongs here rather than a copy of a beer from somewhere else. Those get a longer entry and a mark in the margin that means nothing to anybody but me.
Off the card
- Barley: one farm, one county, variable from sack to sack
- Hops: two bines on the north wall, dried in the loft
- Yeast: bought, and repitched three times at the most
- Water: straight from the tap, hard, and left untreated